Societies have long experienced disruptive change in the wake of epic battles. Horus/Set, Abel/Cain, Remus/Romulus, Allies/Axis, Apple/IBM, Microsoft/IBM, and Netscape/Microsoft.  It's been four years since the last 3D Printing update here on the MJ and a lot has changed:

3D printing is already a viable commercial business where highly customized parts are needed for such applications as rare cars, aircraft, or medical devices like knee joints.  You can start with precision scanning or a computer design, and can make a perfectly customized replacement part.  In medicine it’s no longer theory but increasingly common, in particular in fabricating dental prosthetics.  Make a 3D image from scratch, or make a 3D scan of an object, send it to the printer – feed in the appropriate ceramic, metal, or plastic powder, melt or fuse with lasers or electron beams and the part appears in thin air.  It is pretty exciting, pretty cool.

Forbes: Manufacturing, 3D Printing and What China Knows About the Emerging American Century

The video at 3D Printing Will Revive American Manufacturing is compelling and Karlgaard's 2015-2025 timeframe is in the ballpark but not spot on in my view. The revival will be in full swing by 2015 - this is where the Google Plus/Facebook battle factors into the convergence of virtual currencies with virtual and digitally manufactured goods. In 2007's Assessing The State of Rapid Manufacturing I noted

In a nutshell, “rapid manufacturing” is poised for an unprecedented explosion of growth in the next 3 to 5 years. To see why this potential exists, it’s necessary to examine a broad set of shaping factors. If only a single segment is explored, significant growth looks to be much further out but when one takes into account the converging sources of influences and innovation at work, a different perspective emerges. in this regard it is helpful to examine some other patterns of technology evolution.

...

At some point I expect that Fed-Ex/Kinkos will probably throw their hat in the ring and some distributed manufacturing network startup will have a huge IPO. Perhaps more significantly, a new type of product or service that hasn’t been thought of yet will emerge(think Lotus 1-2-3 or Amazon).

It should be an interesting battle - Google has SketchUp, Google Earth, Checkout, Gmail and now Plus, but Facebook has Credits, Farmville and other gaming resources. Either or both of them can move quickly by acquiring  Linden Lab(Second Life) or Teleplace and leveraging their respective growing open source communities. One way or another, social networks will play a central role in the emergence of desktop manufacturing and the winner of the Google Plus/Facebook battle will likely have to contend with a new kid on the block. The desktop manufacturing wave won't dominate for a decade - with the near exponential growth in cloud and quantum computing, by 2025 we're in Singularity territory.

It's been over four years since I noted that figuring out how to build the next web was The 64 Billion Question. Some thought it seemed like a huge stretch then. Even a year later when Mitch Kapor called virtual worlds a $100B opportunity, most folk were dismissive. Flash forward to last week at the Virtual Goods Summit 2010 in San Francisco, where Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins said he had no doubt about the size of the market and proceeded to do the math: 

So, of course, we've seen a number of years go by and this expansion in virtual goods so there's just now really no questions about this enormous potential and the way I get it to 100 billion mathematically even though it was only a $1 billions last year in the US because it was $7 billion in China and, of course, over their in Asia they built the mobile web first that started with DOCOMO in Japan in 1999. The Koreans copied that. The Koreans invented the internet cafe, they got broadband into the home pretty fast. The Chinese started copying what was going on in Korea and here are these markets over in Asia where they are far more advanced in mobile web, microtransactions, virtual goods and in China it was a $7 billion market last year. Well, the Western world has about eight and half times more gross domestic product so if we had merely kept pace, we would already in the West have a $60 billion virtual goods market not a $1 billion market, again, we're talking last year and then you would have seven in China, then you'd have Japan, then you'd have Korea you add it all up and probably by this year the global total would be around $100 billion. We could already be there.

video here

More conservative views are expecting 31% growth in the U.S. virtual goods market for 2011 which could add $250M to Facebook revenues. For a more detailed look see the excellent article 9 Reasons Why It Might Be Time For Marketers to Value Virtual Goods. 

 Gaming 2.0, a term coined a two years ago was about integrating community into console games. A new wave is on the horizon that may also mark a new more diverse era for the internet driven by women. Recently a survey found that  contrary to prevailing stereotypes, the average social gamer is a 43-year old woman. The how, why and bottom line of the marketplace is discussed in an article about a new game called Glitch being developed by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield. Before looking at the market perspective it's worth noting that this isn't just about games. Last week, I linked to an article about Ushahidi a "game changing" project started by a Kenyan woman.

