3D Printing from London's 'Silicon Roundabout'

Silicon Roundabout is London's claim to be a Silicon Valley. It is claimed to be  fast becoming a major hub for media agencies and tech firms with a digital edge, in an area encompassing Shoreditch, Hoxton and particularly Old Street. That may be the case, but Silicon Roundabout is very different from Silicon Valley. 

Wired's directory of Silicon Roundabout companies reveals that its startups are mostly users of the Web and related technology, developing the 'froth' of applications that sit atop the shoulders of companies in other parts of the world who have developed foundation technologies, based on decades of deep dive R+D and university/research labs collaboration. There may be a few important companies in London's Silicon Roundabout, but the UK should not over-estimate the importance of this cluster. The Cambridge cluster is more significant, but even it is a pale shadow of Silicon Valley, California. Despite this, there are of course some very interesting tech companies in London. Since this is a blog about 3D Printing, lets start there. 

MakieLab is a 3D Printing start up with ambition. MakieLab is a new toys and games company based in Shoreditch, London.  They are making a new kind of future-smashing toy: customisable, 3D-printed, locally made, and game-enabled.

Alice Taylor founded Makielab in February 2011 after nearly four years commissioning games, apps and web TV shows for Channel 4 Education. Previous to Channel 4 Alice was VP Digital for BBC Worldwide (LA), and previous to that, the brains behind another start up producing Java entertainment software – avatars, forums, chat apps. 

We wish MakieLab well, genuinely, but one cannot help thinking that the UK needs to shoot considerably higher than solely being a 'user' of technology in order to create niche toy on demand services. To boost UK competitiveness, to attract investors and to increase the national equivalent of "Market Capitalization", the UK desperately needs to restore its engineering and science prowess in core technology development and R+D. That's not to decry entrepreneurs working in London's Silicon Roundabout .... but all UK Governments of the last thirty years have been curiously willing to believe that the SME sector will be the UK's salvation. They will not. What we need are the Google's, Apple's and GE's of the emerging 'digital space' .... and those companies seed developments from the real Silicon Valley, not Old Street, London. Agreed?

Is it wise for MakerBot to move out of the market for 3D Printer kits

It appears as if MakerBot Industries may have moved out of the 3D Printer Kit market, and will now only sell fully assembled units. We think this is a mistake, and far too early a move in the rapidly expanding hobby/maker market around 3D Printing.

'Makers' and the 'maker culture' want parts, and kits, and extension kits, and the flexibility to make the 3D Printer of their dreams. They want to make things! Plugging a new real of plastic into the very same machine that everyone else owns is not the same thing at all. Not at all.

MakerBot should be a one-stop-shop for 3D Printing to the hobby/maker market. They need to supply everything required for making and using 3D printers, from the smallest parts, to the larger parts, to the specialist parts, right through to consumables.

'Makers' want to create 3D Printer mash-ups. It's the maker culture that's big, not yet the market for home 3D Printers.

A lot of people are going to be disappointed by MakerBot's decision and are going to find other ways to source parts for their 3D Printing maker projects.

As Bre Pettis, founder of MakerBot and the first 3D Printing celebrity according to Business Week, admits “The way I see is that we’re just at the beginning of this market ... In technology circles, people know about this stuff and maybe know someone who has a 3D printer. The next step is moving to where you go to a neighbor’s house to get a new doorknob printed or something like that. We will get there in the next year or two. In 10 years, having a MakerBot will be so normal. It will be like having a microwave.”

UK publishes a 'high value' manufacturing (HVM) strategy

http://www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/free/TSB_UKHighValueManufacturing.pdf

"Additive manufacturing will change everything, but needs to be coupled with additive systems – structure, processing, display all as one – structural electronics."

This study sets out to understand the global manufacturing context in which UK  companies must compete and how that context is expected to evolve over the next 15-20 years. Time for renewal?

3D Printing at the heart of a Third Industrial Revolution?

The Economist magazine has published an article which positions 3D Printing at the heart of a third industrial revolution.

"The applications of 3D printing are especially mind-boggling. Already, hearing aids and high-tech parts of military jets are being printed in customised shapes. The geography of supply chains will change. An engineer working in the middle of a desert who finds he lacks a certain tool no longer has to have it delivered from the nearest city. He can simply download the design and print it. The days when projects ground to a halt for want of a piece of kit, or when customers complained that they could no longer find spare parts for things they had bought, will one day seem quaint."

A major driver may be "servitization". The lines between manufacturing and services are blurring. Rolls-Royce no longer sells jet engines; it sells the hours that each engine is actually thrusting an aeroplane through the sky.

