New Zealand-based 3D printing online marketplace and service provider Ponoko has partnered with German-based fabber Formulor to open a making hub in Berlin. It means EU-based creators using the Ponoko online making system can now choose to have their products made in Berlin – paying just a fraction of the shipping costs which has made [...]

From Germany comes news of a new 3D service: EGO3D, which creates real busts from just three normal photographs. Company principal Robert Fischer says: “With this service we are in a niche between the photographic and the 3D business.  In comparison to other 3D manufacturers, we create a 3D mesh from the customer’s photos (a [...]

CloudFab.com is  a new distributed fabrication service that connects buyers who need digital fabrication (3D printing, laser cutting/etching, etc.) to the sellers who have the capacity.  The goal of the project is to provide a central marketplace to connect buyers and sellers in the digital fabrication sector. The ethos (if that is the right word)  [...]

New Zealand-based online making system Ponoko and ShopBot Tools, a U.S.  designer and manufacturer of affordable CNC tools for digital fabrication of wood, plastic and aluminum products, have combined to launch 100kGarages.com which will serve as a network of local digital makers that will enable users to get “almost anything custom made and delivered”. David [...]

Continuing on from my previous post on the Mcor Matrix 3D printer that uses paper as its raw material, I hope to provide here a review of other recent developments relating to 3D printing hardware.  Not all of these are immediately relevant to the idea of consumers printing objects in their own home, but do [...]

Over the last few months, I’ve noticed that 3D printing technology, and the businesses that are based on it, are receiving a much higher level of attention in the mainstream business and technology media.  Coupled with this is a noticeable expansion in the number of companies that are engaged in the provision of services to [...]

1.  Jeff Howe, author of the Crowdsourcing book, has written an interesting and comprehensive blog post about the possible future online business models that might be adopted by the print media. 2.  RPI, a provider of automated, mass-customized manufacturing and fulfillment for the consumer print-on-demand market, recently announced that it has set an industry record [...]

Two design software companies this week had significant announcements. Delcam, based in the UK, will later this year launch a new version of its CopyCAD reverse engineering package. CopyCAD Pro will be the first product development system to offer “Tribrid Modelling”, by adding triangle modelling to the combination of surface and solid modelling that is [...]

A report in issue 264 (January 2008) of UK computer magazine PC Plus details Intel’s current research in various fields (no online version of this article unfortunately).  While many of the areas covered relate to processors, and as such are outside the scope of this website, one project is very interesting from the point of [...]

Wikinomics, or to use its full title “Wikinomics – How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything” is a chronicle of how traditional collaboration – in a meeting room, a conference call, even a convention centre – has been superceeded by collaborations on an astronomical scale. The book opens by telling the story of Goldcorp Inc., a mining [...]

The Make Magazine Blog recently carried a short post about a demo page depicting an ‘online digital manufacturing’ service on the site of 3D technology company Digital Reality. The copy on the page says that users can “create and sell custom toys, jewelry, motorcycle accessories, accurate fine scale modeling parts, promotional products, and millions of [...]

The Wealth of Networks is Yochai Benkler’s heavyweight analysis of the state of the internet in the early part of the 21st Century. In the book, Benkler argues strongly in favour of what he calls ‘social production’, which harnesses impulses, time and resources that, in the industrial information economy, would have been wasted or used [...]

Via the P2P Foundation blog, I recently read an article entitled The Tranformation of Manufacturing in the 21st Century, written by Lawerence J. Rhoades of Ex One, a developer and supplier of innovative manufacturing technology and equipment in Pennsylvania, USA. It is an excellent and comprehensive article detailing the nature of desktop manufacturing and how [...]

Erick Schonfeld, editor-at-large of Business 2.0 magazine and presenter of The New Disruptors on CNNMoney , recently visited a startup called Desktop Factory. This company is involved in developing 3D printing hardware, and aims to bring their product within financial reach of home users within a few years. The most interesting aspect of Desktop Factory’s [...]

Back in November 2006, I speculated as to the type of businesses which might emerge using a hybrid of mass customization, crowdsourcing, micro manufacturing and online factory business models. One such hybrid has emerged recently in New Zealand. Ponoko describes itself as the world’s first personal manufacturing platform where anyone can click to make, buy [...]