Now that robots have their own app stores, it’s about time we humans gained some cool new tech. And if I had to pick it, I’d say it’s 3-D printing. Oh, don’t worry, Angry Birds: I’m looking forward to your eventual line of furniture with haptic feedback so I can feel every breaking of wood, ice and rock on my bottom. I just think 3-D printing is a little more useful.

Cubify is positioned to bring such a printer to the home market, although it’s not exactly cheap at $ 1,299. And if you do buy a Cube 3-D Printer, you won’t be complaining about overpriced inkjet cartridges any longer: Expect to shell out $ 50 for each colored cartridge for the printer. That may sound like a big price to pay, but the beauty of a 3-D printer is that you’re actually creating a physical, usable object.

Here’s a high-level explanation. Instead of printing a two-dimensional image using ink on paper, a 3-D printer “prints” thin layers of plastic. Each layer is printed on successive layers, building a physical object. In the case of the Cube 3-D printer, that object can be as big as 5.5-inches square.

That means if you can design an object in a format recognized by the 3-D printer, you can actually create it. Or you can design something, upload the plans and Cubify will print the object and send it to you for a fee.

Here’s a short video example from last month’s Consumer Electronics Show, demonstrating how the Cube 3-D Printer can print out a wearable iPod Nano wristband. (No, you can’t yet print a working iPod Nano.)

Once you understand the concept of 3-D printing, you can start to imagine the usefulness it can bring. Lost a key from your computer keyboard? Print one. Stripped a screw in a project? Print one. Broke the flag on your mailbox. Print … well, you get the idea.

It may not be cost-effective to replicate small physical objects yet, but as with most technology, expect the prices to drop for supplies and printers over time. And then get printing!

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Developers concerned about confining their apps to a single infrastructure-as-a-service platform, such as Amazon Web Services, need worry no more. If they’re willing to utilize Cloud Foundry, the open source platform-as-a-service project launched by VMware in April 2011, developers can now run apps that move seamlessly between any infrastructure already running a Cloud Foundry-based service.

As it stands right now, most PaaS offerings sit atop a public cloud — mostly AWS — and are tuned to utilize that cloud’s API and various features. Developers write apps to the PaaS they want to use, which means they’re inherently locked into the underlying IaaS cloud, as well. With Cloud Foundry’s new Multi-Cloud capability, however, developers can write apps that can actually span IaaS clouds that are offering up Cloud Foundry instances.

That might not sound like much, but less than a year into its existence, Cloud Foundry already underpins numerous efforts. On the public side, there’s VMware’seponymously named Cloud Foundry service, as well as AppFog and Iron Foundry. Within the private cloud space, ActiveState is offering its Stackato product. Because it’s just open source code that needs infrastructure to run on, however, Cloud Foundry can theoretically run anywhere — on AWS, OpenStack clouds, Eucalyptus clouds, or even your own laptop.

The Cloud Foundry team explains how this is accomplished in the blog post announcing the new capability. Essentially, it’s a matter of providing applications with an infrastructure-agnostic execution method, standardizing the method of exposing services such as databases, and standardizing service credentials across runtimes. The result is that applications don’t have to worry about infrastructure-specific requirements, because the intermediary Cloud Foundry platform takes care of them.

As Cloud Foundry continues to expand its ecosystem, of course, this capability will become even more appealing. CEOs of other PaaS providers have told me in the past they were looking at ways to expand their platforms beyond AWS — something CloudBees has done by making its code downloadable — so maybe now is the time to get busy on making that happen.

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Haven’t had enough of app stores? Well, there’s going to be a lot more once Appstores.com is finished. The start-up is launching a new app distribution network that allows web publishers to curate their own app galleries, highlighting relevant apps for their audience while building more engagement with users and creating more ad opportunities. Appstores.com is also releasing a new HTML5 Mobile Ad Unit that allows mobile web publishers to inserts ads for apps that are tailored to the reading habits of users.

