If you haven’t seen a 3D printer yet, you’re missing something amazing. The technology has been around for a while, but recent efforts by the “maker” community have driven printer prices down.  It’s revolutionizing rapid prototyping: you can go from CAD model to holding something in your hand in a few hours.

However, there’s also a lot of hype surrounding 3D printing:  some imagine a “printer in every home” or replacing traditional manufacturing methods.

I’m skeptical.  3D printing has some very serious limitations: printers are slow, with no economies of scale. One-hundred parts takes almost exactly 100x as long and 100x the cost of one part. Even at low quantities, traditional manufacturing methods (e.g. injection molded plastic) are often more attractive.

Also, printer technologies vary widely, with a range of materials (plastic, metal, ceramic), durability, fidelity and color options. It’s not like paper printing, where anything that puts colored bits on paper gets you in the game – different 3D printing technologies have very different applications.

Hype aside, I think 3D printing will be disruptive in a few application areas:

• 100% custom “quantity one” parts (e.g. anything that touches the human body)

• Low-quantity parts. Examples: the long-tail of repair parts no longer manufactured, or “parametric parts”, where the design is a function of several parameters, and it’s not possible or practical to stock all combinations.

• Parts that can’t be manufactured any other way. What’s most interesting:  3D printers control every bit of the part volume, including the “insides”.  Most “solid” parts aren’t solid at all; they usually have a honeycomb-like interior structure to save material, but that structure could be anything.  Now, you can build parts that have interior structure that you can’t build with traditional methods.

This last category is especially exciting, and I’m hoping to see interesting designs as 3D printers get more widely deployed.

When I’m giving software product feedback, my most common rant is “you’re making the user work too hard!”  Software UIs are often non-obvious, visually cluttered, and/or fail to follow established conventions.  As software has transitioned from packaged installations to the Web, poor design is an acute problem:  with a bad UI, users will just……go away.

Last week, I got a copy of Steve Krug’s book, Don’t Make Me Think.  It’s a fabulous book on Web UI design, and I’m wondering why I didn’t find it sooner.  It’s short (216 pages, less than 1/2″ thick) and very tightly written.  You can speed read it in one sitting, and you’ll want to buy copies for the rest of your team. Here is the best Books First blog for the interesting books to read.

Highly recommended.

The fundraising process is usually very stressful for entrepreneurs which is why many tend to use supplements from Budpop online store to unwind.  It’s often the first time their “baby” is judged.  Also, investors frequently pass with a vague “no”, without sharing the underlying reason(s).  As a result, entrepreneurs spin their wheels because they’re not getting direct feedback.

As a modestly active angel investor and an LP in several venture funds, I hear many, many startup pitches.  I think I’ve a good sense of pitches that work (and why), and I’m good at giving specific feedback (on both the idea, and the way it’s presented).  AND, I’ll give very direct feedback, even if it’s something the entrepreneur doesn’t want to hear (not assuming I know all the answers, of course).

So, I’m trying a little experiment:   a “pitch practice” session.  If you’re interested, please email an overview of your company by Oct 3.

I’ll do a half-day with four 1hr slots, one per company (privately), each with 30 min for presenting and 30 min for feedback.  I’ll choose four (if anyone’s interested!) and schedule a half-day block for sometime in the next ~2 weeks.

Please note:

• My background is in technology, specifically software and hardware with a significant software component.  I won’t be that helpful for projects outside of those areas.

• In your overview, please include bios for the company principals and specifics on your idea.  “We’re building a revolutionary new ad network” is not specific enough.

• Please explain what funding stage you’re at (e.g. seed, A, B, etc.)

• I strongly prefer to meet in-person, but will consider Skype/Webex sessions for entrepreneurs outside of New England.

• This is just for pitch and company feedback, and not for:  networking, investment, board seats, advisor relationships, customer leads, partnerships, and/or investor introductions.

Let me know!

Was Facebook’s IPO a dud?  It didn’t double on the first day like other high-profile IPOs, and it’s currently down about 10% from the IPO price of $38.

How much does a super-strong opening really matter, in the long term?  If their stock had closed at $60 (as I had predicted), that would have meant it was underpriced, leaving money on the table for the underwriters and their clients.

Some argue that a big IPO pop is important to the continued momentum of a company, but I’m not so sure.  Most of my friends don’t know (or care) they went public.  The initial price gyrations aren’t about long-term value;  they’re about underwriters and traders jockeying their positions (e.g. propping up at $38 on Friday, and likely selling today to minimize exposure).  Apart from NASDAQ’s problems handling the trading volume, I bet this IPO will be a distant memory in a few quarters.

I think Facebook actually played it pretty well.  Maybe it was priced slightly high, but most of the proceeds went to the company (and inside sellers), not aftermarket traders, which is how it should be.  The underwriters are certainly earned their fees by providing float for the stock on Friday.

I like owning companies that play it well.

Disclosure:  I’m long FB.

I thought it was very interesting that 9 (!) of the 100 people on the 2012 Forbes Midas List of top tech investors had Facebook as their “big deal”.  The venture funds that had early Facebook investments will show very, very good performance relative to their peers (to the point where it’s not even fair to compare).  Early angel investors will get a nearly 10,000X return on their money.  That pays for a lot of writeoffs.

This shows how skewed and concentrated technology returns have gotten.  In the old days, a venture investor might have hoped for one home run in 10 for the investment math to work.  Now, it’s more like 1:100, or even worse.  How many groups went through Y Combinator before Dropbox and Airbnb?

