As you may know Shapeways has attended Makerfaire 2010 in San Mateo. It was great to be back and the whole team enjoyed it. It was cool to meet community members. Some are using us very often, others know us but still want to try for the first time. It was cool to see Bulatov and also to see a lot of people getting really enthusiastic about what we are doing. In the two days we handed out over 2000 flyers and the demand was so big, we needed to have more made

The nice thing about show is, that it is fantastic to meet you all and learn what you really want, what you like and do not like about Shapeways. The key learning for me was that our delivery time needs to be faster and that all our materials are really appreciated and should be further expanded.

In the little bit of spare time we walked around and right accross from our booth was Ifixit and I think they have a great idea. They are helping everybody in repairing their own things, like computers, cars etc. The key element is that we are all entitled to manuals to repair our own belongings, to products we can repair AND to spare parts at reasonable prices. The latter is something we could help with!

The icing on the cake of 2 really cool days was that we won the Makerfair Editor's Choice Award ! To us this means people start to appreciate what we are doing and we would like to thank you, our community for making it possible together with us!

(Renders of Bathsheba's Gyroid)

It is really cool to see how coloring your own 3D models is starting to take shape. We had a lot of requests here at Shapeways how to paint/color your own models and the tutorial featuring it is now available here.

Have a look at the pictures below

 

Or have a look at these little rings colored with Ecoline, thanks to Peter Paul who really enjoyed himself getting all the colors he had on them

Looking forward to more creative colorfull creations in our forums or elsewhere!

To share please upload nice pictures to your model details page or in our forum at the "it arrived" topic.

Anybody in the neighborhood? Tomorrow Marleen and I will be representing Shapeways at Play 2008 at Haas School of Business in Berkeley California. And we would like to meet you in person.

Play 2008 is the Berkeley Digital Media Conference organized by its students. This year's theme is 'Disruption: Changes in the digital media landscape'. Next to companies like Cooliris, and Etchstar.com, Shapeways is an example of how the Internet changes how creatives distribute and monetize art and design work.

Hope to see you or otherwise stay posted on this blog for a short review about the conference.

Hi,

we are going to be at Siggraph! I am quite proud to announce that Shapeways will have a booth at Siggraph (#138).

The reason why this is something special is, that it goes back to 1999, when I was asked by Ton Roosendaal of Not a Number (Blender) to help him with the booth of Not a Number for Siggraph. This is the coolest show to be if you are into 3D! Now, after I have visited Siggraph 3 times (2x for NaN, last year for Shapeways) it is going to happen: Shapeways will have it's own booth at Siggraph and there we will announce something really cool.

So, please come and visit us at Siggraph on the 12-14 of August at the Los Angeles convention center. We will have some really exiting news and fun stuff to show. Also we will be organizing a drink on one of the evenings. If you are intending to visit, let us know on our forum, or in a comment to this post.

Hope to meet a lot of you there!

Peter

Dear Shapies,

today we launched our new look and feel of the website, of which we are all very proud. It is a nice moment, to share a little of the process with you.

In January this year we started the process to develop our own brand, including name, personality and look and feel. It was a fun process which we tried to do using as much input from people inspired by the Shapeways idea as possible. The first deliverable from the sessions was our new name: Shapeways. We also gave our brand a lot of thought and this all came together (being an internet service) in the look and feel of our portal, together with some new features.

The new look and feel was ready in April. Now our partner iBuildings had to implement it for us. This was a lot of work, as our new look also changed the functionality quite significantly. Look for instance at the new way the pictures of "you and your design" are displayed next to the 3D model. As I felt very passionate about the new look, I could not wait for it to be ready to launch.

Today we were able to release it and I really hope you all like our new look and website as much as we do and you have fun using our service and explore the exiting new possibilities that 3D printing offers to you.

kind regards,
Peter

CEO Shapeways

Just to let you know that, yes, we are looking for new techniques and materials which might be interesting to offer to you. One of the new materials we are looking at, as you can see in the picture is indeed metal! Using a technique which is called Metal Laser Sintering, where a laser melts tiny particles of metal together to form the object. It is a bit like Selective Laser Sintering

(SLS), which is used with nylon. MLS uses a metal powder and technically it is a bit more complicated. The positioning of the object(s), for optimal support and heat transport, and finishing of the objects needs more knowledge/experience and treatments.

But then the photo shows that it is worth it.

We would really like to know what you think! Is metal cool? Also what would you make if we would offer metal? Please let us know.

Peter

Welcome dear user,

after lots of research and development we are proud that we can offer to you a new service, which will allow you to bring your creativity to life in 3D!

Using a technique called rapid manufacturing or direct digital manufacturing we can offer to you the posibility to bring your digital models to life. The way it works is that you can upload a digital model in collada of x3d format, have a look whether it is indeed possible to manufacture it and then you can use the order button to order it and have it custom manufactured for you!

For now the material used to produce your model is ABS plastic, but in the near future we will add other materials, based on popular request and feasability.

As our service is brand new, so we are really eager to get your feedback, what you like and what we can improve upon. Join us in on the forum to share your ideas.

Hope you like it!

Kind regards,
Pete