$200 MakiBox 3D Printer is the Cheapest on the Market The MakiBox 3D printer is the creation of 37-year-old Jon Buford, founder of Hong Kong-based startup Makible. Buford launched the company with $50,000 More »
3D Printed Phone Cases: UCreate3D Takes On Nokia? Two Dutch entrepreneurs who call themselves “pleasantly insane, incredibly ambitious” are crowdfunding to build a multilingual global platform they call UCreate3D to offer 3D More »
Cube 3D Printer Events AC Gears is a curated electronics & lifestyle store in the village of New York City with unique, useful, and innovative products from the US and around the world. They also More »
Finding a pair of glasses that fit properly and look good is a painstaking process. Could 3D printing help with this? Protos Eyewear thinks so. Protos is an eyewear company based in More »
As humans, we attach more value to things we create than things created for us (See Dan Ariely’s research to understand what he calls “The Ikea Effect”). This common psychological motivation is why personalized More »
SupplyBetter Launches 3D Printing Comparison Engine to Give Designers More Choice
SupplyBetter Launches Comparison Shopping for 3D Printing
Calling itself the “Kayak of 3D Printing”, SupplyBetter provides comparison shopping for 3D printing. With over 200 suppliers, SupplyBetter gives more choice to a designer or consumer looking for a 3D printed object. Sometimes you want to print high quality and sometimes you want low cost. SupplyBetter helps you find the right fit.
We spoke with SupplyBetter co-founder and CEO Matthew Du Pont.
On 3D Printing: Tell us what SupplyBetter does.
Matthew Du Pont: SupplyBetter does two main things.
1) We help buyers find better service bureaus for 3D printing – most companies online are trying to sell you their own printing services, even if they’re not the best fit. We have a database of hundreds of companies that provide 3D printing, which lets us match companies with the right supplier based on geography, material, price, speed, and application. It’s similar to Kayak – buyers come to us, upload a drawing and some information on what they want, and we pick the best suppliers and pull together quotes for the buyer.
2) We help buyers find better contract manufacturing beyond 3D printing. Our eventual goal is to be the best way of finding manufacturers for custom mechanical parts, so whether they need a small run of wood parts in the US or metal casting in China, we’re happy to help them out. We charge buyers if and only if they select a supplier we find for them, and have helped people with wood, plastic, and metal parts.
On 3D Printing: How did you get started?
Matthew Du Pont: Matt and Rob have been friends for seven years. They both have previous unpleasant experiences with procuring custom parts (Matt at a trucking company, Rob at a robotics company), and decided to build a better way to get things made. They’ve been working on SupplyBetter since early 2013.
SupplyBetter has helped buyers in North America and Europe, and quoted suppliers worldwide. Our customers so far have mainly been hardware startups and makers, seeking to prototype or bring prototypes to production.
On 3D Printing: Where can someone go to learn more?
Matthew Du Pont: Here are some links:
www.supplybetter.com - The main homepage, for people looking for quotes on 3D printing
www.supplybetter.com/
www.supplybetter.com/getting_
MakerBot Celebrates Dads and Grads with 3D Printing Deals
MakerBot Offers 3D Printing Deals for Dads and Grads
Every year, June marks Father’s Day and graduation season, or “Dads and Grads” as marketers call it. If you’re looking for something unique to celebrate the occasion, 3D printer company MakerBot has a few great gift ideas.
First, MakerBot is offering access to their 3D Photo Booth in their NYC store, free on June 9 from 12pm to 6pm.
We visited the store in April and checked out the scanner for ourselves. Here’s how it works:
- You sit in a booth and are surrounded by cameras.
- You line your head up so that it fits in the frame shown on the screen.
- Cameras take multiple photos from multiple angles.
- And that’s it! In a few hours, you have a digital head waiting for you on Thingiverse.
- You can buy a 3D printed version of your head for $20 to $60.
The second offer is for Grads:
We’ll also be celebrating graduates this June at the MakerBot Store. Any recent graduate that brings in a copy of his/her diploma or proof of graduation will receive a free MakerBot 2013 Graduation 3D printed lithopane. If you’ve seen our lithopanes on Thingiverse, you already know about the awesomeness in store. Graduation lithopanes will be available June 1 – 30, so be sure to stop in while supplies last.
Via MakerBot.
Top 3D Printing News Last Week: Maker Faire, Contest, Art, Kickstarter
3D Printing News
A roundup of the top 3D printing news from May 28 to June 1:
Tuesday, May 28
Wednesday, May 29
Friday, May 31
- ModelBox 3D: Artists Launch Kickstarter to Bring 2D Images to Life
- 3D Printing is Now – Perspective of a Dad Entrepreneur
Saturday, June 1
Do The Mutation: 3D Printed Masks Take Art to a New Level of Personal
Incredible Art with 3D Printed Masks
Italian designers exploring generative design have taken 3D printed art to a new level of personal. Design lab Do The Mutation developed software called Collagene to create the exquisite masks you can see in the gallery below. These masks were displayed at Milan Design Week inside the venue [Re]vive in April 2013.
Faces were scanned using a Kinect sensor, and then software generated customized masks for each person. Each mask was produced as a unique piece through 3D printing and Windform materials. The three masks were produced by CRP with their reinforced polyamide-based materials.
The designers provided this perspective on their work:
The creation of a set of masks offers the opportunity of deepening the sensibility throught a research on the relationship between body and dress, imagining the mask as the product of the growth of a virtual organism on the human face. The object keeps its traditional functions of body prosthesis, providing identity alteration and concealment, stimulating viewers’ imagination and visual association.
This project explores the border territory between physical and virtual, connecting computer code’s abstractions with the intimate, visceral dimension of body alteration’s sense brought by the mask theme. The topographic anatomy of the face acts as input for a set of algorithms that under designer’s control generate the fibers that form the object, creating a material formation that after 3d printing perfectly fits its territory, people’s faces.
The set of objects made in Windform LX 2.0, a polyamide-based material reinforced with fibre glass represent a population of differentiated individuals, phenotypes sharing the same genotype. No matter how many masks might be produced, they all will share the same genetic code. The system is then flexible in offering possibilities of formal and diagramatic variation, in creating even highly different objects, customizable on different faces and as expression of different designers.
Watch the video below to see how the masks were made and the amazing use of generative algorithms paired with 3D printing to create truly unique art.
3D Printing is Now – Perspective of a Dad Entrepreneur
3D Printing is Now, Says Dad Entrepeneur
Australian entrepreneur, and dad, Steve Sammartino shared a great story on his startup blog about 3D printing a piece of jewelry for his 3-year-old daughter. The takeaway is that 3D printing will be ubiquitous in the future, so get started now on your 3D printing venture!
Steve was playing with his desktop 3D printer when his daughter entered the room, so he offered to 3D print her a piece of jewelry. When the 3D print was completed, Steve narrates: “She said “Thanks daddy” and then put it on her wrist and skipped away to get on with her 3 year old life.”
Steve’s insight:
3D printing to her is as ‘normal’ as cars, TV, airplanes, computers and microwave ovens. How can it not be, it was invented before she was born. It’s just another of the thousands of normal everyday thing she is seeing for the time. Nothing more or less special that the other technology in our lives.
But the really significant element is that by the time she is 13 years of age, yourself and every person we know will have a 3D printer. We’ll all be printing things in our homes on a daily basis. And if you think that isn’t possible, let me remind you that every social media channel you currently use today didn’t exist 10 years ago, and we already know how much that changed our social and economic landscape.
Via Start Up Blog.
CC image by jurvetson
