Motorola Mobility, a Google company, is building a 3D printed modular phone, and has partnered with 3D Systems for commercial fulfillment. More »
The Captured Dimensions pop-up studio was located in the Smithsonian Castle and featured approximately 80 digital cameras all connected to 3D software. More »
Microsoft expanded their support for 3D printing by launching a Windows 8 app called 3D Builder. It includes a library of objects you can edit and 3D print. More »
3D Systems (NYSE:DDD) announced the availability of the Sense 3D scanner, the first 3D scanner designed for the consumer and optimized for 3D printing. More »
With rumors circling that 3D Systems will be purchased by IBM, the stock soars. We look at why IBM might be interested in the 3D printing giant. More »
Yearly Archives: 2012
3D Printing on the Horizon: Can You Spot the Trend?
Peter Goldmark is a former budget director of New York State and former publisher of the International Herald Tribune, headed the climate program at the Environmental Defense Fund. Mr. Goldmark weighs in on the 3D printing movement on Long Island Newsday.
It’s hard to spot a trend before it happens, and trends in technology are harder to decipher and predict than eating habits. But on our horizon is one powerful new technology, still in its birth pangs, that will revolutionize large parts of our production economy. It’s called 3D printing. It’s just starting to be talked about more in the media now; I learned about it from a friend who is advising one of the young companies in the field. Enthusiasts say this is coming at us like a freight train — but, in its early days, it looks very hard to me to tell how fast this train is moving.
He sees the implications as revolutionary as we do.
Think of where this may ultimately lead. What happens to the factory or the assembly line? What happens to the comparative advantage of China and other emerging countries where cheap labor and manufacturing underpin their entire economies? What happens to manufacturing jobs period, in any country, if all a computer operator has to do is input the specs of the desired item to a 3D replicator?
3D printing will spell the end of inventory as we know it. And at the most basic level, it will change the meaning and operation of that most fundamental law of business: economies of scale.
It’s not too early for Walmart, or the Teamsters, to start worrying.
Here’s a video showing the latest in 3D printing.
Read the full post at Newsday.
Trend commandments photo by Michael Covel used under Creative Commons license.
Will Arduino Drive the 3D Printing Open-Source Movement?
Could the open-source movement push 3D printing from the peak of the hype cycle to more mainstream adoption? This would enable consumers to get their hands on cheaper 3D printers and 3D printing applications.
A big catalyst for open-source hardware today is Arduino.
Arduino is the brainchild of an international team of five engineers: Massimo Banzi and Gianluca Martino of Italy; David Cuartielles of Spain; and David Mellis and Tom Igoe of the U.S. According to Banzi, who recently made a presentation at TEDGlobal 2012, Arduino has developed the Interactive Design Institute Ivrea (IDII) to help students there actually build prototype objects that could react to their inputs. Using a foam model of a prototype cell phone, for instance, simply would not make sense.
Arduino’s openness means that the micro-controller board can be found in the heart of a lot of open source hardware devices today, including 3D printers, toys and thousands of projects within the maker community. Commercial vendors and do-it-yourselfers alike are picking up Arduino boards and customizing them for their projects with the eventual launch of some compelling devices.
Implications
With more 3D printers in the hands of product creators, the reliance on “Made in China” would decrease and more goods would be made locally, even in consumer’s homes. Adding open-source technology to the equation only speeds the time to market because of the price discount experienced by consumers.
Will Arduino be that open-source component that gives 3D printing its due boost?
Via ReadWriteWeb.
Arduino photo by LenP17 used under Creative Commons license.
Video: Growing New Organs with 3D Printing (TED Talk)
In 1954, doctors completed the first kidney transplant procedure. Today, someone dies every 30 seconds from a disease that could be treated through tissue regeneration or organ replacement. What if we could use 3D printing to grow new organs?
Anthony Atala’s state-of-the-art lab grows human organs — from muscles to blood vessels to bladders, and more. At TEDMED, he shows footage of his bio-engineers working with some of its sci-fi gizmos, including an oven-like bioreactor (preheat to 98.6 F) and a machine that 3D prints human tissue.
In the TED video below, Anthony Atala asks, “Can we grow organs instead of transplanting them?” His lab at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine is doing just that — engineering over 30 tissues and whole organs.
