Richard Lee, co-founder of www.mfg3d.com, lives in Taiwan and tracks Asia-Oceanic companies involved in 3D printing with an eye new 3d printer manufacturers that have scale or operational efficiencies, and large scale production manufacturing using 3D printing technologies. Rich also studies trends in on-demand regional and local 3D printing centers around the world.
Japanese firm, Rinkak MMS, is launching a service to help manufacturers locate and work with 3d printing manufacting facilities worldwide. The service has been in US beta for a few weeks and is expecting to launch worldwide after August 31st.
Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are developing something called MultiFab, which is a vision-assisted multi-material 3D printer capable of printing with 10 different materials within a single build, with a current material library consisting of 15 possibilities.
DigiFabster introduced a cloud-based work flow automation tool for 3D print shops, including a full back-end and an complete order widget that you can embed on your website.
While art applications are the primary goal of 3d glass printing develed in the MIT Mediated Matter Lab, the commercial applications are also endless.
Stratasys announced customer survey results which forecast near-term manufacturing impact of 3d printing, available free for download.
3D Hubs, which is one of our favorite sites for quick real market data, now offers a marketplace and data from 3D Printing 20,000 service providers. To mark the event, we added Cellular 3D to their map of Phoenix area oursourcers, specializing in medical prints.
Gizmo 3D from Australia has released a new video of their SLA printer in action, demonstrating high speed layerless (continuous) printing.
A new high speed SLA-type printer on kickstarter offers 16X speed compared to other SLA printers and a much larger print bed.
Reinout Holtrup, a student of industrial design at the University of Twente in the Netherlands created a prototype for a DLP 3D printer called the XZEED Multi-Material DLP Printer which can print with up to five materials/colors at once.
Mitch Free, who founded MFG.COM in 2000, has created his own 3D printer and is partnering with UPS to put the printers in UPS hubs for on-demand printing. Starting with 100 printers operated by just three people, his first location has the capacity to grown to more than 1000 printers.