Five days before Christmas, a nightmare became a virtual reality for Shapeways Inc.. The New York 3D printing company’s website went down for 19 hours, the second longest run in company history, next to when Hurricane Sandy hit. “I was having an anxiety attack,” Savannah Peterson told a crowd of Read more…
When I finally get a hold of Savannah Peterson, she is on a bus from Galway to Dublin, home of The Guinness Factory. It has been a busy time for the entrepreneur, who is coming off a two-year PR cycle from Hell. The trip was part of a ‘3D printing Read more…
If there was one company which could be used as the poster child of 3D printing’s incredible growth, that company would probably be Shapeways. A spin-out of the lifestyle incubator of Royal Philips Electronics, with big name investors like Andreessen Horowitz on board, the company has been a smashing success, Read more…
“A company within a company.” That’s the story of Shapeways, a startup that began in an incubator within Dutch conglomerate, Philips. And Shapeways itself is something of an incubator — a 3D-printing marketplace that allows for others to make a business out of their work. Continue Reading and Watch…
Excerpt from WSJ column “The Daily Startup” The Perils of Crowdfunding. When social-media marketer Savannah Peterson raised $125,000 in the first 24 hours of the Kickstarter campaign she launched for Sunnyvale, Calif., incubation studio D2M in August 2012, “it was the most exhilarating day of my professional career,” she told Read more…
The Instacube is a device for capturing feeds of Instagram photos and projecting the images in a digital picture frame that can sit on a desk, table or countertop. It’s also a cautionary tale for individuals and entrepreneurs who use crowdfunding to help get new products and businesses off the Read more…
The average Instagram user spends more than four hours a month looking at their friends’ photos, so it’s no surprise that a Kickstarter campaign promising to stream those photos into a digital picture frame would be a hit. The product is Design to Matter’s Instacube. When it launched on Kickstarter, Read more…
Marketing ninja at your service When Silicon Valley design and marketing agency D2M Inc. posted a job listing on Craigslist for a “marketing ninja,” CEO Andy Butler was hoping for a few creative candidates. “When we put out a posting for a ‘marketing ninja,’ we wanted to attract people who’d Read more…
Design To Matter’s crowdfunding campaign for the Instacube stands as a cautionary tale for would-be crowdfunding backers. After a successful $620,000+ raise on Kickstarter, the campaign has been mired with turnover, internal strife, delivery issues and refund requests. I also proposed that D2M’s involvement in another crowdfunding campaign shortly thereafter Read more…
Apparently, the Olympic ceremonies are really boring for the world’s leaders. Everyone remembers Queen Elizabeth II and her not-impressed face during the 2012 London Olympic Opening Ceremony, and, well, Russia’s Vladimir Putin attempted to steal the show with his bored expression during tonight’s Olympic Closing Ceremony. Sure, it’s been a Read more…