Congratulations again to Oskar, his 17x17x17 Over the Top Twisty Puzzle has caught the imagination of THOUSANDS of people with coverage on many of the major design, technology and culture blogs including articles on:

Gizmodo by Adrian Covert

CrunchGear by Devin Coldewey

Core77 By Sam Dunne

FastCoDesign by Suzanne Lubarre

NotCot By Rugenius

Makezine by Adam Flaherty

Dvice By Raymond Wong

Ubergizmo By Matthew Chung

Technabob By, Technabob

Adafruit by Johngineer

Product Design & Development

Vodule By Yong Kim

And many many many many more.... A big thanks to all who wrote about Oskar's amazing achievement ant the thousands of people who spread the word via their personal Facebook and Twitter accounts.

If you have a design that you currently have under wraps that you are ready to launch, contact me duann(at)shapeways.com and we may be able to help you develop a strategy to promote your item online.

A guest post by John Briscella

On a recent trip to Soho this past weekend, ee had a chance to stop by the Ingo Maurer Showroom. Upon entering the shop, I was familiar with most of the designs. Constructions of paper, metal wire and light performing a spectacle of well balanced compositions. Yet, some new favorites (such as his LED table) suggest Maurer’s playfulness with technology.

In the basement den of lamps, amongst the array of creations, was Swingading (above). Seemly fitting to Maurer’s works of paper, Swingading was 3D printed! Well at least the shade and tip. 

 

Jessica from Nervous System has given us a sneak peek of some new pieces 3D printed in stainless steel that are about to be released along with a new line of jewelry at the New York International Gift Fair from January 29, 2011.

It seems as though Shapeways Twisty Puzzle extraordinaire Oskar has recently turned his hand to that of a twisty cupid with more successful marriage proposals accepted via his Gift Cube.

You may remember the story of Matthew and Mindy and their twisty puzzle proposal? They were married on July 31st, 2010 and have re-enacted their Gift-Cube proposal on YouTube.

Since then there have been another two successful proposals via Oskar's Gift Cube and another one soon to be presented. What will she say?

I'm Ben, the new product lead for the Shapeways web presence. In my first two weeks here, I've done a lot of startup-y things--setting up furniture and helping arrange the new office workspace, meeting new colleagues (and introducing some to the experience of working in New York City and the USA for the first time).

My core focus, however, has been taking website suggestions from our community and merging them with plans developed by our company's leadership team to develop the Roadmap of our site growth over the next 6-month period. This is an intense task, and one that is really a lot of fun.

I'm also planning the implementation of tools to make both processes more efficient and more community-centric. Lots of people are familiar with idea collection systems like Dell IdeaStorm and Ubuntu Brainstorm, and I want to set up something like that for Shapeways as well. You'll be hearing more about this in the next few months.

Our website is a solid workhorse right now, but I see room for improvement. We'll be adding features and fixes at a steady pace, but with a renewed focus on web design and user experience, there are a lot of areas where we'll add polish and enhance the ease-of-use for shop owners, designers and customers.

With our huge selection of products, it's important to ensure people can find things they like. To address that, I'm working on ways to help visitors discover items of interest, and to personalize their experience when shopping on shapeways.com.

Finally, for would-be designers who want to learn about 3D modeling and get started creating and selling their own designs, our team is planning to highlight and expand the documentation and tutorials we provide on the site.

(We've even implemented a few changes to our website already--nothing big yet, but if you see little things that have been changed, that's because of us!)

I'm looking forward to learning from and working with you, members of the Shapeways community!

-Ben

Must watch Ted Talk from Thomas Thwaites (previously interviewed by Shapeways)who as a design student at the Royal College of Art in London has made a toaster, from scratch... Inspired by the quote: "Left to his own devices he couldn’t build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it."
Mostly Harmless, Douglas Adams, 1992

"... firstly, yes, I realise toasting bread over a fire would’ve been a lot easier. But was a piece of toast (or designing a better toaster) really the point of this project?"

As Shapeways is getting more and more press such as the recent article in the New York Times, we are increasingly getting requests for high resolution images that print publications can use for their articles.  This is great news but we are in desperate need of more of these high resolution images from you.

 

If you would like to have your images included please send them to duann(at)shapeways(dot)com and I will add them to our existing database. You can also post them in the Shapeways Flickr Group where many of the Shapeways community are already sharing images of their items.

As a rule, images need to be at least 300 dpi and 5” x 7” to be suitable for publication.

Also if you include a bio about yourself, your design/art/company practice and product, we may be able to leverage this into an article about you and your designs rather than about Shapeways, it's services and the products it enables.

Robert Schouwenburg, CTO for Shapeways was interviewed by Tony Sklar of bnetTV at the 2011 Showstoppers event held in Las Vegas as part of the Consumer Electronic Show.

Shapeways was also recently featured in another article in the New York Times on The Wow Factor of 3-D Printing by Ashlee Vance

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Based on the art of Carl Moore 3D modeled by DotSan and 3D printed by Shapeways is this Skate Boarding Elephant.

Great to see contemporary art hit 3D-Printing that is not math based or 'as' geeky but more aligned with street and popular culture.

The Winter Colors are coming to an end we need your help to pick the next Strong & Flexible colors.

The Winter Red is staying until end of February for Valentine's day, and the rest will retire at the end of January. What next batch of colors would you like?

Nancy has made a poll so you can to help us decide on the next batch of colors (deadline to respond is next Wednesday end of day). We have selected a range of colors available from our suppliers, and includes colors we've had available before as options as well.  Take a look at the color chart and let us know what colors you would like to see next? 

 We will take a look at your suggestions, do some testing and introduce a new batch of colors as soon as possible.

Also let us know if there are any colors you would like to see as permanent options like Black Strong and Flexible or are you happy to have seasonal and event based colors?