Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “New Dimensions to 3D Printing: Peter Weijmarshausen, Shapeways”.
So before we dive into um new dimensions into of 3d printing um, what i always like to do is step back a little bit and realize why i think that 3d printing is such a an awesome thing. That is that we can use as a technology and that i think, a good way to do. That is, if we look around this and we look at all the products that we use they’re mass produced in most cases and um, you know like our laptops or our cars, and you know, although these things have been made very effectively and efficiently, i think there Is a fundamental problem with mass-produced products that they all look the same and as a result, we start to customize in some ways we just put decals on on our laptop or you know we go a little bit uh crazy and build a custom car now. Of course, that works, but it’s not efficient or effective anymore. I mean, if you think, about what it costs to make a custom car like this. You know it’s of course, a lot of fun to do it if you have the skills, but if i want one – and i don’t have that skills – that becomes a very big problem. So how do we combine? I think that’s a very powerful thing to understand.
How do we combine the efficiencies and effectiveness of mass manufacturing that has given us all the products that we care about, not all but most, and how do we combine that with the ability to give our personal input, because, most often we know what we want? You know we have a pet project, we’re working on, we need something or we want something special to give away to a good friend or you know, a loved one. So how do we do that? Well, we believe – and i think most of you will agree – that 3d printing can definitely help us getting there, because actually, 3d printing combines the best of both worlds. In one hand, you can scale it up and we’ll talk about that a little bit later, when we um, we see a picture of our big factory in new york. You can scale it up just like mass manufacturing, but at the same time the technology is really ready to allow anyone to make whatever they want.
So how does that work? Well, it can be very easy. You can go to our site and you pick a product. You, like you, can customize it. You know, put your text or a photo or whatever on it.
You can change the shape, we’ll go into that a little bit later, pick a material after that it’s printed and then the fast guys of ups will ship it over and then you have whatever you want. I mean that’s the service model that they alluded to and that works quite well um, but i think we can go much further, let’s think about the future of small businesses before platforms that offer this technology to anyone existed. If you had a product idea and you wanted to bring that to market, that was really really tough, you had to make a prototype in some way or form in your own chat and then, if, after you have that prototype, you know you need to convince someone To make it for you, so either you go at it yourself and you start your own business. You get investment, you go and find a manufacturer. You find your own retail channel, you market it, and then you bring it to market, and you do hope that a lot of people want to buy it and that is very cumbersome and hard. Or you take a patent out on your invention and you license that patent, but that’s also a very long and sometimes difficult process, depending on who you are, i mean it’s a big barrier and that same barrier actually existed for software before the internet came along.
You know the old software companies they tested, the heck out of their software, then put it on floppy disks and cd-roms and then released it and through retail, now with internet is way way easier. I mean the internet has revolutionized the way we think about releasing software, because you open your own website, you build a software as a service or you make it for download on github or somewhere else. So the same can be true for products and what are the added benefits of that? Well, we worked together with a fashion brand in new york with kimberly ovitz, and the first thing that popped into her mind is that it’s incredibly fast to bring your product to market because, after you’ve designed it on your computer after you know it can be printed. You can upload it, you can make it available for sale and that can be done in days, not in weeks, not in months and sometimes years. I mean typical product development cycle. Stick you know, months to years. This is days and the moment the models hit. The catwalk during the spring fashion week, the accessories the jewelry, were available for sale to everybody in the world, including the audience. That was like a big thing, and that is a big thing. The second thing is, and that is also impossible with mass manufacturing.
It’S what i’d like to call iterative product design, because mass manufacturing necessitates that you make 10 to 100 000 products after you get feedback from your first few customers and they tell you it doesn’t work. You have a problem, you either you know, try and keep selling the products you have, or in some cases you have to put them out for sale and have the price or in some cases you have to trash them. If you have no inventory, you get the feedback, you change the product and your next customer will be a little bit more happy or a lot more happy right and in this way, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing i mean this is just an example i pulled Which is kind of an old example. We saw in a few years that the product has evolved through 24 iterations to make it better and better and better and, of course, in the end result is that people who buy the product are, of course a little bit more happy and that works and, of Course, just like with software, you can fork it. You can have two versions that you develop in different ways and because it all the whole design stays in the digital domain. Before you go into the physical domain that can work, you can have multiple versions that you upgrade from time to time.
Just like software and of course, since you make your end users more and more happy they’ll come back. They’Ll bring friends and family which is good for you as the entrepreneur and then, of course, there is hardly any risk. I mean i alluded to it when i started talking about it, but you know um.