The new tools are designed to be a win for developers, publishers and consumers, helping solve the question of app discoverability by helping sites become a source of good app recommendations, said Ryan Merket, CEO of Appstores, who was previously Developers Relations Manager on the Facebook Developer Network team.

“We believe the future of app distribution for developers and app discoverability for consumers is giving niche content publishers the tools to showcase highly relevant apps to their audiences. It’s really hard to find apps that matter to you in the Apple App Store and Android Market, so we give the sites consumers visit everyday the means to recommend apps their users would like,” said Merket.

When app stores work right, consumers can get some valuable recommendations on apps from the sites they already trust. Developers can enjoy wider distribution and discovery for their apps. And publishers will be able to engage their users even more, providing a service that they can monetize through existing ads and also sponsored advertisements from app makers. Publishers will be able to curate more than 1 million apps for the iPhone, iPad, Mac OSX, HTML5 and Android platforms with Windows Phone and BlackBerry coming soon. The galleries will be customizable to fit the look of a website and can include reviews and ratings. And publishers can create mobile versions of their app stores.

Early publisher partners launching app galleries include HelloBrit.com, CreateDigitalMusic.com, and FabFitFun.com. Some of the initial publishers using the mobile ad unit include 9GAG.com, TheNextWeb.com and WPtouch, a plugin that powers nearly 25 million mobile WordPress sites.

Appstores previously released a tool that allowed platforms like Eventbrite and SimpleGeo to showcase the apps that use their APIs. Now, with the new app distribution network, the company believes it can serve up more than 1 billion app impressions by the end of this quarter.

We keep seeing more activity in the app discovery space, even though there are a number of options available such as AppsFire, AppBrain, Chomp, GetJar, Quixey and several others. Fiksu and Tapjoy have also launched resources for people to discovery and download apps. And Appia, a white label app store provider, has also moved in this direction, working to help carriers, manufacturers, portals and brands create their own app stores.

I like Appstores’ approach in bringing the app discovery process to specific websites. It does make some sense that a visitor to a sports website might want to get some tips on what sports apps to get. And it rewards a publisher who’s built up a solid audience who trusts their editorial voice.

But for this approach to work, the publishers will need to get into the act of actually curating apps. It has to be some serious work or the value of the app store is lost. Just having a list of a couple of apps that I already know about or seeing some sister apps that you’re trying to sell won’t make it a valuable resource. Publishers will need to invest in making their app stores an actual resource, with some good recommendations and reviews and timely updates. But for those that don’t want to do the work, they can also just run some of Appstores’ HTML5 ads. That’s helpful and presumably relevant to users but not as interesting in my eyes.

Overall, it’s another reminder that there’s still more room to innovate in the app discovery space. With mobile apps eclipsing the 1 million mark, there’s going to be a need for someone to help make sense of it for consumers and developers.

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News about wireless bandwidth hogs, new session-based pricing from Leap Wireless and the appearance of a new web site aimed at helping consumers understand their data caps and the limits those impose, all point to a growing problem in the wireless industry. And that problem isn’t congestion. Rather, unless the industry figures out how to give people connectivity at a reasonable costs, wireless will always be luxury access technology and ubiquitous connectivity will be a pipe dream.

The problem isn’t congestion, it’s a stagnation.

A study Friday noted that the top one percent of wireless users consume half of all the data. Meanwhile, Public Knowledge on Friday launched a web site designed to help consumers understand their data caps. On Thursday Leap Wireless’ CEO said the company would begin offering data sessions in addition to its regular tiered data plans. Under that scenario a user might buy a data plan just like he would buy pre-paid minutes on an as-needed basis after reaching his cap. All these bits of news are linked by one key problem: wireless data is in high demand, but it’s also expensive to deliver.

And the tension between what consumers want from their wireless networks and what operators want to give them is leading to stories that harp on congestion, new pricing models and consumer advocacy around high-priced plans. But it’s time to stop trying to address that tension solely with new types of rate plans, and customer education. If we want wireless data to become ubiquitous and deliver on the promise of connectivity, the industry needs to address its costs and educate consumers on those costs in a transparent way.

