In its third acquisition this year, Autodesk, maker of design, engineering and entertainment software, has acquired San Francisco-based Instructables, a popular online community where people can upload, discuss, rate and collaborate on a wide variety of do-it-yourself projects.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Instructables was founded by chief executive officer Eric Wilhelm, a mechanical engineer, and launched in August 2005. You can read up on its history here.

Here’s how Autodesk, which announced the purchases of online photo editing service Pixlr and simulation software company Blue Ridge Numerics earlier this year, pitches this acquisition:

Millions of Autodesk customers around the world are passionate about making things – whether in their professional lives or their personal lives. Instructables will introduce Autodesk customers to a thriving community of like-minded, smart individuals, with whom they can learn and share their personal inspiration or hobbies.

Instructables members will benefit from Autodesk’s scale and powerful design tools, enabling the community to grow and share their ideas with a wider audience.

Whether the DIY community that makes Instructables tick will be equally enthusiastic about this acquisition remains to be seen. You can stay abreast of its members’ opinions via the previous link and on the forum post announcing the acquisition (which you can find here).

For what it’s worth, Autodesk intends to retain the Instructables brand and says it will continue to operate Instructables.com while preserving its authenticity. This is Wilhelm’s take on the matter:

Everyone here at Instructables HQ is absolutely thrilled, because this is going to be awesome for the entire Instructables community.Instructables will still be the same site you love: we’ll keep the Instructables name and URL, the whole team is staying on, our policies haven’t changed, you still hold copyright to your projects, we’ll still run awesome contests, and the Robot isn’t going anywhere.

However, we’ll now have the resources to make some improvements to the site I know our authors and community will love. Autodesk gives us the scale and support to grow and improve Instructables, build some great apps, and continue our mission of creating a positive impact on the world. Everyone on the Instructables team will become Autodesk employees, but we’ll still wear our Robot t-shirts with pride.

While members of the MIT Media Lab, Wilhelm and Saul Griffith founded Squid Labs, an engineering and technology company specializing in design and consulting. Instructables started as an internal Squid Labs project, and Wilhelm later spun it out as an independent company.

Instructables subsequently raised funding from O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures and Baseline Ventures, among other investors, although I haven’t been able to pin down how much.

Update: according to this recent Xconomy profile, Instructables raised “just shy of $2 million”.

The article also teaches us that Instructables currently boasts more than 2 million registered users and a collection of 55,000 how-to articles authored by more than 20,000 contributors.

Musical acts can always do better if they have some sort of gimmick. The band Future Dancing is using a nostalgic-looking light organ as theirs. There is an Instructable on the neat light organ showing off the organ’s 12 bulbs that correspond to 12 notes in the octave (minus the octave note). The lights are positioned where the pipes on a pipe organ would be and the bulbs light up whenever a key is pressed on the MIDI keyboard. Also, the sustain pedal is recognized and can hold the light accordingly.

Other than a midi controller, a computer is also needed to send the data to the bulbs. Check it out in the video below.

[via notcot]

Many digital point-and-shoot users often overlook the need for a tripod. Often times Facebook photos are full of blurry pictures, and that’s just not professional. One of the most often used portable tripods is the Gorillapod. They’re great for fixing your camera in almost any position. But all that comes at a price.

For those do-it-yourselfers wanting to take advantage of the Gorillapod’s design without paying the price, it’s as easy as DIY, thanks to Instructable user Matth3w.   Using Loc-Line modular hose and some mahogany wood for the base, the project has relatively few parts.  Your basic woodworking tools are needed such as a saw, drill, and a grinder. You can even get creative by painting the wood whatever color you want.

This unassuming alternative to the Gorillapod will make a great gift for this holiday season. Check out the full post at Instructables.

[via unplggd]

But this latest one, labeled ‘Brother and Sister’, caught my attention because of something entirely different than the narrative or the concept.

First, watch the video:

Did you take notice of the search results that are shown, and at times clicked upon?

Take a look at the screenshot below if you didn’t pay attention to them.

