Shapeways is an interesting company. They are actually the first 3D printing company I was ever interested in. I was living in Queens when they announced that they were opening up a second 3D printing facility about 10 blocks away from where I lived. I was at the facility on the first day they brought the public through for tours. They were among the first people I met in the industry, when I saw them at the MAD museum in early 2014. Their business has set a high standard for 3D printing services around the world.
Two days ago, Shapeways announced that they are looking to hear from makers and people 3D printing at home to help them improve their Global Partner Network. The Global Partner Network is a group that is comprised of their production partners from around the world. They help bring the Shapeways community access to a wide variety of 3D printing options available in the industry.
Shapeways is a community, and it seems as though they are reaching out to create a definitive, universal 3D printing directory. They are looking for people to tell them what 3D printers they use at home, checking to see if they are interested in doing what they do, which is to produce quality 3D prints for their customers. They want to know if you are an individual, company, makerspace, or so on.
In this way, it seems as though the service provider may be competing with such distributed 3D printing networks as 3D Hubs and makexyz. With a network of over 10,000 3D printer owners, 3D Hubs has both been able to produce prints for local customers around the world, but also create extensive reports on a wide variety of 3D printers. I hope that Shapeways creates more centralizations of information like this. It would be great to finally have a useful database like the Senvol Database.
Though it now has customers in over 130 countries and has printed over 2,000,000 products, Shapeways will only expand its reach. They also have hundreds of thousands of designers on their platform, where people sell their 3D modeled designs as 3D prints for whatever price they see fit.
From their blog: “Give us a shout if you would be interested in joining our Global Partner Network and we’ll reach out in the future if there are opportunities to collaborate.”
