The Equity Kicker

Thinking about new market opportunities case study: 3D printed figurines

Regular readers will know that I’m excited about the emerging opportunities that 3D printing technologies are enabling. In fact I’ve been looking for an investment in this area for nearly two years now. My first thought was that falling costs and rising quality would unlock opportunities in the consumer space, but none of [...]

3D printing expanding through the industrial world vertical by vertical – now dental crowns

If software is eating the world then 3D printing is atomising its factories and production centres. The 3D printing trend is less advanced than the software trend, but it’s coming. I’m writing this today having just read that one in ten dentists (I assume in the US) are 3D printing replacement crowns for [...]

Developments in 3D printing

I’m in Leuven, Belgium for most of this week visiting 3D printing leader Materialise and attending their 3D printing conference. For most of you Materialise is a lead contender for the ‘most successful and innovative European company you’ve never heard of’. The business is 20 years old, has 1,000 employees in 15-20 countries, and most importantly works [...]

3D printing – rapidly getting easier

We first started to get interested in 3D printing a year or so back, and at that I played with a number of the services on the market, but the experience wasn’t easy, and 3D printers in the home still seemed some way off.

Both those things are now changing fast.

The usability challenge [...]

3D fun on a Friday afternoon

Regular readers will know I’m a believer in the web going 3D, well parts of it anyway. I blogged recently about Sun’s and IBM’s interest in the area, and then yesterday I got invited to an IBM conference on the subject in July.

So I’ve been checking out a few things – and the [...]

Sun Virtual Workspace

Check out this video of Sun’s Virtual Workspace. They have built a Second Life style collaboration environment focused on commerce. Very cool.

More detailed info is available on Sun’s site here. They call the initiative MPK20 (obviously not because they want me to remember it).

Being like Second Life, it is avatar based. [...]

Consumer internet – the changing nature of the game

I have been thinking for some time that the extreme capital efficiency of many web2.0 businesses is a feature of where we are in the cycle and will start to come under pressure as the sector matures. So when Max Bleyleben – in his post on Web2.0 bubble debate in full swing pointed me [...]