What an awesome claim: Transform Your Smartphone into a 3D Printer. Since the campaign launched on Kickstarter on March 21st, OLO has indeed achieved a few highscores: $30K in just three minutes, $80K in 30 minutes, $1 million in just 6 days!
It has then somewhat plateaued (still growing, yet slower) as one would expect, this is possibly due to some recent controversy regarding questions about the whole campaign being too good to be true. As Angus Deveson puts it in Maker’s Muse’s video below:
- some objects shown in the campaign look to be laser cut rather than 3D printed, let alone on the OLO itself
- struggle to find names of people behind the project and who they really are
- the address where the project is registered being in fact a post box only
- the pictures and videos being so very professional and again too beautiful to be honest
- why are the likes and dislikes disabled on some Youtube videos showing the product in action
- etc…
However, 15,494 believers in the product have supported the campaign so far with a sound $2,220,197 (at the time of writing), already surpassing 3 previous very famous 3D printing campaigns:
- the infamous Buccanneer ($1,438,765) failing miserably with no refund for the unfortunate 3,520 backers,
- 3Doodler 2.0 back in January 2015 ($1,552,256, 10 160 backers) and
- the Flux delta printer ($1,641,075 from 2,707 backers in December 2014)
Now the next one to beat is 3Doodler again, but the first campaign back in 2013: $2,344,135 from 26,457 backers. It’s just a little over $100,000 ahead, and with 2 days remaining its going to be tight, you can do it, OLO!
And that’ll be it, since it’s unlikely that they will manage to raise the further $600k needed to overtake Form 1 SLA printer ($2,945,885 in 2012) and tiny delta Tiko ($2,950,874 in 2015), not to mention M3D, the most successful 3D printing Kickstarter campaign ever with $3,401,361 from 11,855 backers in May 2014.
So what do you think? Worth betting $99 on it and seeing what happens? Or wait until it reaches production and buy it for $129? Let us know your views in the comments below.
(note the point on Solido 3D is invalid: he’s looking at Solido3d.com where he should be looking at www.solido3d.it – thanks Dejan to pointing out, well spotted)
