Thingiverse – share your digital designs for physical objects

This morning, while investigating a rather awesome-looking steampunk laptop stand, I came across the brilliance that is Thingiverse. It’s a site that allows you to share your designs and plans for the building of real-world physical objects. The idea is that you can use digital cutters and fabricators to cut out the object relatively easily, and voila – a new.. er.. thing.

The best bit about Thingiverse is that it uses Creative Commons licenses, and encourages people to use them. Combined with a recently-added ‘derivatives’ function, it’s incredibly easy to create designs based on other people’s work, or improve existing objects. The steampunk laptop stand was a regular laptop stand before someone added the gear design.

Thingiverse is a great site if you’re remotely interested in making things in the physical world. Although it’s a little clunky at the egdes, there’s tonnes of potential, especially as the tools for easily making the objects on the site become cheaper. If you’ve invented a revolutionary new coathanger, then head over to Thingiverse and tell people about it.

Thingiverse (via Likecool)

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HubDub launches in the UK – make money betting on the news

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Fancy a bet on news events, but aren’t keen on losing cold hard cash in these tough economic times? HubDub’s what you need. The fake-money news-betting site has been going strong in the US since February this year, but given that they’re based in Edinburgh, it was only a matter of time before they expanded to the UK.

The site’s live right now, and you can bet virtual Hubdub dollars on the outcome of such important factors as who’s going to get Christmas #1, whether Laura White from X-Factor will make a comeback, or who the next Dr Who will be. There’s slightly more high-brow questions too, like whether inflation will hit 6% by the year’s end or who’ll win the next election in the UK…

Hiogi launches – a crowdsourced mobile answers service

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What do you get if you cross Yahoo! answers with a service with Texperts, AQA or 63336? Hiogi. It’s a free service, accessible via the web, mobile web, text, skype or email, which lets you ask questions and get replies. The German-based start-up has just come out of private beta.

What you basically do is ask a question, and then wait till the community answers it for you. When the answer comes back you can rate it positively or negatively depending on whether it’s correct or useful or not. On the answering side, you download a ticket which gives you questions. Once you see one that you can answer, you can reserve it for 10 mins to answer it.