Today we are interviewing Rob & Incara Mack. This father and daughter duo have uploaded quite a few models to our site. Rob has been a great community member, developing his handy test piece models so that everyone can order easy cheap 3D printed parts to see the differences in the materials for example. Incara in her own right is notable for being our youngest Shapeways member at 10 years old. Her model, Incaras first character is adorable and she modeled it herself! You can check out Rob and Incara's great models here.

So tell us a bit more about yourselves?

We are Rob and Incara from Sydney Australia. We’ve got a very creative little family here with all of us having our own styles and forms of expression. I’m 37, Incara is 10 and has a sister named Aurielle who is 12. We’re very interested in toy design and production at the moment and are planning to get serious about it in the next year or so.

Shapeways member buho29 printed out parts for a tiny remote controlled helicopter on Shapeways. The parts cost $25 and there were some issues with one of the connection points, balance and with the model getting dirty from oil. But, he 3D printed a helicopter! Of course he still had to do the assembly, and will need some more R&D to get it just right and added off the shelf parts to his design. But..he 3D printed a helicopter. I for one can not wait what the next versions will look like! You can check out the movie of it flying below. 

As of last month we added multiple shipping addresses so that you could give people the gift of Shapeways by sending a 3D printed model directly to them. As of yesterday we can giftwrap your present for you.

You can choose between types of wrapping paper: Valentine's Day and Shapeways, shown below.

Wrapping your gift costs usually costs $4.

But, for now, we will wrap your Valentine's Day gift for free!

This offer lasts up and until the 31st of January and is valid only on the Valentine's day paper and until we run out of said Valentine's paper. Don't worry though we have a lot of it, but things sometimes get a bit hectic around here!

We get a lot of questions about the material properties of our 3D printed models and the materials themselves. Because of this Bart and I made a little movie showing you how strong and above all how bouncy our material White, Strong & Flexible is. You should be able to get a good idea from the video. One thing to keep in mind: the strength and robustness of your model also depends a lot on your design. 

We will be running two contests for Valentines day. Our Best Valentines Day gift contest winner will win $300 in 3D printing from us for the best, most original and romantic Valentines gift. Upload your model with the tag valentinegift to enter the contest. The highest community rated model on Valentines day(Feb. 14th) will win.

If you're not a modeler you can enter the Free my Valentine contest. Just make an original Light Poem with the most romantic text, add the tag freemyvalentine and you're in. The winner will be highest rated Light Poem on the 1^st of February. That person will receive(or be able to send to your Valentine)that very same gift wrapped Light Poem in time for Valentines Day. In order to make your Light Poems easier to read for people you can paste the text of your Light Poem into a comment below your model. This way people do not have to view the model in 3D and then turn it around in order to read it.

One very important note: when you upload your model be sure to set them to "finished" and "available to all" once you've uploaded the model you can check this by going to the model detail page and seeing if the check boxes have been filled in. If you do not do this we can not see your model and we can not put it in the contest. In a few days we will put up a special Valentine's Day page where you can see all the Valentine models. We add models to the contest gallery manually so do not despair if your model is not immediately added.  

Photo Credit LeftHand, WTF Photos and Lord Khan, under Creative Commons, Attribution

The winner of our metal 3D printing in titanium contest is...Huang Yanying with her model Spiral Cage. In second place is Whystler with Nocturnal. In third place ReedCSY with Cruxoid 2.0. The entries this time were phenomenal, and we hope that the two days we spent judging the contest, the time we spent pouring over your files to see which ones were the most printable and the discussions we had were worthy of all the work you put into this contest.  

We choose ReedCSY's Cruxoid for the third place finisher because it was an agressive looking model that played with symetry, shape and looked cool.

Whystler's Nocturnal is quite simply one of the best models we've ever had on Shapeways. For those of you that have missed his discription you need to check it out. His model is a working clock that tells the time by the stars. We love it and it would have been difficult at any other time to find a model that could top this.  

Huang Yanying's Spiral Cage however captured our hearts with an elegant model that was emminently producible as well as well as demonstrating the capabilities of the process well. 

We are really awed by the effort and skill that was put into this contest and would like to congratulate all the winners as well as thank all the participants, you can check out all the entries here.

I love Threadless, a lot. Threadless (just in case you missed them) is a community site where people can submit designs for t-shirts and vote for them. Winning designs get produced, the winner gets $2500 and everyone else gets to buy fun, funny and creative T-shirts. 

So, Exactly how much do I love Threadless? To the right you can see a picture of most of the Threadless t-shirts I own. There are about 50 in that picture (taken in Amsterdam, where I live) and there are more in Eindhoven (where I also live).

Indeed Threadless has a lot to do with why I came to work for Shapeways. What Threadless is for T-shirts, Shapeways will be for all other stuff. Which is what makes what happened to me the other day quite interesting indeed. 

A friend of mine lives in Chang Mei, Thailand and was in Amsterdam to visit his family and friends. As a present he brought me a T-shirt. He talked about markets in Chang Mei where you could get the funniest shirts for next to nothing and gave me one that combined my love of reading for my love of cool t-shirts. 

I can be an idiot at times and was so immediately after he gave it: exclaiming in short order that not only did my girlfriend have the very same shirt but that it was a Threadless shirt, making it abundantly clear to everyone that his gift was pirated. This was a complete surprise to him, and just one more incident of me ruining something by blurting out what I'm thinking. To the right you can see both t-shirts side by side, with the Threadless shirt on the left and the Thailand one on the right. You can see the shirt on Threadless here.