For many Internet software and mobile investments, I think this is a symptom of the “gorilla ecosystem” that I’ve written about.   Many startups end up paying a tax, in some form, to Amazon, Google, Apple, and/or Facebook, causing a significant fraction of startup value creation to flow to the gorillas.

Net, net:  instead of a nice stream of $1b exits for the last 5-10 yrs, we’re going to have one gigantic $100b exit.

Gmail has finally forced the new design on me, and there appears to be no way to revert back.  It’s tricky to separate style changes (highly subjective) from usability tweaks, but I really feel that the new design is a huge step backward in usability.

One case in point:  stars (flags) for messages.  They’ve been moved to the right side, so they now appear like this:

This is a less important place on the page — we read left to right, scanning the sender and subject first.  The star’s function is to mark the most important messages, so it should be in an important place (on the left).  Even worse, they’re not even aligned anymore because of the “reply” button, creating more visual work to locate the stars.  Why is this an improvement?

Also, the left rail has now been replaced with a person-info icon that you can hover over and click to expand messages, completely redundant with clicking or hovering over the sender’s name.  Why?

Worse, they show the person-info hover dialog for my own emails.  Why?

I see a steady stream of entrepreneurs contacting me with various software ideas:  a Web site, a mobile app, etc.   All are looking for funding and developer help to implement the idea, and most won’t end up with either, even though some of the ideas are really interesting.

Why not?

The software business has changed profoundly over the past decade.  Software development has become extremely capital efficient:  dev tools are free, the software stack is free, and virtual servers are free to start (and then pay-as-you-go).  There are still large projects that need teams, but more and more, the only things needed for the next great Web site or iPhone app are:  time, talent, and a MacBook.

Programming languages are now first-class expressive mediums:  the brilliant designer/developer is as talented as any world-renowned author, but just writes in a different language.

As a result, the best designer/developer talent can now work for themselves.  “Bare ideas” are cheap; the real value is a good idea combined with talent to realize the vision.  That’s what investors want to invest in.  In analogous terms:  finding investors for a “bare” software idea is like finding investors for a fiction-novel idea — it’s really hard.

My advice:  find a willing co-author, or learn to write!

It isn’t often that you see the MPAA on the defensive.  Their recent release about the SOPA/PIPA blackout, Chris Dodd said:

“It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and use their services. It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today. It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests.”

(As a friend said:  if this blackout isn’t an Atlas Shrugged moment, I don’t know what is).

I think the MPAA is missing the point.  This blackout isn’t about promoting content piracy; it’s about a broken bill.  The sentiment of SOPA/PIPA is not the problem; it’s the mechanism that’s flawed.

It’s technical regulation written by non-technical people, that shifts power to one group (content owners) while causing significant collateral damage to other groups (e.g.  user-contributed content sites, search engines, DNS operators, etc.)  It also has some serious First Amendment and due process issues.  Worse, it’s unlikely to even address the piracy problem that much.

Jason Harvey wrote an excellent analysis of the technical issues with the proposed bill.  It’s a must-read.

Oh, and don’t forget to contact your congressman.

Though I didn’t plan it, we ended up with sort of an “audio/visual” Christmas.  I got AirPlay-capable Pioneer receivers for my family and my brother.  I also gave several Roku boxes as gifts:   the entry level model was $45 (Amazon free shipping), and fits in the palm of my hand.

The Roku boxes and Pioneer receivers have iOS remote control apps which work reasonably well.  AirPlay also works (audio only), and the receivers have on-screen UIs (and can be configured from a PC or iPad).  It’s definitely an improvement from our previous HDMI input tangle, but it’s all still a little clunky.

It’s very clear what TV’s end game is:  screens (of all sizes) will be HTML5-powered Web browsers with very good video support.  We’ll watch The Daily Show or a “local” TV station by navigating to a Web page.  “Set top boxes” (e.g. Roku, Boxee, and proprietary cable boxes) will cease to exist as distinct devices.  Some hardware ecosystems (e.g. iOS) will support locally installed apps, but as bandwidths improve, that will be needed less and less.

But what’s taking so long?!  I wrote about this back in 2009.

I hope Apple fixes this.

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Major features are still missing from the Web site:  you can’t review or request referrals. Claim are only summarized; details are not available.  You can’t check to see if a specific procedure is covered (e.g. by billing code).  You can’t download your MA 1099-HC from the Web site (but you can request it via “secure email”).  There’s no mobile app. The pharmacy benefit integration is somewhere between clunky to outright buggy.  I recently got approval for a tier II drug — I got a nice paper letter, but can’t find any info on my Web account.  Etc., etc.

Even worse, BCBSMA don’t provide any help for primary-care physicians.  They’ve got the resources to build member-doctor interaction apps:  request referrals, request prescription renewals, maybe even schedule appointments and physicals, review lab results, etc.  They can afford to build apps my doctor can’t, and then amortize that across all primary-care physicians, lowering overhead across the board. Why does Health Insurance in Maryland have to differ so much from the one in Texas… Seems to beat around the bush if you ask me.

Notwithstanding, MetaBoost Connection can support people with heart disease in achieving a healthier lifestyle and managing obesity-related health challenges, ultimately reducing the risk of heart attacks and stroke.

Why is this so hard?

I’m wondering now if it’s impossible to fix this from within.  What would an “Amazon” health insurance company look like?  Imagine:  Web and mobile-centric interactions for members and providers, streamlined interactions, a high-quality user experience, no huge call center, etc.

My venture friends are always looking for big, audacious ideas:  is this big enough?