New York-based Shapeways sells 3D printing services to designers and makers and also has an Etsy-like marketplace for creators. The startup, a transplant from the Netherlands, was printing more than 100,000 products a month and had over 150,000 users inside its community last year, so has no doubt grown that audience and volume since then.

Last month Shapeways debuted their new API which enables developers to create consumer facing applications that can tap into the Shapeways printing network and marketplace. That’s important because, as GigaOM Pro analyst Mike Wolf explained it, the API gives Shapeways greater access to the bigger, non-maker audience who want access to 3D printed objects but don’t want to learn how to use sophisticated 3D design software.

Shapeways has been planning to expand through its new New York factory, which is supposed to occupy up to 30,000 feet in Long Island City. Previously, much of the printing work was being done in Europe at its Eindhoven factory in the Netherlands or through partners.

Check out our Field Guide to 3D Printing on GigaOM Pro (subscription required), which defines 3D printing as:

[A] process that produces physical 3D objects by adding layer upon layer of material. Direct from a computer model, objects are “grown.” These objects can be almost anything: engineering prototypes of automotive components, tooling for manufacturing, medical implants, architectural models and sellable goods for end users.

We’ll be digging into 3D printing more at our RoadMap conference on connected design in November in San Francisco. To be the first to register for this event sign up here.

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DIYROCKETS, a global space company, and Sunglass, which offers a collaborative design service, are partnering for the event, which offers $10,000 in prize money. Shapeways, a company that prints out designs for people without 3-D printers will also provide $500 in printing costs to the top two entries. To get an idea of how 3-D printing works, here’s a short video from Shapeways to explain:

For the 3-D rocket engine contest, teams will work together in order to foster collaboration and to advance designs for private space efforts. Judges include inventor Dean Kamen, as well as individuals from MIT, NASA and TED. Per the announcement:

“Although several companies have recently made strides in showcasing the power of the private sector in space exploration, DIYROCKETS is taking this a step further by creating the first of many competitions that encourages the fusion of creativity, technology and collaboration by people across the globe. Utilizing Sunglass’s cloud-based platform to visualize, collaborate, manage versions and exchange feedback on each design with team members and the public from anywhere on the globe, the contest aims to dramatically drive down design costs, while creating innovative technology for all types of space hardware and parts, ranging from space propulsion to space medical sensors.”

While I don’t have the science chops to participate, I like the idea of this contest. As government funding for space projects has been cut over time, private efforts have thankfully expanded. Even better is that many have succeeded and picked up where government programs left off: Last week’s SpaceX Falcon launch and docking with the International Space Station is a great example.

The contest also brings more awareness to what I think is game-changing technology: We’re in the early stages of consumer-based 3D-printing, but the technology is getting cheaper so that more homes and businesses can eventually afford these devices. And as that happens, a design revolution should follow.

Think of the many products and design ideas that will come from millions of 3D-printer owners. Rocket engines aren’t one I’d normally envision, but why not if they can get us beyond our planet at lower design costs?

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A few of Lux’s portfolio companies appear to be doing pretty well. Kurion, a startup developing nuclear waste cleanup tech, scored a breakthrough deal to help clean waste water for Japan’s Fukushima nuclear meltdown. About a year ago I called them “the most successful greentech startup you haven’t heard of.” Portfolio company Shapeways has become synonymous with the emerging industry of 3D printing, and smart grid startup Gridco just launched to build a next-gen power grid using solid state transformers. Portfolio firms that have been acquired include skin company Magen Biosciences, LED tech company Crystal IS, and chip companies SiBeam and Silicon Clock.

“There’s definitely been negative sentiment towards cleantech in the market,” said Hebert, but it really “depends on the individual Limited Partners” (the groups that put money into venture firms). Our LPs still see substantial innovation ahead around energy and resources, said Hebert. Going forward in 2013 “we remain disciplined and selective,” said Hebert.

While Lux says it remains committed to energy tech investing, other firms have been unable to raise new cleantech funds, and some have dialed back or transformed their energy and cleantech focused divisions to make them more capital efficient. VantagePoint Capital Partners shut down its efforts to raise a $1.25 billion cleantech fund recently, and firms like Mohr Davidow and Draper Fisher Jurvetson have reduced their commitments and turned to backing IT-based cleantech, or cleanweb companies only. In 2012, venture capital firms put a third less money into cleantech companies compared to 2011.

Still some investors like Lux Capital still see the potential of energy and resources technology innovation. Canadian firm Chrysalix says its energy focused portfolio is doing well. NEA says its still committed to energy investing, though its scaled back a bit. Khosla Ventures still continues to make aggressive and many bets across sustainability from energy to agriculture to smart grid to biofuels.

