Bold by Peter Diamandis

I’ve just started reading Bold by Peter Diamandis and I’m already hooked. It is a fascinating book. In the first chapter he mentioned the company Quirky, that helps inventors get their products into the market.

3D Printing

And now, in chapter two I’m reading about the company 3D Systems.

They make 3D printers and I want one of those so bad now! Only a thousand dollars. Very cool stuff! Did you know those Invisalign braces are all 3D printed per person?

Made in Space creates 3D printers that are being used in the International Space Station! Also, discovered Shapeways, think Etsy for 3D printed stuff! And yes, there are even 3D printed dolls. Each one custom made.

Local Motors is a whole 3D printed car; the first one ever. We can currently print ten single family homes a day.

The book is not due out until February 3, 2015, but I was able to get a review copy from Netgalley. If you are a big book reader I highly reccomend you check them out.

I looked into getting the book because I was present at a Partners 2014, a technology conference, where Peter Diamandis was one of the keynote speakers.

Key Points

This being a net galley pre-reader, I’m not allowed to quite the book, but here are some interesting tidbits that I’ve read about so far:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will do everything better than humans by 2029.
Robotics is the fastest growing industry and will be the largest be 2020.
- Robots don’t unionize, no lunch, and can work an assembly line for approx. $4 an hour!
- Within the next 2 decades 45% of American’s will lose their jobs to Robots and AI
Flow: the state of optimal human performance, I love this new word!
People who retire at 55 are approx. 90% more likely to die ten years after they retire, than those who wait 10 more years to retire.
If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it, this and many other sayings in the book remind me of Lean Six Sigma.
- He has other great rules like this on his website.
Another crowdsourced website called Threadless is great to find some awesome shirts.
Tongal crowdsources TV ads and other creative projects.
Kaggle – crowdsourced data scientist that compete to solve real world problems.
Approx. 150 members is the point at which the community itself begins to carry the conversation
Almost anyone with a passion has the power to bring real change into this world.
abundancehub.com

Make Some Money

Fiverr – users submit small tasks that they need done and pay a minimum of $5.
99designs – If you are graphically inclined you can make some money here.
Freelancer – Exactly what it sounds like a site to get small, short jobs for various amounts of money.

Diamandis’ kind of thinking was behind the creation of super top secret (Skunk Works) projects like the Nighthawke and the Raptor.

He also discussed how companies now release a “minimum viable product”. Basically, the beta of a device just to get something out there and bet the competition to the market. Then the make small updates to the product over the years until it is where they had first envisioned the product. This reminded me of the iDevices from Apple.

Diamandis is involved in 6 companies:

I’m a big fan of Elon Musk and his car company Tesla, but I didn’t know that he was also the one responsible for SolarCity.

Achievemint, is pretty cool, all you have to do is sign up with your fitbit and you they will start tracking your steps. So, what you say, Fitbit already does this. Yes, but does fitbit pay you $25 for every 50,000 points you get. You don’t have to do anything but wear your fitbit and make sure your steps are syncing to Achievemint. You can check the site every once and a while to make sure this is working.

Then Achievemint using GiftRocket will send you a gift card or a check in the mail. GiftRocket was super simple to use. Achievemint sends you an email saying you have a gift, then you go to giftrocket’s website and use the code in the email. Once you can choose to get the money as check or virtual gift card. I got the check and it arrived inside two business days. Perfect!