We like really big 3D Printers

ZCorp, acquired by 3D Systems, have introduced the ZPrinter 850, with the following characteristics:

• A build envelope of 20 x 15 x 9 inches (508 x 381 x 229 mm)
• Print as many as 96 baseball-sized models in a single build
• Print in 390,000 colors
• 600 x 540 dpi produces parts with fine detail and accuracy

"We're ZPrinting footwear designs nonstop, and the additional capacity will help us better meet the demand of our R&D teams.  The ZPrinter 850 could also open up new uses for sporting equipment where we really need large, colorful prototypes. I'm certain we'll see a huge demand for this new in-house capability." -- Dave Schwirian, model shop/RP manager, Nike

A 3D Printed Case for the Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a very new and very exciting bare board ARM-based Linux box, for $25. It's the size of a credit card. And it does not come with a case. So what do you do if you want a case. Well, if you have some 3D design skills, you load up your favorite 3D modelling software, design a case, export the .STL file, and log into Shapeways, a 3D Printing Bureau Service. Hey presto, you can have all the cases you want for all of your $25 Raspberry Pi computers.

And if you thought this was a one off, take a look at all of the R-Pi cases starting to appear on Shapeways.

Stratasys and Objet merge

http://www.objet.com/NEWS_EVENTS/Press_Releases/Merger/

http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-FNA1K/1801848414x0x560087/39653365-fbf2-440d-ae05-64bee367161c/SSYS_webcast_presentation_041612.PDF

Faballoo appears relaxed about this news of the merger of two 3D Printing industry giants, stating that "We had been wondering what might happen to Objet after 3D Systems' recent acquisition of ZCorp, which put the industry on notice that major consolidation was underway. Objet was a big target, with its interesting technology and large size. Was 3D Systems was interested in acquiring Objet? With their recent pattern of acquisitions, probably. However, in this case Stratasys prevailed and now is the largest 3D printing manufacturer in the world today."

We are not so sure.

Industry consolidation is usually a signal that individual companies are not making it in the marketplace. Companies set out to combine forces to stave off the inevitable. They use cross-selling of each other's products, to each other's customers, in order to generate new revenues that they were failing to create alone. 3D Systems have acquired ZCorp, and now Stratasys has merged with Objet. What's next? Stratasys merging with 3D Systems! If ZCorp and Objet were great printers, why could they not have survived on their own. ZCorp and Objet are great printers, so why these acquisitions?

To those who new to the world of 3D Printing it looks and smells like a hot new industry, especially with all of the activity at the hobbyist and consumer end of the market, with companies like MakerBot and Shapeways.  Yet additive manufacturing, in its various guises, has been around for twenty years or more. Perhaps the technology is mature. Perhaps it was time for consolidation? Maybe 3D Printer innovation was coming to the end of the line. Surely not?

Or perhaps there is something more interesting going on? Is the 3D Printer/Printing industry 'servitizing'?

Servitization is defined by Wikipedia as the conversion of product businesses into services businesses.

For example, GE Power Systems used to sell generators, now it leases power. This is a step beyond just adding maintenance services to the generator business. It's a whole new business model. GE has been taken down this road because of the commoditization of its products and component supply chain, and also because of the escalating needs and expectations of their customers. Perhaps 3D Printers are also coming under the pressure of commoditization and the increasing requirements and expectations of customer? Maybe it is only possible to make money in 3D Printing services? If so, that makes for an interesting analysis.

2D Printing did not follow this path. HP's printer unit did not have to get into the Print Services business in order to survive as a printer manufacturer. Indeed, the reverse was true. When 2D Printers were unreliable and expensive, bureau services ruled the roost. When Printers become cheaper, fewer consumers and businesses used services, they just went out and bought a printer of their own. Perhaps that is what is not happening with 3D Printers, hence the acquisition of ZCorp and Objet. Perhaps only the 3D Printing service companies were buying enough printers to keep ZCorp and Objet as viable long term business? If 'servitization' is happening to 3D Printing at the current, then this could be an indicator that either:

1. The market is too narrowly defined and the predicted explosive growth of 3D Printing by business and consumers maybe being hyped, and/or
2. 3D Printers are simply too complex to use by themselves, and businesses are instead looking for 3D Print Services

So with this consolidation taking place, as evidenced by the rash of recent acquisitions and mergers, are we at the end of one 3D Printing cycle, and the start of another, or is the industry already facing a struggle between products and services? What do you think is happening?