A new wave of investment is happening in long-suffering Detroit. At first blush, that sounds eminently promising—the region, and the U.S. auto industry, is still rebounding from the recession, with mixed results. But the who and why paint a more complex picture. As part of their steady push into the U.S. auto industry, “Chinese-owned companies are investing in American businesses and new vehicle technology, selling everything from seat belts to shock absorbers in retail stores, and hiring experienced engineers and designers in an effort to soak up the talent and expertise of domestic automakers and their suppliers,” Bill Vlasic writes in The New York Times. More
How Do You Regulate 3D-Printed Guns?
Ethical technological question of the day: If technology is neither good nor evil, but simply a means to an end, what happens when that end has potentially dangerous consequences? Cody Wilson, a University of Texas at Austin law student, has developed a working gun—which he calls The Liberator—using a 3D printer, and he’s made the design available on his website, Defense Distributed. Wilson's home-made firearm becomes all the more striking as the cost of 3D printing drops precipitously, with low-cost printers poised to enter the mass market. More
Staples Brings 3D Printers to the Mass Market
Designers have used 3D-printing websites like Shapeways to manufacture and market their wares for several years now, while some intrepid DIY makers have taken production into their homes by investing in desktop 3D printers from New York-based MakerBot. But 3D printing machines have yet to make their way into mass-market retail stores. Until now. Last week Staples announced that it will sell the Cube 3D printer, made by South Carolina-based 3D Systems Corp., in select stores. Priced at $1,299, the machine sells for almost half the cost of Makerbot's Replicator 2. More
The Humanoid Robots Start Arriving
Steve Jurvetson, a VC friend of Techonomy's at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, ordered a humanoid "Baxter" robot from Rethink Robotics and shared these shots of taking it out of the box and plugging it into the wall. Right out of the box, Jurvetson programmed Baxter by moving its arms. On his first try, he taught the robot to move cups across a table, reporting that Baxter was able to persevere even as people placed cups in random locations on the table. "It learns what its hands can do by looking at them against the table as background," writes Jurvetson. More
An Online Matchmaker for Designers and Manufacturers
Repatriating U.S. manufacturing jobs isn't just about bolstering the economy. There are practical business problems associated with outsourcing production abroad. It's not uncommon for shipments of products made in countries like China to arrive with defects, which can be hard to rectify from the other side of the world. In a report on WNYC's New Tech City, Matthew Burnett, a small business owner in Brooklyn, says quality control wasn't the only issue he ran into when he used foreign companies to manufacture parts for his designer watch company—language barriers and time-zone differences hampered routine communications. When Burnett started his next company, a clothing line, he decided he only wanted to make his products in the U.S. That way he could order smaller batches and call up the factory directly if there were any problems. More
With $30 Million, Shapeways Will Push 3D Printing Frontiers
Peter Weijmarshausen believes that 3D printing "is fundamentally changing the manufacturing ecosystem in its entirety." Several deep-pocketed investors agree. Weijmarshausen announced today that Shapeways, the 3D printing marketplace he heads, has raised $30 million in a series C financing led by Andreessen Horowitz. Existing investors Union Square Ventures, Index Ventures, and Lux Capital also participated in the round. Since its founding in 2007, Weijmarshausen says Shapeways has seen a drop in 3D printing prices, an expansion of printable materials, and users upload over 1 million designs. More
GE-Quirky Deal Opens Tech Patents to Almost Everybody
Independent inventors of consumer products are about to get access to the resources of a $245 billion industrial technology business. In a partnership with the Manhattan-based product-development startup Quirky, GE will open up a trove of more than 30,000 patents and technologies to Quirky’s crowdsourced collaborators. The goal is to create a co-branded line of app-enabled, connected devices that leverage industrial-grade technologies for use in the home in applications such as health, security, water, and air. More
Business Digital Manufacturing
Next Trick for Laser Printers: Manufacturing Electronics
Since Xerox researchers revolutionized putting ink on paper with the invention of the laser printer in 1969, the technology has been applied to "printing" DNA as well as 3D structures. Now the approach has a promising future in electronics manufacturing, with "ink" made from tiny fragments of silicon chips. New York Times reporter John Markoff describes in today’s Science Times how a new technique developed at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center will print computing power onto a flexible surface. More
Energy & Green Tech Jobs Manufacturing
Deloitte’s Chris Park: 3D Printing for Cleaner and Leaner U.S. Manufacturing
Revitalizing manufacturing is essential to U.S. economic recovery, but it’s not clear yet how this new phase might look. One thing is certain: it won’t look anything thing like manufacturing did 15 or even 5 years ago. PARC CEO Stephen Hoover has spoken at Techonomy events about how innovations like 3D printing and crowdsourcing can drive a paradigm shift in manufacturing. But can a new American manufacturing approach also be eco-friendly? Techonomy spoke with Chris Park, a principal at Deloitte who helps clients with their environmental, social, and sustainability performance, about how next-generation manufacturing technology could reduce environmental impact and bring jobs back to the U.S. More
Dutch Firm Plans 3D-Printed Canal Boat
In a talk last January at Learning Without Frontiers, Ray Kurzweil speculated that one day 3D printers will be able to self-replicate by printing parts to make other 3D printers. Kurzweil, now Director of Engineering at Google and a speaker at last year's Techonomy conference, thinks 3D printing could have a paradigm-shifting impact on how we manufacture all kinds of things—from automobiles to the highways that they drive on. Fueled by this vision, students at the Singularity University, which Kurzweil founded, are working on creating 3D-printable buildings. Now, the Dutch firm DUS Architects plans to use a mobile printing facility called the KamerMaker to build the first 3D-printed canal boat. More