3D Printing, Hardware Startups, and Hacks Invade Silicon Valley
Is hardware making a comeback in Silicon Valley? It seems that way with hardware startups from Y Combinator, projects from Kickstarter, and legendary designers creating new devices like Tony Fadell at Nest.
Part of the formula for success in software has been rapid prototyping. Developers could build something quickly, test it with users and either iterate or abandon the feature. Now this is happening in hardware thanks to 3D printing.
The New York Times featured this growing trend of hardware startups and hacks.
“Something that once took three months to make now takes less than a month,” explained Andre Yousefi, co-founder of Lime Lab, a product development firm based in San Francisco that works with start-ups to create hardware products. “With 3D printers, you can now create almost disposable prototypes,” he said. “You queue it up at night, pick it up in the morning and can throw it away by 11 a.m.”
The rapidly falling cost of building computer-based gadgets has touched off a wave of innovation that is starting to eclipse the software-driven world that came to dominate the Valley in the dot-com boom of the late 1990s.
“If we look hard over the last 10 or 15 years, people don’t realize how different the world is now compared to 1996,” said Sean O’Sullivan, a venture capitalist who splits his time between the United States, Ireland and China. “Products like the iPhone have driven down the cost of components. You can now easily make connected devices that transform lives in the way we have only been able to do with software before.”
Read more at the New York Times.
Nest thermostat photo by Nest used under Creative Commons license.
Cloud Production Coming: Does Every Consumer Need a 3D Printer?
Consumer 3D printers are still costly. The latest models from MakerBot are over $1,700 and a DIY kit still costs $400 or more. Does every consumer need a 3D printer? Not according to Phin Barnes, venture capitalist with First Round Capital.
At AND 1 we had a 3D printer. It was super expensive but it shortened the time from a drawing to a physical object by weeks. The file that drove the printer could also drive the CNC machines in Asia that cut the aluminum molds we used for production.
MakerBot has innovated in the 3D printing space by making the printer cheaper and establishing a marketplace for the digital files that create the physical objects. But for the people who want high quality, durable parts with real utility, will it ever be possible to have a CNC machine in your house for metal objects or an injection mold set up for TPU parts? Maybe, but why can’t I pay Makerbot to make my file in hard plastic or metal? Wouldn’t enough people want this makerbot Prime service to support a CNC machine in Brooklyn? I bet they would – and as the peer-to-peer economy grows, cloud production should grow with it.
Barnes goes on to comment about the different ways that entrepreneurs can solve “logistics problems”.
- Marketplaces: There is great value in coordinating buyers and sellers and removing friction in an existing transactable space. (eBay, Half.com, ETSY, CustomMade, ThreadFlip). This is traditional behavior at web scale.
- Collaborative Consumption: A technology platform that coordinates demand and balances it across distributed capital assets. These platforms unlock a previously latent pool of demand (usually with very efficient unit pricing) and help individual suppliers maximize the value of their assets and time with better utilization rates. (Uber, TaskRabbit)
Both types of companies are solving a logistics problem — removing coordination friction that used to make a transaction impossible — but as this granularity of supply takes hold, the rules of utilization rates and economies of scale will still hold in the world of physical assets. I think this will inspire a third group of companies with logistics at their core: Cloud Production.
In the transition from digital to physical (online to offline) platforms that enable full utilization/rapid amortization of wholly-owned capital assets over a greater base of creators should emerge. Today’s cloud services are maximizing utilization of the physical devices required to store and serve digital goods. Cloud services in the digital space have changed the math of the creator’s business. Instead of budgeting for a certain level of demand — and buying servers to safely cover that projected level of usage, companies/creators can make sure the unit economics work for each unit of demand and architect for infinite scale. Up front costs are dramatically decreased and more ideas come to market.
This same transition should occur around the physical production of goods where economies of scale are powerful. With cloud production niche products can meet global demand and achieve greater scale than ever before. The innovation will be in the coordination and technology required to aggregate individual creativity and produce increasingly specialized, niche products with higher production value and quality.
In summary, physical goods production — enabled by 3D printing — will follow the lead of software-as-a-service and cloud computing to provide goods-on-demand. We are already seeing this trend from 3D printing marketplaces like Shapeways, i.materialise, and Ponoko.
Read the full post at Sneakerhead VC.
Cloud photo by Bast Productions used under Creative Commons license.
