eMachine Shop, a bridge between the real world and computers.

No Second Acts?:
"At eMachineShop, you can download a powerful yet straightforward CAD program to design objects. You then specify the material and submit your design to the site, and eMachineShop will price it according to the materials and machining or forming difficulty, along with the number of steps involved in manufacturing and finishing. The available materials range from every imaginable kind of plastic to metals such as aluminum, brass, and steel. You can specify bending, drilling, milling, turning, and various other operations. You can also specify finishes, including plating and powder coating.

The eMachineShop software prices your job on the spot, while the 3D rendering is on your screen. You find out what your part or run of parts will cost you in minutes, not days. When you give the okay, eMachineShop makes your parts and ships them to you. It's a full-capability fabrication facility that you pay for on an as-needed basis. Customers have created both simple and complex parts; you can see some photos on the site."

Lewis wasn't content to stop at mechanical fabrication. His goal is to be a one-stop product development facility. "As Amazon is to books I want to be to manufacturing," he says. Since more and more devices contain electronics, it made sense to offer circuit board fabrication too. You can go to sites like www.pcbexpress.com and order up a run of single-layer or multilayer circuit boards, but you have to be sufficiently knowledgeable to generate files that will control their drilling and routing equipment.

So Lewis created the Web site Pad2Pad, where you can design your board with simple downloadable software, place parts, run traces, spot holes, and connect layers. Like eMachineShop, Pad2Pad prices your work in advance and actually assembles the boards from a large inventory of parts instead of delivering solder-ready boards.

Of course, Pad2Pad can't stock all of the millions of electronic components, especially the more esoteric integrated circuits, but it can leave holes or surface-mount pads on the board for you to stuff or solder to. Pad2Pad is still in launch mode, and Lewis is expanding the parts inventory. He plans to connect with a major parts distributor, thus gaining access to just about anything you can put on a circuit board.…

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1619713,00.asp