Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

It's Only Common Sense: All I Want for Christmas is a 3D Printer

Editor's Note: To listen to Dan's weekly column, as you've always done in the past, click here. For the written transcript, keep reading...While at Staples doing a little Christmas shopping (Staples is one of my favorite places to shop, especially around the holidays), I spied the future, something we’ve all heard and talked about for the past couple of years. It’s called “The Cube” and it is the first 3D printer I've ever laid eyes on.

There it was, the future--right there in front of me and on sale for the relatively low price of $1,299. Actually, the thing looked like a toy, like this year’s version of those Creepy Crawlers molding machines we used to play with. But this was a genuine 3D printer. The future is here and available at your corner store.

Now, after checking out the 3D printer, I was curious to see what else was in store for us in the very near future and I didn’t have to wait very long. I stopped at my local Barnes & Noble bookstore and headed to the magazine rack. The first thing I saw was a special edition of Wired magazine with 132 pages of ideas to future-proof yourself and your business.

“Great,” I thought. “This is exactly what I need!”

I snatched it up and headed home to my favorite reading chair and started devouring the magazine.

Here are some of the more fascinating trends that we are in for in the next year:

• C-Folding: Electronic circuits will be foldable so that we can print grapheme pathways using inkjet printers.
• Nano LEDs: Computers will be able to read fingerprints using zinc oxide nanowires which light up like tiny LEDs when pressure is applied.
• 5G Broadband: Mobile broadband speeds of tens of gigabits per second will be possible: That’s hundreds of times faster than what we now have with 4G technology.
• Pure glass: Mobile screens that kill bacteria will come to market when Corning commercializes its antibacterial glass.
• Lifetime storage: A new, extremely durable memory medium in which a nanostructure in glass is written to by five laser dimensions. A disk-sized piece of the glass will be able to hold the equivalent of 80,000 DVDs.
• The end of terrestrial television: Streaming devices will outnumber traditional cable boxes as the Internet starts to dominate the way we receive our programming.
• “Crowd-patroning” the arts: Everyone will be able to be a true patron of the arts as sites like Patreon.com link artists, musicians and writers on the web. Donors will commit to a small payment every time the artist produces something new.
• Beijing showdown: Chinese leaders will face tough opposition from state-owned enterprises and other special interest groups. This will come as the Chinese government moves to shift its economy from export and investment-led growth to a more balanced model that emphasizes domestic consumption and private enterprise.
• 3D printed food: Pizza will be coming out of a 3D printer as a company in Austin, Texas develops new technology for NASA: a food printer for astronauts.
• Smart diapers: Diapers will be equipped with chemical sensors to test a baby’s urine. A QR code strip on the outside of the diaper will be scanned by a smartphone to advise parents of a possible ailment.
• Biosensing tattoos: A temporary tattoo will tell athletes and soldiers involved in strenuous activity when they are about to “hit the wall” by monitoring the person’s lactate levels through his sweat as they approach the danger zone.
• Sensitive artificial skin: Amputees will be able to feel through their prostheses with artificial skin. The sensitive material composed on nanoparticles of gold and a PET substrate detects pressure, humidity, and temperature.
• GM silk: Artificial spider silk, tougher than Kevlar, produced by genetically modified bacteria will be commercialized next year by a Japanese start-up.
• Battery-less devices: Sensors buried in concrete will be able to receive and transmit data without relying on batteries by harnessing energy from broadcast and cellular-comms signals around them. The devices will harvest signals and convert them into electricity and re-transmit them in a Morse code-style message picked up by nearby sensors.
• Drone space: We’ve all seen the bit where Amazon is working on using drones to ship products, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. Solar-powered drones are slated to replace satellites and everything that they do, from checking on soda machines, to helping farmers monitor their crops to finding out what the average American citizen is up to.

These are just some of the things in store of us in the coming year. Exciting stuff, isn’t it? I think we should all plan on sticking around to see what happens. It’s going to be fun.

On a more personal note, I think this bodes well us in the PCB business, because so many of these new products involve new technologies that incorporate our products. Find the companies involved in these technologies because they are your future customers…it’s only common sense.