This incident has many far reaching and interesting implications for communities such as Threadless and Shapeways as well as the future of "peer production", mass customization and intellectual property in general and is interesting to me for 9 reasons:

This Saturday on the 17th the Shapeways site will be down from 8-9:30 GMT+1. We're sorry about the inconvenience but we need to upgrade our capacity once again. You can check here what time that will occur where you live.

Photo Credit: Guspim.

Pedestrian traffic lights are always more or less the same. Most often you can find two circles that change from Red to Green, the circles tend to hold a boring man pictogram walking when green and standing when red. Ho hum. 

When I was in Berlin recently I noticed that there they use the Ampelmannchen (Ampelmaennchen). This is a hold over from East German times and quite original because in the rest of Germany (indeed rest of Western Europe) the boring old man symbol is the norm.

I find the Ampelmannchen to be irrisistebly cute. When the signal is red, he stands there, arms outstreched as if he wants a big hug, is waiting to be joined in a circle of people holding hands or is sincere about stopping you. When the light is green and he is walking he seems hurried and busy, going places. The hat would seem to be more in place on a Spanish bullfighter but I love how they've taken something completely mundane and standard and transformed it into something original.

As of today we've gone live with the Shapeways Shops. The Shapeways Shops mean that everyone that can 3D model can now sell tangible products worldwide without any start-up costs. So if you are a designer you can join us and within a few minutes your products can be shipped, distributed and sold all over the world.

Here is a short overview:

• The rights of the designs will always remain with you.
• You can choose your own URL, Shop name and upload your logo.
• You can decide how much money you would like to make on each model.
• Shapeways does the production, shipping, billing and customer service so that you can concentrate on designing.

If you would like to open your own Shop we have a guide set up showing you how to do this.
You can also browse the first Shops here.

If you're not a 3D modeler do not despair there is lots in it for you too. This is your chance to buy a knotted gear, a functional nocturlabe that helps you tell the time with the stars, a Voronoi network with the symmetry of a snub dodecahedron or a trefoil knot of high genus hyperbolic kelp. At $22.91 including shipping it is the cheapest trefoild knot of high genus hyperbolic kelp I have ever seen! These are simply impossible, improbable and beautiful things that do not exist anywhere else.

For those handy got to have around the house items we have hollow dice, a pengiun, a one quarter scale model of a Mac iic and the cutest tabletop toothpick holder ever.

We are proud to be the worlds first marketplace for 3D printed goods. We hope to inspire: you, our community of members, to new heights in your creativity. This in turn will enable more and more people to create and buy unique objects that better reflect what they want and need than today's mass produced products do. As this happens we can add new production techniques and lower prices making the products on Shapeways even more acessible. Meanwhile as we grow and prosper our community members also grow and prosper. This reinforces our ability to inspire you and the whole thing becomes an autocatalytic cycle. That is basically the plan, so want to join in and be a part of that?

I was in Berlin over New Years and loved the place. One of the things we did there was walk around Unter den Linden. This large avenue has a lot of flagship stores on it and one of them was the Volkswagen one. As well as all the Volkswagens you could also see the new Bentleys and they also had a Bugatti Veyron. 

Surprisingly the luxury cars pulled in more people than the new Volkswagen models. It was the first time I had ever seen a Veyron. It is a very very attractive car. It is sleek, low, the tires are rap star large and the angles are dramatic and make it look very powerful. 

So why am I blogging about the Veyron here? Can you see the dash on the pictures to the right and below? Those are some pictures I took of the car from the outside. And that dashboard you can see.That is a 3D printed dashboard. The Bugatti Veyron is, as far as I know, the world's first production car to feature 3D printed materials in the final car. 

Car companies were the first big users of 3D printing and have used it for years to prototype cars and car parts. But, until now it really did not make sense to use 3D         printing in the actual cars because of cost and production issues.

The Veyron however is produced by hand, is subject to a lot of customization and is comming out in an extremely limited series of 300. Because of all these factors they used 3D printing.

The Shapeways office is currently at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven. This is a campus-like office park with restaurants and houses NXP, Philips Research and lots of other companies. Each day we walk to the local Albert Heijn here to get lunch. This supermarket is set next to a large pond(or a tiny lake depending on how you look at it and where you a from)in a building with restaurants, a barber and a bank. Today when we trudged through the snow we saw that the pond was frozen over and people were ice skating on it during their lunch break. 

This post has nothing to do with Shapeways but I thought it was interesting and kind of funny and could not imagine many other places where people can ice skate during their lunch breaks. The photos are taken with a camera phone by the way(shouldn't it be phone camera?), so apologies for that but I left my camera in Amsterdam and so had to ask Robert to take them with his phone. 

If you've ever had the urge to cast your unborn children in bronze, you can now. If you go to the London Ultrasound Centre you can get an echo of your baby made and they will then use this to 3D print a cast and then use this to make a bronze cast of your as yet to be born child.  We're looking into processes such as these and things of a similar nature but somehow I'm kind of happy that we didn't come up with this one.

Although I did meet Scott Barett of Black Powder Media at SIGGRAPH and seem to remember that he had a life sized version of himself in Carbonite(a la Han Solo from Star Wars(if this does not ring a bell at the moment, uum it will take a while for me to explain)) which he had 3D printed. Perhaps we should make a Creator for this? How big is the market for people who would like life sized Carbonite models of themselves?

Photo credit JohnSeb.