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In a must-read story, the Economist explains how cheap 3-D printers could one day let knock-off artists crank out shoes, gadgets, watches and any type of prized design. While counterfeiting is already wide-spread, it could increase dramatically with the machines:

But while the [traditional] pirates’ labour rates and material costs may be far lower, the tools they use to make fakes are essentially the same as those used by the original manufacturers. Equipment costs alone have therefore limited the spread of the counterfeiting industry. But give every sweatshop around the world a cheap 3D printer coupled to a laser scanner, and pirated goods could well proliferate.

My colleague, Janko Roettgers, has reported that file-sharing platforms already aspire to be exchanges for 3-D goods (see “The Pirate Bay now lets you download physical objects“). In other words, kids may one day go from swapping not just MP3s on the internet but iPods too.

The Economist notes that 3D printing is likely to touch off a new intellectual property debate between those who want to label the devices “piracy machines” and those who see them as a technological revolution like the advent of personal computing.

It’s early days yet and, for now, the objects being replicated are dumb pieces of plastic. This means that, in the immediate future, it may only be firms like Lego or Oakley (not Apple or Porsche) that may have to worry.

But if the “print-me-anything” devices take off as predicted, we will eventually be able to copy most things around us. When that happens,  the debates over copyright and the DMCA will look like a tea party.

For a look at how New York company Shapeways has already “printed” more than one million objects, see: The Future will be printed in 3D

(Image by meunierd via Shutterstock)

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The house of the future will be outfitted with hundreds of products created on 3-D printers, everything from jewelry and cups to home decor items and eventually more complex items like furniture or digital devices. It’s a future coming sooner than people think, said Peter Weijmarshausen, the CEO of 3-D printing start-up Shapeways.

Fresh off $6.2 million in new funding for Shapeways, Weijmarshausen spoke with GigaOM about where 3-D printing is going, how it parallels the software industry and how far the technology can take us into the future. The New York startup, a transplant from the Netherlands, operates both a 3-D printing service and an Etsy-like marketplace for creators. It has now produced more than 1 million products to date and is the leading 3-D printing service available.

Outfitting our lives with 3-D printed products

The 3-D printing revolution is just barely underway, Weijmarshausen said, but it holds the promise of huge disruption in the way products are made.

“Production will be completely changed by this technology. There’s a lot of things that will be mass produced because we need bulk and standards, but there are so many products you can make custom,” Weijmarshausen said. “If you can’t buy something, you can just make it.”

Shapeways offers printing in 30 materials and finishes such as plastics, ceramics and metals such as steel and silver. The printers, about the size of a table, work by laying down a layer of powder, which is melted by a laser that follows digital designs created through programs like CAD software. As each layer is laid down, the laser fuses it all together, creating all manner of shapes, from very simple products to more complex constructions with interweaving parts that are already in place.

Shapeways, which prints more than 100,000 products a month, has 150,000 users inside its community, most of them buying items on Shopways’ 6,000 marketplace shops. The company projects users will double over the next 6-8 months and expects it will need to double the printing capacity in the next 4-5 months. A big part of Shapeways’ expansion plans include an upcoming New York factory, which will occupy up to 30,000 feet in Long Island City. That will give the company much more capacity and will expand its U.S. production. Previously, most of the work was being done in Europe at its Eindhoven factory in the Netherlands and through partners.

Empowering creators

Just like software tools have simplified the process of creating websites, 3-D printing offers the chance for anyone to be a maker, Weijmarshausen said. The factory, in essence, is open to all. But unlike the manufacturing world, there are no barriers between consumer and creator, said Weijmarshausen. A product can go through any number of evolutions, based on the requests or feedback of users. There’s the potential for an iterative production process, similar to what happens in agile software development, in which a product can be shaped over time.

He said consumers are slowly coming around to understanding the alternatives to mass production. Markets like Etsy are helping build awareness about individually crafted goods, which speak to people’s desire for unique products that fit their exacts needs.

“Mass production has given us everything we want and then some but it’s all standardized and based on the lowest common denominator. But the trend you see on the web and everywhere is people are making things by hand and there are artisans again and where 3-D printing comes in is the need for people to get exactly what they want,” Weijmarshausen said.

Major challenges to mainstream adoption

However, there are three main challenges holding 3-D printing back from mainstream adoption. Right now, the creation tools are still hard for average users to use. Alhough there are more accessible software programs such as Tinkercad and Google’s Sketchup, it’s still too complex for most users. But Weijmarshausen said there will soon be 10 times as many people with 3-D design know-how as students take it up. Shapeways is also providing a number of simple products that users can easily customize without having to know 3-D design.

