Spending month playing World of Warcraft made Alice Taylor, Makielab, think about how the 3d printing technology can be put in the hands of people. Learn more about what she and her team have done so far, and what their plans are for the Toys from the Future!

Something happened today that I suspect none of us expected. When the official announcement was made, Yahoo!’s new CEO Marissa Mayer acknowledge the existence of this dragon. And she acknowledged it up front:

I’m delighted to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Tumblr!

We promise not to screw it up. Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going. We will operate Tumblr independently. David Karp will remain CEO. The product roadmap, their team, their wit and irreverence will all remain the same as will their mission to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve. Yahoo! will help Tumblr get even better, faster.

That’s right. The very second thing she said was:

We promise not to screw it up.

That’s quite astonishing. Companies so rarely acknowledge their past mistakes in this way. And there’s a subliminal second part to this. Yahoo! was somewhat infamous for dragging its acquisitions down by making them rewrite themselves to match the company’s technology base. Instead, right now, Yahoo! seems to be remoulding itself to match Tumblr. The main Yahoo! blog has moved to Tumblr already. It’ll be interesting to see if Mayer’s blog continues beyond that and the follow-up which plays on a theme we’ve covered here before.

Reaction hasn’t been entirely positive. Matt Mullenweg of Tumblr competitor Automattic mourns the lost future of Tumblr as an independent entity:

News like this, whether from a friend or a competitor, is always bittersweet: I’m curious to see what the creative folks behind Tumblr do with their new resources, both personal and corporate, but I’m more interested to know what they would have done over the next 5-10 years as an independent company.

He also made reference to an uptick in imports to WordPress.com from Tumblr, but has updated his post to clarify that he doesn’t expect a mass exodus.

Many commentators have spotted advantages. Felix Salmon for Reuters:

Second, there’s the ability to use Tumblr’s data to help optimize the rest of Yahoo’s pages. If I’m logged in to Tumblr, as I normally am, then when I go to Yahoo, I should see the kind of material that Tumblr knows I’m interested in, rather than some one-size-fits-all generic home page.

Good point. Tumblr is one big engine for determining what people are interested in…

Om Malik highlights the impact on the New York start-up community:

A Silicon Alley insider who wished to remain anonymous put it best when he described this deal as sign that finally in New York people who build things are getting rich versus people (Wall Street) who take things. A bit hyperbolic, but the point is well made. I think this exit allows the young New York startup community to look up to David Karp in the same way folks here look up to Kevin Systrom of Instagram.

As ever, time will tell. Management changes in big companies often lead to radical change soon direction, and promised made at the time of acquisition don’t always hold. But at this point, even some of crusty old veterans of the mid-2000s are feeling a little optimistic.

Where does the internet of things exist on a spectrum between objects you really want and gadgets? We’re in a state of hysteresis – the condition where a system is dependent on both its current environment and the past. And that means we’re having to reboot manufacturing.

Photo Credit: Heisenberg Media / Dan Taylor

“We have the technology to do anything. To make things happen you need to turn to design and redesign the context, the decision making and the question.” – Dan Hill, CEO of Fabrica, figured out that smart citizens are necessary to make smart cities. The institutions are collapsing, we have to decide on our own!

Probably the biggest single boost in attention came when noted comics and sci fi author Warren Ellis picked up on the video and published it on his blog:

People like Anab and Bruce do some of the best science-fictional thinking around, up on their feet at places like this.

Warren’s referring to Anab Jain, whose talk is up now. From that post, the Sterling video was found and passed on by über blog Boing Boing:

Bruce Sterling’s speech from NEXT Berlin is a blast of cold air on the themes of startup life, disruption, and global collapse. Bruce excoriates the startup world for its complicity with the conspiracy of the global investor class to vastly increase the wealth of a tiny minority, and describes the role that “design fiction” has in changing this.

My perception of the speech was that the design fiction element was as important as the warnings of the dangers of a minority of people holding the purse strings. That’s not been reflected in all the commentary that followed the Boing Boing post, though. The headline of Barry Ritholz’s post focuses on the negative: Startups Are Not Disruptive – The Global Rich Get Richer. This forum post picked on on the same theme, but for more evident reasons.

Bruce expanded further on his themes post-conference in a chat with Henriette Weber of ToothlessTiger.

Others, though, took inspiration from the talk:

This broke a whole bunch of paradigms for me, interesting that I’ve thought about creating a global network like he talks about… time will tell if we can.

Matteo Cassese returned to the theme of how Sterling and Jain’s talks informed one another:

It’s a vision non dissimilar from the positivist view of singularitarians, but that sees technology not only as a tool of empowerment, but as the vehicle of accelerated human confusion that she calls superdensity.