Here are the sites that are shown throughout the video:

1) TellMeHowTo.net – property of Clarity Media; an online community of users sharing hints and tips on how to do just about everything.

2) eHow (shown 3 times) – part of the Demand Media stable; an online community of users who publish how-tos, images and video clips and receive a percentage of profits earned from traffic and advertising.

3) Instructables.com – independent service; an online community of users who share what they do and how they do it, a place where people go to learn from and collaborate with others.

4) Teenadvice.About.com – About.com is part of The New York Times Company; the site banks on ‘guides and contributors’ to offer solutions and advice on, well, again, just about everything.

5) TheKnot – a listed niche media company that caters to brides and, to a lesser degree, grooms by serving just about everything you might ever want to know about weddings; while the main content comes from professional editors, a core aspect of TheKnot is its online community of users who actively share information, tips and whatnot on its message boards.

Notice a pattern here?

I realize full well it may not seem fair to everyone to be calling all these sites mere content farms – that all depends on what you think the term entails, or doesn’t.

But clearly, all these sites rely on users generating content to a certain degree, either in exchange for cash or other benefits, or simply for the sake of being part of an online community of like-minded souls who actively engage in content creation and curation.

In my mind, Google in its latest ‘Search Story’ perfectly highlighted that amazingly often content produced by non-professional writers tends to come out on top when one does certain types of searches on the Web (the same goes for Q&A sites, which also shows in the video).

That’s the whole point of course: companies like Demand Media, Yahoo’s Associated Content and AOL’s Seed thrive on throwing online masses of search engine friendly but often poorly researched or written content, produced by amateurs at low cost.

I mean, sweet Lord, did you read this?

You can debate if this is the future of online journalism or the definitive end of hand-crafted content all you want. What Google’s video inadvertently shows is that the strategy is clearly working – these sites are getting an enormous amount of traffic from search engines, all of which gets monetized quite efficiently in most cases (that’s what the whole business model depends on).

Thanks to Google for reminding me of Michael’s last sentence in his essay on the rise of (crappy) content farms: “Long live fast food content, it’s here to stay.”

What more do you want? It’s the weekend. If you want to horse around with manually watering your lawn, by all means do so. I’m not going to stop you.

Full details are over at Instructables, should you decide to create a similar solution!

Via Hacked Gadgets.

How-to sites are always popular on the Web because they give people practical instructions on how to perform specific tasks and projects. They are also search engine optimization (SEO) machines, getting most of their traffic from search engines. About.com and eHow are the biggest sites in the category, but there are a slew of others, including wikiHow which just crossed the 20 million monthly unique visitor mark (see Google Analytics screenshot above provided by CEO Jack Herrick). It also released a major redesign today which makes the crowdsourced site downright pretty. (Wikipedia should take note). While sites such as eHow (which Herrick founded and sold to Demand Media) and About.com are still roughly four times as big, getting to 20 million monthly uniques with only 6 employees and no VC money is nothing to sniff at.

Besides the new look, some of the new features include a video curation tool, a guided editing page which automatically organizes the how-to articles into Steps, Tips, And Warnings, category pages (also great for SEO), user profile pages (duh), and images on the homepage. There is also a community page to help train new editors and collaborate on articles.

The site is filled with tons of useful and not-so-useful information such as “How To Use Old Corks” (gotta love that easy chair). And is all about openness. You can even opt out of advertising if you want.

What is your favorite How-to site?

Complete instructions are over at Instructables. should you want to make one of these yourself. My only complaint is that the noise of the vacuum cleaner drowns out the sweet sounds of the harmonica. Surely one of our clever CrunchGear readers can improve upon this design?

And if anyone wants to one-up the Stupid Inventions crew, may I suggest rigging a kazoo up to a CPU fan?

Since these cakes last for up to six months, you can prepare a whole slew of them ahead of time, and then parcel them out as you forget birthdays! And, bonus!, if you get the munchies between birthdays you can simply take one down from your special cake-in-waiting shelf and devour it. Just remember to make another batch before they’re all gone.

Via Gizmodo

[via MAKE]

What does this have to do with tech you ask? You didn’t? Well you should. It’s actually pretty interesting.

