This one will appeal to quite a few of you I think.

3D Printing
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1

This one will appeal to quite a few of you I think. After some successful seed funding 3D Hubs have now officially launched their service, which turns your idle 3D printers into money-making machines, I really like this concept.
http://bit.ly/192OV4D

2

Completely, I believe in the City concept, I think it changes everything. However one slight flaw is returning business, let’s say you get a model printed well and you collect it, what’s to stop you cutting out the middle man next time?

3

I signed up. I have to say I don’t understand the ‘unlocking’ stuff. My hub city (which is actually 200km away from me, but it’s the only option I can select) is not ‘unlocked’ yet. Does this mean people can’t use my services ? I have no idea.

4

@Shachar_Weis they’ve done it that way so that end-users (i.e not printers) have more options, people will not be able to see your service until there are 10 printers in your city. Bear in mind that it has only officially launched this week so may take some time, but growth rate is exponential.

5

And mailing prints is a big no-no? They limit the locations to major cities.

6

@Shachar_Weis they say that the city aspect is what differentiates them from somebody like makexyz, admittedly it is pretty limited for those in rural areas but for now they are targetting big cities.

7

The big problem I see with this is the same that I’ve seen on ebay through the years. As a new reprap design comes out and people want printed parts for it, the price is at a premium. A week later, everyone is doing it for almost the cost of the plastic and then there’s no point in doing it after that.

I guess this could be different, given that the parts are custom selected rather than pre selected, with any modifications able to be made by the user before the parts are actually printed.

I guess you could get a premium if you have a different style machine (SLS, etc)

8

I just signed up but it said I needed 20 printers to unlock Manchester, not 10. It would also be nice to change the currency to local currency.

9

Their blog says European cities need 10 printers to unlock, and world cities need 20. I guess the UK isn’t Europe? Or maybe they meant the Euro zone…

10

That seems kinda arbitrary.

11

So stupid. Why bother with unlocking? We have this ‘modern’ invention called ‘mail’.