If you do it the old-fashioned way, you need to invest a lot of time and money and maybe one is more valuable than the other, but in any case you need to do that, and in this case you know, the risk of going to market is almost Zero, you just try it and if it’s only one person, your best buddy is buying it well, you know that was that and if you have an instant success and you sell ten thousands of copies, that’s cool too, and of course, the better we will become at Um, you know explaining to people what this means the bigger this will get today on shapeways over 10 000 people run shops and the top 1 000 are making serious money um, i’m rooting for the first shapeways millionaire, and that would be awesome. Hopefully, one of you um, so what’s next well, quite recently we released our api. You know the future of apps, not only virtual apps, but let’s make apps that connect the virtual, the digital world with the physical world.
So how does that work? Well, you have an idea, you provide input and you get a 3d printed physical product. These are a few examples of our early adopter users. This is mixime startup in new york. You can customize your own little figurine. You know in ways we all know about making avatars i’ve used to do that quite a couple of times myself, but then, all of a sudden they turn into real products into real physical thingies. You know you can have your whole team and make one or this one we did ourselves.
You know you use sound waves from soundcloud, which you can get from the api that they provide. You turn it into. You know a physical shape, put it on top of an iphone case and you all of a sudden, enable anyone to make an iphone case, or this was a fun one. You know the minecraft is basically a 3d software, a 3d creation suite. Why not use minecraft and connect it to a 3d printer, and that was done through mind toys and you know all of a sudden. We saw all these crazy minecraft things popping out of our machines and we went like where is this coming from, and that was the first thing and then oh yeah through through this, so that’s really really cool. I think so. You start to see how this becomes much more than just a tool just more much more than just um a technology. It becomes a platform, an enabling platform. Um – and sometimes i say you know when we first got access to the internet. I got it. You know.
I was online in 92. The first thing we started doing was email because that’s something we understood. You know we were sending letters mail, so we made email um and what you start to see now is that, after the first iteration of copying over you know, oh, i can print my own iphone case.
While you could buy one as well now we start to develop things and we start to develop a network and infrastructure that provides us much much more and i’m really rooting to see what we have what’s going to come out of this in the future. So what is there in the future? Well, today we can print, as you all know, in plastics print in ceramics. We can print in metals.
We can print in silver. You know, that’s all there. So what kind of materials do we foresee in the future? Well, what about 3d printing, your own circuit boards, or at least your own electronics research, is being done both here in the united states and abroad and layering down semiconductor components and actually i’ve seen memory chips. I’Ve seen actuators i’ve seen antennas conductors. You know all that stuff being printed. You know the fun thing is going to be.
How do you express what you want, but after we figure that one out, you know i’ve foreseen a few years, that you can upload your electronics design and we will be able to print it for you or what about your own textiles? What about your own shoes? I mean the technology and the materials are getting there that we start to be able to do that. How about carbon fiber extremely light? You know if you’re making your own drones, then you know weight is an issue because if you can make it lighter, you can put more batteries in stays up longer or titanium extremely strong. On light, i mean these are just a few of the the materials that will be coming and i’m sure many more multiple materials where one printer prints in different types of plastic first and then in different materials, plastic, metal, ceramics together.
There is work being done on that. That’S a little bit further out. I think so a little bit about our factory. We’Re really proud that, a few years after we opened our main office in new york, we also opened our factory there, we’re billing it out as we speak, it looked very empty in the beginning, mayor bloomberg came over and he opened it for us, which was kind Of cool – and today we already have 11 big industrial 3d printers there, making about a thousand to 1200 products on a daily basis by the end of the year. We anticipate that there will be 30 to 50 high-end machines, which will be able to make somewhere between two and three million products on a yearly basis in that factory alone. But then it’s at capacity, so we will be opening factories all over. You know, maybe in the west coast, makes a lot of sense to me, maybe in other parts of the country and in other parts of the world we already have a smaller factory in europe.
We will build that out as well and as a result, more and more people can come visit. We do have meetups there, so you can come see, but also you know the fact that it’s local means that there is hardly any shipping time lost. There’S hardly any cost to shipping and of course we save a little bit of a carbon footprint on the environment because we don’t hold stuff halfway across the world that we want.
So that’s a little bit what i wanted to talk to you about the future of new materials, the futures of apps and the futures of small business, it’s all being made possible through 3d printing. That’S it! Thank you! .