BotQueue

I e-mailed Zach Hoeken and he told me about BotQueue, a program that he has been working on with a few others. Apparently this is a way to send 3d printing requests such that multiple printers can print them at a time, speeding up efficiency. This seems great for the distributed manufacturing portion of the concept mentioned in this blog. I'd imagine one could extend this idea to other types of manufacturing so distributed teams could automatically build things (perhaps incorporating linked data) wherever it is best to build them without a lot of fuss. Tony pointed out in his blog hoektronics that he didn't see the point in distributing print jobs around the world, and then shipping them to location for purposes of inconsistent quality control, higher shipping costs than one shipment, various times of arrival. Zach retorted that it really wasn't the point of BotQueue. Instead it was to control large groups of printers at a high level. Again, this makes me wonder, how will this work with linked data, and forms of AI? I believe the folks at Digital Bazaar have given some thought to 3d printing and payment. I'm not certain I can find it, but here are some use cases published by Payswarm, a product that they have developed. Maybe there would be a way that everything could be paid for, and people would be happy?