Another big challenge is that there’s still a limited number of materials. Weijmarshausen would like to work with wax, which can be good for traditional jewelry making, and higher-end metals such as titanium and gold. Wood would also be appealing, but with Shapeways’ manufacturing process, it would not resemble the natural finish people of think of with wood products. But he said more of these materials are becoming available. And researchers at Xerox PARC are working on printable electronics for things like RAM, sensors and transistors. That, he said, could lead to consumers creating their own phones or MP3 players housed in cases of their own design. 

The last challenge is pricing. In some cases, making a silver ring, for example, can end up costing a similar amount as one bought at retail because of the big mark-up on jewelry. But 3-D printing isn’t able to take advantage of economies of scale, so the price of most products don’t differ much whether one item or 100 are created. Weijmarshausen believes over time, as 3-D printing gets more efficient, the savings will get passed on to consumers as well.

Weijmarshausen often fields questions about what product will actually open people’s eyes to 3-D printing. But it’s not about any one product, he said: it’s about making it possible to print any number of products, whatever people can imagine.

“We need to let people create what they want so there’s a variety; millions of products,” said Weijmarshausen. “We haven’t seen anything yet.”

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From the release:

“We’re excited to offer a wide range of items, from basic supplies like drill bits and automatic hand dryers, to hard to find parts like laboratory centrifuges and miniature polyimide tubing, enabling business and industrial customers to streamline their buying processes,” said Prentis Wilson, vice president of AmazonSupply. “Low prices combined with fast, free shipping and a vast selection, make shopping on AmazonSupply a great experience for customers.”

Many of these are uncommon, some are built to exacting standards and most of the one-off parts like drill bits seem like something that would be perfect for on-demand 3-D printing. It’s not as nutty as one might imagine. Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos has had an investment in MFG.com, a company based in Atlanta that connects folks who need parts (and have designed them) with others who can make them on demand. There is enough demand for made-to-order industrial parts that MFG.com hit $100 million in revenue in 2008 according to this story in The Atlanta Business Chronicle.

Now imagine if that demand could be fulfilled form a startup like Shapeways, instead of a machine shop in France. There is giant market of big companies that require custom-made drill bits for oil wells, replacement parts for airplanes and millions of other bits and pieces that keep the industrial world humming. I don’t doubt that Amazon has its eye on that space and AmazonSupply is one way to connect with the market that could find the most use for it — outside of printing LEGO pieces, of course.

It’s also marketed for individuals, which helps bring someone’s need for a bit of tubing for a research experiment out of the realm of the purchasing department and into the realm of the individual. For those familiar with Amazon’s cloud strategy, this should sound familiar. So while this store (and a line of credit on your Amazon card that Amazon is offering) is pretty cool for helping make DIY and running a small business even that much easier, imagine what happens when you really can just go onto Amazon’s web site and pull down whatever part you need, on-demand and from the cloud.

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It sounds like something out of science fiction — and in fact some have compared it to the “replicator” on Star Trek, which could dispense any food or liquid at the press of a button — but 3-D printing is rapidly becoming a reality. It isn’t quite the same as printing with paper, of course, but the idea is the same: you feed a design in one end, and out the other end comes a 3-D version of that object. And there are signs that it is closer to becoming a part of your life, even if you don’t command a spaceship — one 3-D printer company just got $5 million in funding, and some are planning to use a similar process to make artificial limbs and possibly even entire houses.

This week, Shapeways — a Dutch startup that was spun off from electronics and engineering giant Phillips as part of an incubator program — announced a Series A funding round from Union Square Ventures and Index Ventures (the company is also moving to New York as part of the funding). Ben Holmes of Index Ventures said in a blog post that Shapeways is “democratizing production”, and that the investment firm sees it as similar to some of its other investments such as Etsy, an online marketplace for crafts, while Albert Wenger of Union Square compared Shapeways to the Star Trek replicator in a blog post about the revolution going on in custom manufacturing and design.

Shapeways’s 3-D printing has come a long way even in just the past year: the company originally only created objects out of various plastics and polymer compounds, which are easy to mold and shape, and they were only available in a single color. But in January the startup began offering different colors of custom objects, and several months ago it started offering full 3-D fabrication in metal and even glass. Shapeways will make and ship small objects for as little as $25, and says that users are “printing” more than 10,000 objects such as jewelery and small pieces of art every month.