“What will happen when we get the greater ecosystem working in conjunction with Ushahidi — more of these microblogging services [such as Twitter] and mobile phone networks?,” he asks. “It becomes even more exciting when you look beyond the digital environment in the U.S. and start plugging into the social networks that are used in other parts of the world.”

“I don’t know what the the future will be,” he adds. “But I think it will be very powerful.”

Cause Shift

Indeed.

Butterfield hopes Glitch will “do for online gaming what the Wii did for consoles” — greatly expand the audience for a type of product that has recently sold itself short by settling all too comfortably into a niche.

For more than two decades, designers of online games ranging from the text-based multi-user dungeons (MUDs) of yore to early graphical experiments like Meridian 59, Underlight and Ultima Online imagined amazing social possibilities for online games. They pictured virtual societies run by the users, with political factions and other organizations appearing organically and giving people a way to socialize in a whole new way outside of the rigid establishment of real life.

But that dream never came true, in part because a game called EverQuest introduced a less ambitious and more restrictive model that was arguably the first to comfortably support a business. It did so by appealing narrowly to a niche of hardcore gamers with powerful gaming computers and a lot of time on their hands.

The great majority of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs for short) that have come to market since then have closely mirrored EverQuest’s example, including World of Warcraft, the 11-million player phenomenon that has dominated the genre for just over five years. If you watch the industry closely, though, you can see that the model isn’t working well for everybody, and it restricts the genre to a very small segment of users.

...

There’s no doubt that there’s a vast, untapped market of would-be gamers — hundreds of millions of people who’ve never picked up an Xbox 360 controller or played World of Warcraft, but who could become absorbed in an accessible, story-driven experience. If Tiny Speck isn’t doesn’t fully exploit that massive and emerging market, someone else will.

As noted in the above quote, this hasn't happened overnight. Although over the past two decades books by pioneering women such as Brenda Laurel(Computers As Theatre) and Janet Murray(Hamet On The Holodeck) have been largely ignored, their voices haven't been silenced and as the advances make technology more accessible, the business case becomes compelling.

"Why hasn't anybody built any computer games for little girls?" Why is that? It can't just be a giant sexist conspiracy. These people aren't that smart.There's six billion dollars on the table. They would go for it if they could figure out how.

Brenda Laurel On Making Games For Girls TED Talks 1998

Previously on the MJ

Cultural Mesh: Open Source

Community Interaction and Culture In Virtual Worlds

Virtual currency and goods have been a recurring theme here on the MJ. Here's an update:

Washington Post: Second Life's virtual money can become real-life cash

Last year, as the physical economy withered, Second Life's economy blossomed, with user-to-user transactions topping $567 million in actual U.S. currency, a 65 percent jump over 2008. About 770,000 unique users made repeat visits to Second Life in December, and the users, known as residents, cashed out $55 million of their Second Life earnings last year, transferring that money to PayPal accounts.

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More than 50 businesses in the virtual world made more than $100,000 each last year.

Second Life's owner, Linden Lab, makes money by selling land plots and islands. An island runs about $1,000, a high barrier of entry for most Second Life users. But to open a strip mall, dance club or office tower, or to build a home, avatars need land. Some Second Life users have taken on Donald Trump-like personas, buying land from Second Life and then leasing plots to small-business owners or would-be homeowners, or flipping their properties as speculators.

As in physical reality, these land barons are few in number but generate a big chunk of the world's gross domestic product. The top 25 Second Life earners are mostly land barons, making a combined $12 million.

ABC News on virtual gifts

Americans are expected to spend $1.6 billion on virtual goods this year,

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Some companies make a handsome profit selling virtual gifts. In most online settings, gifts can be bought and sold using virtual credits, but these always have to be bought with real cash from the parent company. On Facebook, for example, a $1 gift will cost you 10 credits.

Cary Rosenzweig, CEO of a booming online community called IMVU, says his company sells $3 million of credits each month that customers use to dress avatars or build homes, with almost $1 million a month spent on gifts.

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Zynga, the company behind Facebook's immensely popular "FarmVille" and "Mafia Wars," made an estimated $200 million last year simply by enticing players to buy and sell virtual seeds and chickens, according to Inside Network's Smith. In fact, some of FarmVille's vital goods, such as chickens, can only be gifted.

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And while in the past virtual goods were mostly bought by teens and young men with X-Box consoles, women have started making a big dent in the virtual economy.