Part of the problem is just a matter of physics — airwaves can only carry so many bits per hertz — but other aspects of the high cost are related to policy and the reluctance of the industry to embrace, or even talk about, technologies that will help them deliver wireless at a lower price per bit. Right now, sending a bit over the cellular airwaves costs a lot more money than it does to send that same bit over fiber or even DSL. How much more depends on if you are in a populated city or out in rural America (it also depends on if you are in America) as well as the type of network the bit is sent over (i.e., LTE, CDMA or HSPA). But broadly speaking it’s at least 200x more expensive to use cell networks according to analyst Chetan Sharma. He estimates that number will drop over time to 100x, but clearly that’s still a huge disparity.

Not all bits are equal (or as expensive). So let’s rethink the network.

Fortunately, not all data has to travel over the gilded cellular pipes. Smart consumers already use Wi-Fi networks for streaming video and movies, but ideally this will become more automated. This means operators must include Wi-Fi in their networks, and actively shunt certain types of traffic to those networks when available. In short, we need application-aware wireless networks that send traffic to the cheapest, but most appropriate network the application can use and the consumer will accept.

This means when I stream YouTube videos, my carrier routes me over to Wi-Fi if it’s available but my email and voice calls stay on 3G if the Wi-Fi is weak. As a consumer I would advocate Wi-Fi as the default network with carriers switching me over to a cellular plan only when absolutely necessary, much like upstart Republic Wireless tries to do. Buying cell phone plans becomes a little more complicated, perhaps involving a short questionnaire that a consumer fills out ranking what types of traffic he needs to get instantaneously versus the traffic he is willing to compromise on.

This new type of plan also means that consumers may have to accept lower quality service for streaming video, might end up paying for access to a carrier Wi-Fi network and will need to accept their operators monitoring the applications they use. There’s a role for developers here in building tools that help consumers see exactly what their operators are doing, and the FCC should stay active in enforcing the spirit of the network neutrality rules. I have a hard time believing that carriers could behave well enough for me to trust them with something like this — just look at their historical stances on Wi-Fi, or the recent questions around Google’s Wallet service on Verizon’s network, but something has to give and I don’t think it will be the operators.

We want what we want. Until we have to pay for it.

CTIA says ladies like their mobile data.

Despite the cost of wireless plans, we want and will use wireless data. On Friday, the CTIA put out a study noting how women use the wireless network for an increasing amount of stuff. And articles offering a word of caution about viewing the Superbowl on your mobile phone get that while it may make you bust through your data cap, people will watch bits of a big game on the go. That very idea was unthinkable a few years ago, but mobile has changed our surfing, shopping and even our TV watching habits.

Carriers have moved forward in delivering faster networks that can deliver between 5 and 12 Mbps down — enough for video, voice and even the most demanding web services — but their current cost models don’t match up with the usage expected and advertised on the networks they’re building. Consumers look at carriers’ pricing, their marketing (which shows customers streaming video on their phones) and their comments in the press about high costs for mobile data and congestion, and recognize that carriers are not telling the whole truth. If network resources are such a precious commodity, then why not price data so it costs more at peak times? Or why even encourage video on the LTE network?

But when will that disconnect between the ease of using a service and the high cost of that service start to change or curtail consumer behavior? In short, when will a user suddenly think, “Maybe I shouldn’t use my phone for this, right now?” In a mobile-first world, will wireless become a second-class access technology, or will carriers adapt their networks and their cost structures in time?

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Michael Szewczyk was sitting around this past summer, taking stock of all the photo sharing apps that were blossoming and wondering why all this user generated content wasn’t being monetized better. So the director of operations at San Francisco start-up Qwiki left the company and returned to New York, where he set about tackling that opportunity.

