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
Analyzing Funding Goals of 3D Printing Kickstarter Projects [Data]
Why do some Kickstarter projects achieve their funding goals while others are unsuccessful?
The New York Times recently published an analysis of three years of Kickstarter projects.
Almost 50,000 projects have sought financing on Kickstarter since the site began on April 28, 2009. About half successfully reached their fund-raising goals.
We decided to run our own analysis of 3D printing Kickstarter projects. Here is what we found:
- Of the 13 projects since October 2009, only 6 have successfully reached their funding goals, or 46%
- The average funding goal of a successful project is $3,842 and the average funds raised is $11,039, or 287%
- The average funding goal of an unsuccessful project is $16,874 and the average funds raised is $1,105, or 7%
- The average number of backers for a successful project is 55 with each backer pledging $164
- The average number of backers for an unsuccessful project is 21 with each backer pledging only $38
- There was no geographic concentration of successful projects
Based on this analysis, we are seeing that unsuccessful projects are asking for too much money and also not finding enough individual backers to support their idea. Sometimes this is due to the production quality of the pitch, but overall it seems that crowdfunding backers are not ready to embrace 3D printing projects.
For example, PotteryPrint was an iPad app concept to teach kids about 3D printing. They raised $6,000 of their $12,000 funding goal. Another example on IndieGoGo is Anarkik3D, which has only raised $3,050 of its $120,000 funding goal with 55 days to go. Both of these projects have good ideas and great production quality, but have set targets above the average successful funding level of $3,842.
Below are some charts of our analysis and the raw data.
3D Printing Kickstarter Projects Funding by Location
Kickstarter bookshelf photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid used under a Creative Commons license.
Stable Design: 3D Printing with Autodesk 123D and MakerBot [Video]
The video below shows an expert tutorial on how to create a flat surface foundation on the bottom of your design in Autodesk 123D before sending it to your MakerBot for 3D printing. This is important so that your model can stand up as it’s being printed and will continue to be stable once it leaves the printer and is used in the real world.
Shapeways Feed is a Pinterest for 3D Printing Designs
3D printing marketplace and community Shapeways has launched a new website featured called Shapeways Feed. Simply put, it’s a real-time Pinterest for 3D printable designs. Or as Shapeways puts it: “Our newly launched Feed is the best way to discover all the cool stuff people are making!”
Beautiful feature, and very effective at showcasing how many new high-quality designs are being published every day.
I immediately found two designs that I thought were amazing.
This “I miss you!” bracelet has a jigsaw puzzle design with a piece missing, created by badulaques.
And this Nocturnal timepiece is a very old instrument for telling time at night by measuring the stars. While concept is ancient, this design is all original. It is fully functional (all dials move properly) and meant to be worn as a pendant. Created by Whystler.
Great addition Shapeways! Our only request is that you enable 3rd party sites like ours to embed your feed. When will that be possible?
Inspiring High School Students to be Tomorrow’s Designers: 3D Printing [Video]
High School teacher Lesa Childers is inspiring her students to be tomorrow’s designers and engineers, thanks to technologies like 3D printing. In the video below, students from Notre Dame de Sion School of Kansas City showcase their project: a 3D printed fantasy castle with custom-designed furniture and decorations.
For this particular 3D printing project, Childers 3D printed a Castle she found on Thingiverse, and then assigned her students the task of 3D modeling small items of furniture they could then print on the Mosaic and then set into the castle. She gave various criteria as to the size, and watching out for material overhangs. She also create several video tutorials for getting up to speed on using SketchUp (first one here).
Castle photo from MakerBotShop on Thingiverse.
Via 3dprinter.net
3D Printing the Rosetta Stone for Kids Toys: Nerd Dad Triumph
Carnegie Mellon Professor Golan Levin has built the Rosetta Stone for kids toys. His Free Universal Construction Kit is a design for parts that enable interoperability between Legos, Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs and several more popular toy brands. The catch? If you want these parts, you have to 3D print them yourself!
In what Forbes calls the “ultimate nerd dad triumph”, Levin and his former student Shawn Sims made sure these parts will fit:
Levin and Sims didn’t just make near replicas of the commercial toys, they used a measurement tool called an optical comparator to copy the toys’ dimensions to within 3 microns. And then they published those models on the Web. “Our lawyers were a bit concerned,” admits Levin, so much so that the pair initially planned to release the project anonymously.
Back in April, we highlighted the potential disruptive impact 3D printing could have on the toy industry.
With the price of toys so marked up, it’s within reason to think that kids will turn to generics or pirated designs to fill out their toy chest after parents tap out the budget at retail.
Look back at the music industry. The only way to buy music in the late 90s was to purchase the full album at retail. Then Napster and other P2P sharing software came along and allowed consumers to download individual mp3 songs, albeit pirated. When iTunes launched with individual song pricing and a more reliable service than the P2P networks, consumers flocked to the legal alternative. The retail music industry died but the digital music industry was born.
Perhaps in the next 5 years we’ll see the retail toy industry collapse and be replaced by a digital successor. The question is whether we will see a digital toy black market in the interim. In our view, that will be up to the toymakers and their willingness to disrupt their current model.
Has Levin truly liberated construction toys from working only with their own kind? Will this type of innovation improve or hurt sales and prices of popular toy brands?
See the full poster of toy compatibility at Slideshare.
The video below shows how the Free Universal Construction Kit works. Notice how the voiceover makes it feel like a proper 1980s advertisement.
Read the full story about Levin’s project at Forbes.
