Coming soon to a shoe and dishwasher near you

Just printed these suckers out.

Here's a big change in the way we make and buy things that could creep up on us much as the Internet did: 3D printing. We can understand it intellectually, but it's hard to imagine how it will change our everyday lives. Consider:

Soon it will be possible to print out products at home ranging from appliance parts to shoes. You will be able to have that dishwasher part made just for you instantly. This promises to empower a new wave of design and customization fueled by our personal taste and imagination.

It's here already.

Nike with its Nike iD services lets customers personalize and design their own Nike merchandise, down to their favorite colors and materials. Amsterdam-based Freedom of Creation, renowned for its lighting designs, has 3D-printed fixtures gracing the interiors of luxury hotels around the world. Canada-based Weatherhaven, which supplies portable shelters, digitally explores and validates its custom designs without having to build physical prototypes. This saves the company up to $100,000 per shelter. 

As a result, yesterday’s factory is evolving into a global community of custom design and personal fabrication services. And manufacturers are creatively embracing the changes.

Myriad industries – from automotive (which already created the first 3D printed car) and aerospace to footwear and jewelry – have embraced 3D printing that creates objects by laying down successive layers of materials.It is estimated that 3D printing will grow to become a $5.2 billion industry by 2020, up from $1.3 billion last year.

I'm going to print me out the perfect napping couch.

They're watching you

Major websites such as MSN.com and Hulu.com have been tracking people's online activities using powerful new methods that are almost impossible for computer users to detect, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The new techniques, which are legal, reach beyond the traditional "cookie," a small file that websites routinely install on users' computers to help track their activities online. Hulu and MSN were installing files known as "supercookies," which are capable of re-creating users' profiles after people deleted regular cookies, according to researchers at Stanford University and University of California at Berkeley.

As consumers become savvier about protecting their privacy online, the new techniques appear to be gaining ground.

Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer, a Stanford Ph.D. candidate, identified what is known as a "history stealing" tracking service on Flixster.com, a social-networking service for movie fans recently acquired by Time Warner Inc., and on Charter Communications Inc.'s Charter.net.

Such tracking peers into people's Web-browsing histories to see if they previously had visited any of more than 1,500 websites, including ones dealing with fertility problems, menopause and credit repair, the researchers said. History stealing has been identified on other sites in recent years, but rarely at that scale.

Gathering information about Web-browsing history can offer valuable clues about people's interests, concerns or household finances, the Journal says. Someone researching a disease online, for example, might be thought to have the illness, or at least to be worried about it.

Creepy.

The new face of work

Use it to sell buggy whips.

Some years ago I met a fellow who sold fine art prints out of a store here in my town. Buyers either stumbled upon him or heard of him by word of mouth. Why don't you put your business on the Internet? I asked.

He hadn't heard of the thing -- this was awhile ago. But he got someone to do a website, and soon he was connecting with buyers all over the world.

How will we solve our very serious problem of unemployment -- more than 16 percent of our population is out of work or working less than they want? My friend pointed the way.

The answer won't be propping up the industrial dinosaurs like the Detroit automakers. The era of a gold watch at 65 and a pension and healthcare forever is gone. So what comes next?

You've heard of Skype, right? It's a new kind of enterprise, what Hal Varian calls a micromultinational.

Just as the mechanical innovations of the 19th century led to dramatic changes in our way of life, the still-evolving computing and communication innovations of the early 21st century will have a profound impact on the world's economy and culture. For example, even the smallest company can now afford a communications and computational infrastructure that would have been the envy of a large corporation 15 years ago. If the late 20th century was the age of the multinational company, the early 21st will be the age of the micromultinational: small companies that operate globally.

Silicon Valley today seems to be overflowing with these enterprises, Varian writes.

They can already draw on email, chat, social networks, wikis, voice-over-Internet protocol, and cloud computing -- all available for free on the web -- to provide their communications and computational infrastructure. They can exploit comparative advantage due to global variation in knowledge, skills, and wage rates. They can work around the world and around the clock to develop software, applications, and web services by using standardized components. Innovation has always been stimulated by international trade, and now trade in knowledge and skills can take place far more easily than ever before.

Think of all the information technology you use for free. The browser you're reading this on, for example. To go geek on you for a moment, here's the technology of the micromultinational.

Today, a substantial amount of software development on the web involves connecting standardized components in novel ways. The Linux operating system, the Apache web server, the MySQL database, and the Python programming language are prominent examples: the LAMP components that serve as basic building blocks for much of the web. Once your application is developed, the cloud computing model offered by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others changes fixed costs for data centers into variable costs for data services, lowering barriers to entry and increasing the pace of innovation.

Change is scary, but there has always been change, and it's always been scary. If you've got a nice little buggy whip business going there in Detroit, you can always form a union to protect your healthcare benefits. That'll stop the change.

Tat tech: skin-deep electronics

This is just weird.

It may soon be possible to wear your computer or mobile phone under your sleeve, with the invention of an ultra-thin and flexible electronic circuit that can be stuck to the skin like a temporary tattoo, The Independent reports.

The devices, which are almost invisible, can perform just as well as more conventional electronic machines but without the need for wires or bulky power supplies, scientists said. The circuit is about the size of a postage stamp, is thinner than a human hair and sticks to the skin by natural electrostatic forces rather than glue.

Try not to scratch.

What can you do with this thing?

A simple stick-on circuit can monitor a person's heart rate and muscle movements as well as conventional medical monitors, but with the benefit of being weightless and almost completely undetectable. Scientists said it may also be possible to build a circuit for detecting throat movements around the larynx in order to transmit the information wirelessly as a way of recording a person's speech, even if they are not making any discernible sounds.

Tests have already shown that such a system can be used to control a voice-activated computer game, and one suggestion is that a stick-on voicebox circuit could be used in covert police operations where it might be too dangerous to speak into a radio transmitter.

This could give a whole new meaning to a hickey