Normally, beekeepers have to purchase rather expensive equipment in order to extract the honey from the combs. There is however, a DIY alternative out there that you can make if you’ve got an antique washing machine, a few 2x4s and a welder. If you’re interested in building one yourself, this is a great resource.

Of course, with 15 steps and quite a lot of engineering involved, it’s hardly a lazy Sunday project. Still, if you’ve been waiting for a reason to try out that sandblaster you got for Christmas, I can’t think of a better one.

If you’ve got an old UPS laying around, and are both technically adept and extremely paranoid, have I got a project for you! This Instructables instructable is probably the most complicated way to go about this; there’s a lot of soldering and voltage metering going on when you really could simply, well, glue a small flash drive into place where the USB/RJ45 port usually is. But if you want to go the whole hog, it involves rewiring the USB interface from a little USB enclosure to make the 2.5″ HDD go naked inside the gutted UPS.

I’ve contemplated ditching my business cards for some time, but every convention I attend and every PR flack requires me to donate one dead tree to them. A friend recently told me he had ditched business cards altogether a while back and immediately directs people to connect with him on linkedin, which is a great idea. But, I really want a kickass looking business card that won’t get lost in the shuffle. I think I found what I’ve been looking for over at Instructables. The video only gives the final product and if you’re steady with a soldering iron then read on, good buddy.

Here’s what you’ll need:

* One CR2032 battery (I got them for about 16 cents on ebay when I bought 100)

* One CR2032 battery holder (I used part 18-3780 from www.rapidonline.com. This costs around 14 cents in quantities of 100 – these are a common type of holder that you should be able to find at places like www.mouser.com if you are on the other side of the Atlantic to me!)

* One PIC16F57 (Order code 1556188 from www.farnell.com – These cost 66 cents each in 100+ quantities – again, you can find them at www.mouser.com)

* Four surface mount switches (Part 78-1130 from www.rapidonline.com at 20 cents each)

* Some miscellaneous resistors and capacitors in an “0805″ surface-mount package – you will need 5×100 ohm resistors, 2x10k resistors, 1x47k resistor, 1x47p capacitor, and 1x100n capacitor – any of the suppliers mentioned above do these, and they cost almost nothing!

* 75x “0603″ LEDS – as bright as possible, and as cheap as possible! I used item 72-8742 at 6 cents each from Rapid, but again, you should be able to get them at other suppliers. In quantity, you can get these down to about 3 cents each.

* Some double-sided foam adhesive tape that is slightly thicker than the battery you are using – mine was 4.5mm thick)

* A printed circuit board (PCB) for the project – instructions for producing your own are beyond the scope of this article, but you may have some success with the iron-on or photographic technique (my preferred technique). You can find instructions for making your own printed circuit boards elsewhere on instructables and other sites. The PCB layout is reproduced below in a PDF file if you want to try yourself.

You will also need a soldering iron (plus solder), a cutting knife, some spray adhesive, and a way of printing the front of your card – you can use a colour laser or inkjet. I printed on OHP transparency film. You will also need a way of programming the PIC microcontroller. I use the PICKit2 which is part number 579-PG164120 from www.mouser.com, and available at around $35. A strip of 5×0.1 inch PCB pins (such as 22-0510 from Rapid) can be pushed into the programmer to act as an interface with the board.

If you’re still interested then check out Step 3: Soldering Starts! and go from there. If you do decide to make yourselves one then send in the video or a picture of it. Let us know how easy or difficult it was, too.

The original SmartPlayer gave users the ability to manipulate instructional videos on the fly, allowing for frame-by-frame progress, slow motion, and zooming. The new version improves on these features by introducing ‘add-ons’, which are essentially pages of text and images with no limits on length. By including all of this data, the 5min videos have become self-contained guides that can be embedded on any website.

I think that the updated player has a lot of potential. Chefs will be able to include their recipes alongside detailed videos demonstrating how to prepare a dish. And musicians will be able to include sheet music or tablature alongside their lessons – a godsend for instructors.