The result is a new iPhone app called Kapture that lets merchants, businesses and brands reward loyal users for sharing pictures of a business or product on Facebook. It’s taking a habit that many consumers already do – taking pictures of meals and establishments – and giving merchants a way to leverage that as a marketing channel and also build a better relationship with their customers. And it lets consumers benefit from their interest in certain businesses and brands.

“We created Kapture to take this experience that people already know – taking pictures and sharing them – and we asked: why not reward users for sharing this with their friends,” said Szewczyk. ”With Kapture, the individuals visiting a business become their social media troops in a way.”

Photos ops offer rewards

Kapture is starting at 25 businesses in New York including the Gansevoort Park hotel and Battery Place Market and has many more lined up to go soon. The merchants offer a range of small discounts and free items for users who take a picture and share it on Facebook. For example, Gansevoort Park is offering a free glass of champagne for people who take a picture at its rooftop bar. Spin Ping Pong is also offering a free drink for a picture of a user’s game. The pictures gets stamped with a water mark from the merchant and link back to a landing page from Kapture that tells where it was taken and provides information on any discounts. The Facebook posting itself doesn’t include any discount information so it appears like a regular update.

The app allows users to see what “photo ops” are nearby and when they get to a participating location, they can take a picture through the app. They can then tag friends, share the picture directly to Facebook and then receive a coupon, which they show to employees. Kapture plans to extend support for Android and Twitter next year. Kapture doesn’t actively try to ferret out fraud but does include a button to report abuse. Szewczyk said social pressure on Facebook should also curb people’s desire to spam their friends using Kapture.

A tool for merchants
Szewczyk moved to the Bay Area from New York two years ago to be part of the founding team on Qwiki, which presents search information in short multimedia presentations. He was excited to return to New York and get started on his own venture, which is now up to 7 people. He is in the process of still raising seed funding and has gotten investments from Qwiki CEO Doug Imbruce and COO Navin Thukkaram. He’s also signed on some notable advisors including Serkan Piantino, who is leading Facebook’s New York engineeing office and Alexia Giles, principal of new business development at Google.Merchants can set up their own Kapture account online through a dashboard and set their rewards and what they want users to do in the picture. They can also determine how often they want to run rewards and how many they want to offer each day. Business owners will have a Kapture sticker they can put in their window and they can also put up signs directing people to specific discounts and the app.

Leveraging user generated content

I think Kapture is a smart idea that can be a helpful tool for merchants if it can scale up. Business owners are getting bombarded with offers from companies like Groupon and Living Social. But those deals often require them to offer steep discounts with sometimes half of the revenue going back to the deal provider. That can be helpful for some businesses, who want access to email lists from these deal providers. But for many merchants, they already have an avenue for getting the word out: their own customers. If they can better leverage their existing fans, they can market to a wide audience without having to offer big deals. Using photos is also smart because it’s an action that people already do. I just took a photo of a dish I had in Brooklyn just because I liked the meal. Getting rewarded for that might push me to come back and it would definitely make me appreciate that restaurant more.

CEO Michael Szewczyk

This is a growing opportunity, helping merchants and retailers leverage social actions and user generated content. I recently wrote about Social Passport, another New York company that lets people use QR codes and NFC on their smartphone to trigger social actions such as liking, following, checking-in or posting about a business. Piictu, yet another New York company, launched publicly in September and offers users a way to have conversations through pictures. The company said it sees a way in the future to help brands sponsor picture conversations on Piictu and help create user-generated content. Szewczyk said pictures are just the first step for Kapture, which will eventually become more of a platform for leveraging all kinds of user generated content.

Long term prospects

Kapture still has a ways to go and there are all kinds of companies looking to capture the local advertising budgets of merchants and retailers. And I wonder if this will be a feature that other competitors will try and incorporate into their products. Facebook and Google could also be interested in picking up Kapture if it gathers steam, especially considering their advisor connections. But I’d like to see what Kapture can do on its own. It’s got an interesting take on user generated content and could be a good tool for merchants looking to make better use of social media.

