Entrepreneuring With A MakerBot

There’s a terrific story on Solidsmack of how an entrepreneur turned a MakerBot personal 3D printer into a viable business.    The folks at I Heart Engineering wondered whether they could treat a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic as a kind of miniature factory for a startup business. They designed a specific adaptor for hooking Microsoft Kinect sensors… Continue reading Entrepreneuring With A MakerBot

Ponoko’s List

You’ve probably heard about Ponoko, the New Zealand based personal manufacturing and marketplace service. You can not only have your item built with their facilities, but you can also mark your item for sale and others can have Ponoko build it for them, too. And you get paid for it! One of the interesting twists… Continue reading Ponoko’s List

The EBF3 Business Case

We wrote a few weeks ago about NASA’s new EBF3 manufacturing process (Electron Beam FreeForm Fabrication), which uses a high-energy electron beam to melt raw metal (typically aluminum) and deposit it on a vacuum-encased rotating platform. Shiny round metal objects soon emerge. Now we learn a bit more about the benefits of EBF3, which originally… Continue reading The EBF3 Business Case

3D Printing Market to Hit $782M by 2013?

A recent report by ABI research suggests that the 3D printing market could reach heights of almost USD$800M by 2013. Is this possible? We think so – and here’s why: The number of applications of 3D printing continues to increase. We’ve seen medical, artistic, manufacturing and other uses appear simply due to the creativity of… Continue reading 3D Printing Market to Hit $782M by 2013?