Weren't we just talking about something like this a couple of days ago?

Weren’t we just talking about something like this a couple of days ago? - just…with much less of a money-making scheme to it?
http://www.indiegogo.com/protoexchange

Basically a market place for on demand prints ?
The principles look nice but I fear it won’t live up the hype.

I think the primary driver is financial compensation which, if history tells us anything, will subvert any effort to actually make the world a better place :slight_smile:

How do they handle confidentiality of designs and orders?
(People do print things that are not open source)

in the same fashion as traditionnal freelance platform : public global request without details and private communication between winning designer/producer with NDA for the most sensitive products.
no ?

Why does it has to be a bidding system? Can it be just a list of manufacturers that offer specific parts for a specific price or price per filament+print time? Then the user can chose from that list who ever he thinks it fits his needs better.

Now that I actually read the website (yes I know I’m a terrible person) this looks exactly like what my friend Steve and I sketched out about a year ago, and he even built a MVP of the online system.

It’s an interesting idea and certainly could bridge the gap between now and a time when 3d printers are common in every home, but the real cleverness comes after the basic network is formed, and there are some principals to the implementation of the network that we discovered which could make a big difference as well.

I should get in touch with these folks.

for producers, that’d be “just” a directory, indeed. But for designers, it’s not as easy to pull fixed prices.

Cool. I can’t invest in time/programming as I have no knowledge of that, but I hope I can use this in a while when I can be on the producer’s directory.