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PayPal began as a way to help people pay their friends easily. Now, it’s taking the logical step of enabling Facebook users to pay their friends using a new Send Money Facebook app.

The new app allows a user to send a personal payment for free as long as its tied to a PayPal balance or a bank account. If users fund the payment through a credit card, it costs 2.9 percent plus 30 cents and the payer, or sender, pays. Payments overseas incur a fee of up to a few percentage points depending on whether it utilizes a credit card.

This is, in some ways, just a simple onramp for PayPal to get people to send money through Facebook. Instead of getting people to go through PayPal, they can just initiate payments in the place where people spend a lot of their free time. But again, it’s just an onramp. Payments ultimately have to be completed by signing on to PayPal. You also have to enter in a user’s email address because payments are tied to an email. Still, it’s an obvious move to tap the 800 million members of Facebook. And if it can get people to load up their PayPal balances more, it can mean extra income from interest on those funds.

But it’s not just about exchanging money. The Send Money app tries to be social by allowing users to send an e-card with a message that can include a picture or YouTube video. Or users can just send money directly. Either way, the app will post a note on the recipient’s wall that they’ve received a payment, though any message or amount of money paid is kept private.

The idea is that a lot of people send e-cards; 500 million each year according to PayPal. Now you can throw in some cash with that. For a lot of occasions, I’m not sure I want to send straight up money. That seems even less sentimental or meaningful than just sending a gift card. But I can imagine this is better for paying people back for things. And it shows that PayPal is intent on being everywhere that people are. It’s trying hard to extend its payment infrastructure into offline stores too. The bottom line is PayPal is going where the action is and it’s not just online or mobile, it’s social and local.

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Personal style curation is a huge thing online, especially among females. Sites such as Polyvore and Pinterest have become massively popular by allowing users to assemble collages comprised of their favorite clothing items, accessories and beauty products.

These platforms are addictive because they let users express themselves creatively and get positive feedback from other users who dig their personal style. Brands, naturally, are increasingly keen to have their products featured on such sites because of the great sell-through potential they provide. But what if the people who spend hours curating fashion and style products online could make money from the experience as well?

Enter StyleOwner, a new e-commerce platform that lets anyone in the United States create and run an online boutique. Users can customize the decor of their online shops using a variety of templates and fill them up with clothing, accessories and beauty products from over 2,000 StyleOwner brand and retail partners, including Saks 5th Avenue and Nordstrom. The site opened in open beta in early October.

Hours online can equal real money

But the site doesn’t just give users a platform to get social kudos for having great taste — it can be a source of actual income. Store owners get a ten percent cut of everything they sell through their StyleOwner pages. Users can choose to receive their payment in a check, use the money toward buying products on StyleOwner, or donate it to a charity. It’s totally free to own and operate a store.

Examples of StyleOwner stores (click to enlarge)

It’s an interesting departure from most fashion-based social sites, where users have fun but the only ones making money are the site owners and brand partners. “We really take seriously the idea that we are empowering people to become business owners,” StyleOwner founder Joel Weingarten told me in a recent interview. “We’re enabling our users to earn enough money so that it can become a significant business for them. We constantly talk about how important it is for us to create a platform where everyone wins.”

Mixing high tech and high fashion

There’s a lot of complexity underneath StyleOwner’s pretty exterior. On the tech side, Weingarten has serious chops, having worked for years in high tech (previously he taught robotics at the University of Pennsylvania in the Electrical and Systems Engineering Department.) “From a back-end perspective, we spent a lot of time building proprietary technology” that lets the payment and shipping process go smoothly, Weingarten says.

Meanwhile, it’s no small feat to persuade big name luxury brands to allow their products to appear in new stores. Brick-and-mortar boutiques have to prove themselves worthy to designers if they want to sell their wares, as brands are very careful about not sullying or diluting their image. That names such as Alexis Bittar and Lauren Merkin have given the OK for their products to be sold through StyleOwner is a big coup.

