One common complaint around the 3D printing industry is that sometimes people just 3D print stuff without trying to think of new possibilities. In a bid to overcome this, new communities are spawning all over the Web that should further incentivise people to experiment, innovate and invent new objects by giving them a place to sell them or help people do it themselves with workshops and by sharing ideas.
“Distributed inventing” is likely to be the way of the future. Tim Berners Lee, the man who invented the Web, and other Web visionaries believe that only the distributed mental power of each one of us – united by the Web – can help us solve many of the world’s biggest problems but this type of collettive reasoning needs to start small and grow. That may be the idea behind projects such as Quirky and a new US-based marketplace for inventions called “REplictivity”. Pronounced “Rea-plic-tivity,” and standing for “replicate or validate creativity,” the site has been developed by Hsin-Ju Chuang to offer a unique, usable and useful platform.
The concept is simple: giving artists, entrepreneurs, makers, tinkerers, manufacturers and early adopters a place to show and sell their creations. Users of the start-up website, currently in beta testing phase, can set up a virtual storefront and sell inventions, prototypes and parts directly to other inventors or innovation enthusiasts. The idea is that in such a virtual community it will be possible to collaborate on complex fixed-price jobs, submit bids and be hired by inventors and entrepreneurs to work as a team on specific creation and prototyping projects.
The website’s Shop section, which will be free for those selling products and services, is an effort to help democratize the innovation process, and will be structured to increase new brand recognition by being entirely focused on new products instead of established brands. All sellers will be able to ship directly to their customers, specifying quantities and shipping rates. The payment method accepted is Paypal. Job listings will also be free and will expire every 7 days.
Increased content visibility will be obtained through the use of “hubs”, which will consist of SEO-optimized editorial content, such as articles, Q&A sessions, tutorials, product related stories, news or start-up updates, that each user will be able to create to help drive traffic to their own shops, creating that sense of distributed knowledge that in the future may develop more and more into full collaborative creativity.
This is certainly coming across as a more expansive content platform with business opportunities built in. It is about facilitating people and groups in an environment that has been well thought out. But it’s still early days.
