Every now and then, someone comes up with an application that surprises you, either because the idea is so compeling that you wonder why nobody thought about it before, or because you never thought that it could have been built to being with, or both. This week brought more than its fair share of such applications, with the discovery of an Office 2.0 file compression tool, a voicemail translator, and a 3D printer.

Krunch is a cool little application that lets you upload files onto a server, compress and uncompress them using the zip, rar and tar.gz formats, and share them with others via email links. It has some size limitations right now — you cannot compress more than 10 files into a single archive, and each file being compressed/uncompressed can be of a maximum size of 10 MB — but there is nothing else like it that I know of.

SpinVoice automatically translates voicemails into text messages that are sent to your mobile phone or email. The idea behind the application is that reading text messages is faster than checking voicemails. Also, text messages can be stored for later use and could be repurposed into online feeds. Currently, the service only supports voicemails left on mobile phone numbers. UPDATE: GotVoice is nice too.

Big Blue Saw turns CAD files into real parts that are shipped in 14 to 21 days. Parts can be made from aluminum, stainless steel, plain steel, clear polycarbonate plastic, and clear acrylic plastic. Prices are calculated based on setup time, material, and machining time. Down the road, I would expect similar services to provide engraving and etching as well. But what would be really cool is if they could provide chrome plating. This would allow me to build custom parts for my beloved Harley Davidson motorcycle.