“I’ve been amazingly lucky to build a team of people who have real connections in the fashion world,” Weingarten said. For instance, StyleOwner’s president of fashion operations is Michael Kors veteran Jordana Silver, and its chief strategy officer is Tracy Gardner, the former president of J. Crew retail. StyleOwner was founded in January 2010 and has taken on around $ 2 million in seed funding to date. The company, which is based in New York City and has 11 full-time employees, plans to conduct a formal series A round in the coming months.

Power to the fashion bloggers

StyleOwner shop "Carpe Denim" (click to enlarge)

I think it’s a fantastic idea, and even an empowering one. There’s a growing legion of fashion bloggers out there who have attracted loyal followings just by posting images of the outfits they wear daily — but if those bloggers want to make money, there are not many really natural ways to do it. Ads and product endorsements can pay, but their readers want to see genuine opinions, not shills. With StyleOwner, there is potential for these kinds of online style-setters to make money by doing what they already do: Showcasing their favorite looks. If their readers like what they see enough to buy it, the bloggers get a direct cut.

So far, Weingarten says StyleOwner has seen lots of demand since it launched in open beta last month. The company has been measured in how quickly it has accepted users — “It was important for us to make sure that each of our store owners could have a really great experience,” Weingarten said — but it now has around 1,000 stores and is slowly opening the gate wider to accept new users more quickly. “We’ve been really overwhelmed by the response from the community.” The online fashion landscape is a crowded and fickle place, but StyleOwner has a good chance at becoming part of the in crowd.

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Not so walled garden? A Mac hacker has found an exploit in iOS that allows a remote computer to steal photos, read contacts, make the phone ring or vibrate and more – all from a fully signed app. Read more…

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Cell phone chips just became more appropriate for server workloads, as ARM said it would offer a 64-bit version of its low-energy processor Thursday. The first company to take advantage of the new design looks to be AppliedMicro, which said on Thursday it will expand its embedded systems business by making servers aimed at the cloud and webscale companies.

ARM is knocking on the data center door.

By now, many readers are familiar with the challenges faced by webscale data center operators, who are running tends of thousand s of servers and are concerned about rising energy costs. The ability to eke out the highest performance for each watt of power has become a crucial metric. In some cases, they may not even need the gigahertz monsters that Intel has offered with Nehalem chips, because their processing workloads are smaller.

This shift in computing has led to a plethora of startups such as Tilera, a massively multicore chip company, Calxeda, a startup that will reportedly soon announce a newer version of ARM chips used in servers from HP, and SeaMicro a company building low-power servers using Intel’s Atom chips. Other industry players such as Marvell, Nvidia and Via are also getting into the server market.

In an interview Jim Johnston, senior director of marketing at AppliedMicro, explained that Applied wants to use these 64-bit ARM processors to deliver up to 3 gigahertz per core in systems that can use between two and 128 cores. At the same time, the goal is to deliver that processing power without sucking watts of energy. ARM and a special chip that governs the operations of the multicore chips are its answer to managing power, security and perhaps enabling a host of other uses for the cores.

AppliedMicro wants to join the webscale party.

Johnston explained that the value of AppliedMicro architecture will be that it can offer single-threaded multi-gigahertz performance using the ARM architecture. Companies like Marvel or Calxeda appear to be using multiple cores with less processing power to deliver higher performance. In this way the AppliedMicro version of the ARM chip looks more like a rival to Intel’s lower power Sandy Bridge chips it announced this year.

While the chips using the newly announced ARM architecture won’t be sampled until mid-2012 and then not in full production until 2013, there are already companies eyeing the use of ARM-based servers. Efforts such as AppliedMicro’s, which got into the chip business after buying IBM’s PowerPC business in 2004, may help convince folks that their data centers don’t always have to be an x-86 world. In the process, AppliedMicro might see its own business expand from the embedded world to servers and high-end telecommunications gear.

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