Congratulations to Kimberly Ovitz for getting her Shapeways range of 3D printed jewelry into the April 2013 edition of Elle Magazine.  The fashion and jewelry industry has become one of the fastest growth markets for 3D printing with designers such as Kimberly Ovitz, Ursa Major and Vera Meat joining the existing Shapeways community as a way to sell their 3D printed designs.

Some of the best uses of 3D printing is the ability to connect things to things, whether it is your a plant to your bike, your GoPro camera to your drone or your Raspberry Pi case to your Lego castle.

The MagSafe Adapter Key Ring by jbobrow makes sure you do not lose the Magsafe Adapter for the new MacBook and connects it to your keyring 3D Printed in Stainless Steel using the adapters internal magnet.  Clever.

Another app plugging into the Shapeways 3D Printing API is the Magic 3D Easter Egg Painter By Vishal Srivastava that uses the accelerometer in iOS devices to navigate around and decorate an Easter egg that can then be 3D printed in full color by Shapeways.

Imagine your Easter Egg as an object floating in the Real World.  Your iPhone becomes a Movable Window that allows you to see and paint all sides of your Egg from every possible point of view. STAND UP, hold up your iPhone, and spin around your Egg (seriously!) to see and paint all different sides!  Done painting the front of the Egg? TURN ALL THE WAY AROUND the Egg while holding up your iPhone, and you can paint the back!  Need to paint the top? Make your iPhone flat, look down at the Egg below you, and you can.  Don't forget to paint the bottom! Turn your iPhone up, so you're facing the ceiling, and you can paint under the Egg!  When you've finished creating your Egg, you have the option of ordering a "3D printed" figurine of your creation from inside the app! They make great keepsakes or can be hidden in Easter Egg hunts!

Connecting to the Shapeways 3D Printing API the iOS Stand Creator is an app that makes it easy for anyone to customize a stand for their iPhone and 3D print it with Shapeways.

Usually when we think of iPhone apps we think of applications within the iPhone but this application makes it easy for anyone without 3D modeling skills to create a customized stand in just a few mouse clicks.  

What makes this app really interesting is that it uses 3D printing to make functional, not decorative items.  Most of the apps so far plugging into the Shapeways 3D Printing API on the Create page are making sculptural, cosmetic products or jewelry while there is a huge potential in making 3D Printing apps that connect things to things. 

If you want to 3D print a custom product but do not know how to 3D model the iOS Stand Creator App is a great way to get started, if you are a designer and/or developer interested in getting into the 3D printing app market this is a great example of how to make a customizable, functional product.  Take a look at some of the stands made so far that are now ready to 3D print.

Congrats to Kioròdesign and Archipelis.com. 

Tech and the City: The Making of New York's Startup Community is a new book by Alessandro Piol and Maria Teresa Cometto that looks at the exploding tech startup scene in New York City including an interview with Shapeways CEO Peter Weijmarshausen.

“Tech and the City” is the first book telling the story of how and why this is happening: from the birth of Silicon Alley in the ‘90s to today’s level of activity and important milestones, such as the building of the Cornell NYC Tech campus. Based on over 50 interviews with entrepreneurs, angel investors, venture capitalists, university professors, members of the Bloomberg administration and other stakeholders, this book’s objective is to inform and inspire the current generation of entrepreneurs. 

The Desktop Factory Competition launched in June 2012 challenged makers to design a cheap, open source method to turn plastic pellets (which sell for $10 kg) into filament suitable for a desktop 3D printer (that currently sells for $50 per kg).  83 Year old inventor Hugh Lyman developed the Lyman Filament Extruder II which for under $250 in parts can take standard plastic ABS pellets and squeeze them into filament.

The fact that this device is released as open source hardware means that others can modify and improve the mechanism to lower the cost and increase the efficiency, just as we have seen with the open source desktop 3D printers based on the RepRap.  

Not only will this result in a massive reduction in the cost of raw 3D printing media, but it is also a very small step away from being able to grind and reuse failed 3D prints to feed into fresh new filament, or perhaps adding conductive media into the hopper to create filament suitable for making basic elctronic circuitry, or any type of tweak to customize the base material.

The speed of innovation in the open source 3D printing world is making many of the large industrial 3D printer manufacturers appear to be moving in slow motion.  We are not seeing the same rate of innovation in machines nor materials and we at Shapeways would LOVE to have new materials to share, or have a way to drop the material cost by a factor of five or ten as we see made possible by innovations like the The Lyman Filament Extruder.  

Congratulations to Hugh Lyman who scored a giant $40,000 cheque for his invention and the respect of thousands of makers around the world.

via Time.com

This week for our weekend contest we challenge you to 3D Scan to 3D Print using Autodesk 123D Catch.

Take up to 40 photographs around an object with your iPhone, iPad or your camera and 123D Catch will take the photos and stitch them together in the cloud using photogrammetry to create a 3D object.  You may need to give the 3D file a little love to make it ready to 3D print then upload the file to Shapeways with the tag '123D Catch' and we will give our favorite entry a $25 Shapeways Gift Card.

Anyone who owns a desktop 3D printer knows that sometimes you need to replace some of the components to optimize performance.  In many cases you can simply 3D print a replacement part with your 3D printer which is an incredibly rewarding process of self sufficiency but when it is a critical component that stops the 3D printer from functioning properly it can quickly become frustrating dead end.  

Shapeways community member Schlem discovered the extruder gears that came with his Printbot Kit were warped and his 3D printer was not functioning properly.  Of course a non functioning 3D printer can not 3D print repair parts so he used Shapeways to 3D print his replacement parts in laser sintered Nylon.  By using Shapeways to 3D print the parts for his 3D printer he now has a more durable, higher resolution part that will make his desktop 3D printer more accurate and reliable.

He also made it possible to make the 3D printer even more awesome by designing the Skulltruder, adding a little gothic bling to what is essentially an engineering project.

If you have any 3D parts to share on Shapeways, be sure to tag them '3D Printer' and the type of 3D printer they are for so others can easily find them and repair their 3D printer too.

For the past few months we have been using Instagram to share images of the Shapeways team as we build out our factory in New York, play with new 3D printing processes, show off your designs at events around the world and give a glimpse behind the scenes at Shapeways.

If you are already using Instagram follow us @shapeways for a visual feed of our 3D printed world.  When you post images of your 3D prints on Instagram be sure to mention us @shapeways or hashtag #shapeways so we can see your 3D prints in the wild.  It is always inspiring for us to see your designs in context, especially if you are experimenting with any post processing of your 3D prints.