So how does it work? The plastic version of the “printer” or fabricator deposits small amounts of a compound in layers, which then hardens and is dipped in a chemical bath to set (the plastic can either be flexible or semi-rigid). The metal version uses a fine stainless-steel powder, which is deposited in a thin layer and then combined with a chemical binding material so that it becomes solid. Objects are built layer by layer gradually, until they are finished, and then “infused” with bronze and cured in an oven. Deposition-style fabrication has been available to designers of aircraft parts and other custom fabrication shops for years, but the price of the equipment has been falling and the quality and range of materials that can be used has increased.

As the New York Times described in a recent feature, there are other companies applying the same kinds of technology in other areas as well: Bespoke Innovations, for example, is planning to make customized prosthetic limbs through a similar process, allowing the disabled to design and create their own arms and legs, and to do so much more cheaply than traditional manufacturing methods allow. A Dutch firm makes custom furniture for hotels and other locations using a 3-D printing process, and a U.S. company called LGM makes architectural models. Contour Crafting of Los Angeles, meanwhile, says it has developed an extra large-format printer that can make buildings.

Lighting design firm MGX gets designers to create lighting fixtures using a variety of 3-D printing methods. And 3-D printing was even used during the making of the movie Iron Man to rapidly create pieces of the comic-book superhero’s suit, using a “desktop” 3D printer from Objet Geometries. Shapeways won’t be the only 3-D printing concern in New York City either: hacker Bre Pettis’s startup, called MakerBot Industries, sells a small open-source, custom-manufacturing device that costs less than $1,000 and will make plastic objects to any design, provided they are less than 4 inches by 4 inches by 6 inches — the only downside being you have to put the machine together yourself.

Embedded below is a video of Shapeways doing custom metal “printing.”

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Nail Soup

Maybe you’d think I was crazy, but almost two years ago, we speculated that the web workers of the future may begin taking their digital designs and producing tangible items to sell, using online fabrication and production services such as Ponoko. Since then, the infrastructure of personal manufacturing has become gradually more accessible and affordable, suggesting that boutique production could become a viable career choice for many of us.

Last month’s issue of Wired explored some of the culture around  personal manufacturing, noting that “global supply chains have become scale-free, able to serve the small as well as the large, the garage inventor and Sony.” Wired’s piece drew some criticism, with Gizmodo suggesting that rather than being the the “future of American manufacturing,” the developments of the last few years are really only affecting hobbyists — who are actually just outsourcing work to China. Despite this, it’s clear that everything from open-source car designs to customized LEGO parts are just a click away.

“Thing” Directories and Fabrication Services

Companies such as Ponoko and Shapeways are providing end-to-end services that enable product designers to submit designs, have prototypes manufactured for review and then listed in online stores where customers can customize them, place orders and have items shipped.

Other services such as Thingiverse act as open-source directories of “construction files” for items as diverse as engagement rings and light-duty pliers. Elsewhere, Flexible Stream is offering free, downloadable portfolios of designer’s work for use in rapid manufacturing devices such as 3D printers and CNC machines. The company’s catalog includes objects as esoteric as collections of wood joints for making furniture.

Other creators are offering their designs as direct downloads from their own sites and blogs; designer Julien Madérou’s downloadable papercraft iPhone stand is a great example. Indeed, rather than printing such a design on paper, services such as Ponoko or Shapeways enable such designs to be fabricated from tougher materials, such as wood and metal.

3D Printers and Rapid Manufacturing Fabrication

Where the likes of Ponoko enable hobbyists to submit a design file for fabrication at a remote facility, for the more adventurous designer who’d like to make things at home, tools such as 3D printers are becoming more affordable and accessible.

New York’s MakerBot Industries are producing 3D printers that cost less than $1,000 and can purportedly manufacture any item that’s less than 4″x4″x6″. Though currently limited only to ABS plastic as a material, the price point and capability of these devices will only improve over time.

In parallel with these low-cost fabrication devices, networks of fabrication workshops are emerging as a kind of “coworking for machine shops.” The most prominent of these — TechShop – is concentrated in California. More recently Ponoko and ShopBot Tools (a manufacturer of CNC tools) launched a joint venture — 100kGarages — to bring together creative consumers and local fabricators in a global network of “garage workshops.”

Between fabrication services, “thing directories,” low-cost 3D printers and “comaking” workshops, the opportunities for web worker careers is growing, moving beyond the production of digital value and into a new world of boutique physical items.

Have you considered adding making and selling boutique items to your portfolio of skills?

Related GigaOM Pro Research: Report: 3-D Computing From Digital Cinema to GPUs

Read more: http://pro.gigaom.com/2009/10/report-3-d-computing-from-digital-cinema-to-gpus/#ixzz0f9XwNgkf