And some people are just out and out fans of Mr Sterling:

If you’ve read this show in the past, you already know about my girly crush on Bruce Sterling. His calculated grumpiness and enormous savoir-faire just pushes my intellectual buttons in a way that few men are able to, plus he can write fiction like no other, and it helps that what he has to say is usually daring and brilliant. This time around, Mr. Sterling is in Berlin for the NEXT Conference, whose tag line this year is “Here Be Dragons”. No shit. Well, those European tech hipsters sure got what they came for, this is Sterling at his best.

And the conversation rolls ever on – and new ideas get introduced. People have been responding to Bruce’s request for design fictions authored in Berlin…

Photo: Dan Taylor, Heisenberg Media

Martin Spindler works as a consultant for topics around The Internet of Things for various clients and shares his views on spam, algorithms and connectivity and stated: “We need to stop worrying about connectivity, and start worrying about what we do with it.” Watch his inspiring talk at day two of NEXT13.

The last few weeks must have been super busy for the LineMetrics co-founder, right?

“Well, actually, I’m just back from two weeks’ holiday,” laughs Wolfgang. “But I’m all caught up now.”

That’s not to say that the win hasn’t had an impact on the Austrian startup. The most significant outcome so far can be summed up in one word: motivation.

“The award really motivated the team, it really accelerated them,” says Wolfgang. They’re not a big team – nine people working from in the Austrian countryside – so the award felt like a really vindication of what they’re doing. Wolfgang notes, as he did from stage, that the media in particular kept telling them that the field they’ve chosen to try and disrupt – industrial production monitoring – just wasn’t sexy. Why weren’t they competing the mobile or app space? That sort of criticism was something that the start-up could ill afford at a critical time in its development – the main product launch actually co-incideded with NEXT Berlin. No wonder he needed a holiday.

Wolfgang suggests that the award vindicated the team’s work – and their belief that the impact of digital can be felt in far wider ways that the traditional app economy. It’s been a platform for them to start spreading their message of industrial disruption, and given them reassurance that launching an industrial product with a start-up approach was the right thing to do.

“We’ve had interest from the media, from partners, from incubators and from investors,” says Wolfgang. “There’s been some interest from customers, but our customers aren’t really ones we can reach through the start-up world.”

That’s no slam on the start-up world – just an acknowledgement of a reality for the fledgling company. “I love the start-up world and events like NEXT,” he says. “They’re nothing but positivity and people who are actually doing things.”

The team are in the process of following up the interest they’ve had as a result of winning the pitch competition – but don’t expect big announcements quickly. “We’re pretty well funded already, so we’re in no rush,” says Wolfgang. “We can take our time and really get to know potential partners and investors.”

Indeed, they’ve got a bigger priority right now: getting out to meet potential customers. Given that the big manufacturers don’t tend to hang around with start-ups right now, that means some serious groundwork. Wolfgang and his co-founder are effectively “on tour” at the moment, going out to present their product to potential users, to build a solid, German-speaking customer base as quickly as they can. They’re not planning on building slowly – they’d like to be spreading beyond the German-speaking world by the end of the year. I put it to Wolfgang that nine months from product launch to internationalisation is an aggressive schedule.

“It’s a huge target!” he says. “But we’d rather aim high and push hard, if we can. It might take us longer, but we can try.”

We’ll be checking in with LineMetrics every few months over the next year, to see how our Start-up Pitch winner prospers. 

Photo: Marcus Dewanger

“The princess I’m trying to win in my fight with dragons is the end consumer” – Stan Sugarman of G+J Deutschland explained what it is worth fighting for in times of shattered industries and disruptive technologies. Together with the dragon-slayers Matthias Schmidt-Pfitzner (Deutsche Telekom AG) and Peter Rampling (Telefónica), he discussed how global players can tackle the digital challenges faced by their particular industries.

Foto: Marcus Dewanger

“Innovation is not happening in walled gardens, it’s happening in open ecosystems” – Thomas Kiessling,  Chief Product and Innovation Officer at Deutsche Telekom clearly sees the company’s future as a platform provider. At NEXT13 Kiessling shared his visions about the potential business areas Deutsche Telekom could get into – how do they select which ones they get involved with?

Gesche Joost, Head of Design Research Lab, was announced to be part of chancellor candidate Peer Steinbrück’s expertise team this week. At NEXT13 Joost and her colleagues Tom Bieling and Fabian Hemmert explained their newest innovations to the audience. For example a glove that supports communication for deaf-blinds.