Paul Krush

I am building a group of designers out on oDesk.com that anyone can contact and use themselves. Why am I building this group, not under my control? It’s an itch that I want scratched. I need this service myself and I have people contacting me on both sides. There are jewelry businesses from around the work that need CAD work done and I also have jewelry designers contacting me looking for work. I see oDesk as model that both sides can get together and do business. I think my actions will be the catalyst to get a large number of people using oDesk for jewelry CAD work.

Why do I think oDesk.com is so different?

• It offers transparency to both buyers and service providers
• You can view feedback of both parties and drill into a lot of detail of the process.
• You can use it for very small projects.
• Lower cost and higher availability of skills.
• They handle all the paperwork and money transactions
• They only charge 10% of the fee.
• They offer guarantees to both parties.
• You can see random screen shots of the designers computers as they are working.
• It’s very easy for a designer to post a portfolio on their profile page.
• It lowers the cost entry of hiring world-wide remote workers
• It’s easy in general for both parties to use.

Mind you this is all in theory! There are a lot of pro’s and con’s to this method. This is why I want to test out these ideas.

Really what options do you buyers have right now? You have to relationship with someone already. Or you have to find designers around the world by their websites. That’s too big of a leap for most people.

I will be publishing these random screen shots of the jewelry model being developed. I find this interesting as heck. People will be able to see the work of the designer in action. For me this is additional content is what makes this project worth pursuing.

For now the best place you can find designers are the general 3D model sites such as TurboSquid and the Classifieds1000 pages. And of course if your willing to pay western rates there is the Gemvision Service Bureau List and the Rhino jewelry section. There are too many individual people offering services on their web site to mention.

You get an easy CAD like 3D engine in Flash and people will build mass customization tools with it. It’s a given. There will be a million micro-factories that will rise up in Asia making every custom product you can think of using these 3D tools to directly communicate to the world wide consumer. I see this growth of mass custom as inevitable and unstoppable.

So I’m glad to see things are moving along on the 3D Flash front. Adobe has released a beta version of Flash 10 with some native 3D support, including hardware rendering. Speed wise it’s getting comparable to a regular windows application.

A company out of Russia called Alternativa Game, Ltd. has released a 3D Flash engine based on the Flash 10 called Alternativa Platform. Neat stuff. It’s private competition to open source Papervision3D

Microsoft has to be cooking up support for 3D in Silverlight, but I have yet to see any news on this. I don’t see how they can get to critical mass with Silverlight, but you can’t take them off the table as a player.

I don’t plan on working with 3D for Flash for a long while, but it’s nice to see it’s evolving into something useful for 3D consumer jewelry design in the browser.

I have said this a 100 times, but I just have to repeat it. Flash is on more machines than Windows and growing. These tools are going to give you the ability to release 3D design tools on any screen. Consumers will be able to design products on their iPhones, smartphones, micro-laptops, whatever, with the same interface as their home computer. Yes, a lot of the tools will be impractical due to screen size, but a least they have the connection/portal to the mass custom tools, databases, and community.