The scale problem still remains. Going from 10 users of your webapp to 1000 does not take much in terms of technology and capital investment. Going from 10 hand-assembled bits of hardware to 1000 units manufactured in China is a difficult and expensive leap.<p>They're right though, it's definitely going to be a growth market. Looking forward to learning more about what Grand St. is doing.
This post is indicative of where we are on the hype cycle for 3D printing (<a href="http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=2124315" rel="nofollow">http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=2124315</a>), i.e. right at the peak.<p>Consumer products are still, and will be for a few years, made in traditional ways. The lower cost of production in China being the biggest factor today for the last step of concept to real.<p>Pumping money into a sector will accelerate it, but the heating funding environment for hardware isn't a fundamental change.<p>To draw an analogy to software you really need to compare timescales and access to sufficient technology.<p>A talented developer can rent sufficient technology to support thousands of customers a day on a website and build the product in a week for a small launch.<p>On axes of both time and money hardware idea to product are still <i>at least</i> an order of magnitude higher. Which, to be fair, is still much better than it has been, and a welcome evolution of the market.
As I was reading this I was thinking "yeah, that's all great but what about the working capital requirements caused by horrendous retail deals" and then you brought it up. I think a shift in retail philosophy has to happen as online customer acquisition cost is still the white elephant that no one likes to talk about and big chains with high margins, long payment terms and "sale or return" deals are stifling what products can reach the masses.<p>If these terms can improve then that working capital requirement can drop and then you'll see a much greater impact on the market. I would argue that things like arduino are great for prototyping but they are actually making the electronics design for manufacture step harder as you are one more step removed from the in production components than you would be going down a slightly older fashioned route.
Going from Kickstarter/prototype to China is too big a step. Small companies can not manage the constant hops across the Pacific to keep things moving.
Prototyping shops like <a href="http://www.techshop.ws/" rel="nofollow">http://www.techshop.ws/</a> are/will feed directly into US-based contract manufacturers that specialize in building the supply chain, assembly instructions, QA/QC checks, and the myriad details that can then bridge to China when volumes are sufficient.
I'm interested to see what gets sold here. The open source hardware movement has been awesome, but at the moment, it seems to only have resulted in a large hobbyist movement, and hasn't quite affected mainstream consumers yet. Perhaps these guys are going to partner with some of the more successful kickstarter projects and sell them in one spot?