But despite the improvements made since the first Smartplayer, 5min still has a ways to go. For one, it seems that there is no way to resize the video and attachment windows, which is a pain when there is a lot of text. There is also no way to get the ‘add-on’ field to auto-scroll, which would be key for musicians attempting to play a score along to a video.

Other competitors in this crowded space include Howcast, Expert Village, and Instructables. You can check out a sample video below (you might want to make it full screen).

The highlight of last year’s conference for me was LaunchPad, where thirteen young startups showed their stuff to the audience. See our coverage from last year here and here. Many of those companies are doing very well. Only one, Pubsub, has entered the TechCrunch DeadPool.

LaunchPad this year was perhaps even more competitive than last year. Over 200 companies applied to present at the conference. Only thirteen were accepted, and each had five minutes to demo their product to the crowd. We have a summary of what each announced below.

3B

3B creates a three dimensional browsing environment based on input from a user, who can then create an avatar to explore the space, invite friends, chat with them, etc. A demo is here. In my notes I wrote “pretty, fun, completely useless.” On further reflection I can see people creating a 3B for various promotional purposes, but it won’t be able to compete with Second Life for virtual reality attention.

Adify

Adify allows anyone to create a vertical ad network – their software handles all of the details and allows publishers to determine prices, ad types, and monitor advertising metrics. They aim to help an estimated 500,000 advertisers fullfill their desire for targeted advertising on the sites they want. The Washington Post uses Adify with their Blogroll platform.

Instructables

Instructables is a site catering to “do-it-yourself’ers” and includes lots of step by step instructions for creating things. 30,000 people use the site regularly, the company says. Today they announced the launch of new collaboration features. More on them in the near future.

InTheChair

IntheChair is best described as turning musical instrument practice into a video game. It’s a web application that lets musicians practice their instrument alongside recordings of professional musicians. By hooking up a microphone to your computer, the application gives you real-time feedback about how well you’re hitting the notes and tempo of any song in their library. Users can also record sessions and share them with their teacher, grandmother, etc.

oDesk

See our previous coverage of oDesk here. oDesk provides an online marketplace for finding talented programming contractors. They launched in May 2006.

OmniDrive

We’ve covered Omnidrive for nearly a year…they announced their launch today at the conference. They have an online, windows, and mac client that allow you to seamlessly store and sync files from your computer to your online drive. Their open API also allows for more specialized implementations. See our previous coverage.

Sphere

We’ve covered Sphere, an blog search engine, for almost a year. Today they launched Sphere It for blogs. TechCrunch has integrated Sphere It into our template and a link is included at the end of every post. Click it to see contextually related blog posts and other information relevant to the story.

Stikkit

Stikkit, the “digital equivalent of a sticky note,” launched today – see TechCrunch UK for deeper coverage. Use it to take quick notes, and Stikkit makes an intelligent decision as to exactly what you are writing about and takes action from there. Mention a name and contact information and it will store it in an address book. Event information is stored in a calendar. Stikkit also supports tagging and other taxonomy structures. We’ll be following up on Stikkit.

Venyo

Venyo is launching a reputation management application with a couple of interesting twists. Not many details yet.

TimeBridge

Timebridge integrates with Outlook 2003 and helps businesses bundle together easy meeting coordination and project collaboration. Meetings are coordinated by sending out email invitations with suggested meeting times that match up with everyone’s schedule. Attendees choose their best times, and Timebridge finds the best time for the group. They’ve taken $6 million in funding from Mayfield Fund and Norwest Venture Partners.

Turn

Turn is a new advertising network that work on a CPA, or cost-per-action, basis, meaning advertisers only pay if some defined action occurs, like a sale or user registration. Turn computes how often an action actually occurs, takes into account the bidded payment per action, and distributes ads across its network accordingly. Looks like there’s a lot of technology behind this, and the executive team is strong.

Klostu

Klostu launched today. It leverages the 300 million people who have participated in Boardscape message boards and allows them to create a single sign on and identity among all of the boards. Turns each message board into a social network. We’re going to dig deeper on this one. Great design.