MakerBot Industries

Need everyone’s input on this. Someone just posted a comment on a BusinessWeek feature on MakerBot and our CEO Bre Pettis.

I Like Bre…Great Charisma and energy. I wish him well. I think his printers will be successful but ultimately real manufactured goods will still be made with industrial 3D printers. I believe that his equipment is perfect as an educational piece, hobbyists or even classrooms.

Is this true? This sounds like the commenter is taking for granted that manufacturing will never change, as if it’s always been the same. We make MakerBots so that people can make the things they want and need, not just one copy of something that was made a million times. The way things are done now satisfies the broadest base of customers.

What does it mean to say something is a “real manufactured good”? Does that mean that something you make for yourself can’t be just as good as something that was made for you? We totally disagree.

By the way, the article in BusinessWeek today is great. And in case you’re wondering, you can now scan yourself in a number of ways that don’t involve cornstarch! But the cornstarch method is still fun. 4Chan founder Moot and new media guru/Internet philosopher Clay Shirky were into it! Watch the video of their scans below.

 

Sometimes I shy away from writing about instances of MakerBot being honored for this or that. There are a lot of those things, and I figure readers of this blog probably understand that our products are cool. On Friday we participated in something that I do want you to know about, though, since you are, by virtue of the act of just reading this blog, part of it.

MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis accepted a Disruptive Innovation Award from the Tribeca Film Festival, specifically for “creating an entire ecosystem for desktop 3D printing.” What is an ecosystem without all the flora and fauna? The people who own our 3D printers, or interact with the world of personal fabrication in other ways – by spending weekends in hackerspaces or uploading design ideas to Thingiverse or commenting on others’ ideas and creations – are the people who breathe life into this ecosystem. So our hat’s off to you.

Now let me tell you about Justin Bieber. Read the rest of this entry »

From Wired:

A well-run bake sale can generate enough funds for a school to buy a 3-D printer and 123D is a free, beginner’s CAD program. It just takes one plucky parent to get kids learning the basics of mechanical engineering by the time they can ride a bike.

Check out their nice slideshow of “10 Amazing Things 3D Printers Can Do Now,” including these sweet scissors.

 

Remember to check out MaterialConnexion’s print/3D exhibit, running through May 11, 2012. This is a great chance for anyone curious about 3D printing to get an upclose look at a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic and the actual printed objects it can make. There’s a range of 3D-printed things on display, including prosthetics and even a bikini, so visitors can really explore the breadth of additive manufacturing.

UPDATE: View the video above here at WSJ.com.

The exhibit is open to the public, and runs from 9 AM to 6 PM, Monday through Friday.

View Larger Map
Material ConneXion
60 Madison Avenue
2nd floor
New York, NY

 

On Tuesday we had the great pleasure of hosting Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer here at MakerBot. We knew he was a fan already, but the video from The L Magazine gives a nice review of how Mr. Stringer sees MakerBot fitting into the exciting tech landscape here in New York City.

What I love about MakerBot and 3D printing is that this is an industry that’s on the move. And New York has to continue to be on the cutting edge. … I get energized about what the city could be like when you come and take a tour like this. … This is the energy; this is the new light manufacturing that can create a lot, a lot of jobs, put money into our economy, and continue to make New York edgy, and the place that everyone around the world wants to come and be in.

The video also has a great timeline from our CEO, Bre Pettis, who explains some of the history of our products and how we grew out of the hackerspace Bre co-founded, NYC Resistor.

By the way, we tried to give Scott a MakerBotted replica of his borough’s most famous icon, but Politicker writes that he was mindful of the rules!

“We can put it in the office, not home,” Mr. Stringer said. “That’s the law.”

Not that we pay that close attention, but we happened to notice that Charlie O’Donnell just called us one of Brooklyn’s best companies.

Swoon.

Talking about the various advantages of locating his office in Brooklyn,

RRE, for example, has invested in three of the borough’s best companies: MakerBot, Pontiflex, and HowAboutWe.

 
Hit the play button on the video above for a behind the scenes look inside MakerBot Indstries courtesy of Business Insider. The crew got some great footage of Bre in the BotFarm before heading to the Botcave to see where MakerBots are built, tested, and shipped. You may even recognize some familiar faces from previous blog posts!

Why honor your company’s Employee of the Month with a generic trophy when you can customize the award with their own image? Bloomberg Businessweek included this personalized Employee of the Month award in their story, “A MakerBot for the Office,” which features MakerBot user Brendan Dawes.  An interactive designer and the founder of Beep Industries in Manchester, U.K., Dawes has designed a number of things for his office including cable holders, clips for attaching pens to notebooks, and a hexagonal organizer to keep his desk tidy.

For more ideas of ways to perform a MakerBot takeover on your office, check out Businessweek’s accompanying slideshow, which includes this sweet 3-D printed tie.

UPDATE: As Nudel points out in the comments below, the items featured in the BusinessWeek piece and slideshow are all designs that have been uploaded to Thingiverse. If you have a MakerBot, print at will. Thanks, Nudel!

Do yourself a favor and check out this fantastic episode of Al Jazeera’s social-sourced web show ‘The Stream.’ Bre joins Maker Faire Africa Co-founder Emeka Okafor and host Derrick Ashong in a lively and inspiring discussion of all things #maker, #hacker, and #DIY – all in the time it takes The Replicator to build the Empire State Building. The panel explores how and why maker culture is shaping the future of industry, development, and humanity itself.

Read the rest of this entry »

Art Info wrote a very cool piece on what 3D printing means, not only for artists and designers, but for everyone in the world. The article featured MakerBot’s collaboration with fashion designer, Asher Levine, who describes how 3D printing makes prototyping easier:

“The fashion industry is stuck in this archaic method of manufacturing, while we’re on the cusp of a new method,” Levine told us. He also let us in on a secret: “I can’t sketch sunglasses.” Instead, he molded models from clay and subtly tweaked the designs using a CAD program — “move this in a bit, move this out a bit, make it a quarter-of-an-inch shorter” — input them into his Replicator, and had a revised version in just nine hours — more quickly, efficiently, and cheaply than the traditional method. The machine took the design and extruded melted ABS plastic through a nozzle onto a platform, building the sunglasses layer by layer via FDM (think ’90s, line-by-line dot-matrix printers, but in three dimensions). Thanks to Thingiverse, Makerbot’s open source website, you can actually download Levine’s designs and make them at home — the only catch is that it’s BYOMB. Bring your own MakerBot.”

The writer also paid a visit to Material ConneXion’s and the article includes a slideshow of 3D-printed objects from the Print/3D exhibition.

Read the full article here!