Distributed Manufacturing

Xometry Stock – An On-Demand Manufacturing Marketplace

Anyone who decides to spend a few bricks on bee school will quickly become acquainted with the Harvard Business School (HBS) Case Method. It starts with a “case study,” a 10-20 page document written from the viewpoint of a real person leading a real organization. The aspiring leaders of tomorrow then use Google to try […]

Why We’re Long Protolabs Stock But Not Shapeways Stock

It’s bad enough that the market seems to be completely ignoring The Rona which is decimating the trillion-dollar travel industry and – one could argue – has caused the price of agricultural products to skyrocket. But another lingering effect of the pandemic is that it gives everyone a pretty good excuse. Just listen to the […]

Smart Manufacturing Startup Builds AI OS for Industry 4.0

Smart manufacturing. Industry 4.0. Smart factories. Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Manufacturing on demand. The list of buzzwords around how the world will completely digitize the manufacture of every widget imaginable goes on and on. These factories of the future will link every machine and robot, each mapped down to the micron in a cloud-based […]

Why Have 3D Printing Stocks Been Going Up Lately?

Back when we first started investing in tech stocks, we often made the mistake of confusing short-term stock price performance with long-term potential. For example, we’d write a piece on some small tech stock pointing out a bunch of red flags and then panic when it doubled in price. The criticisms would usually come from […]

Six Manufacturing-as-a-Service Companies

Computer-aided design has been giving us digital twins long before the term became mainstream. The ability to design something digitally and then create it in the real world has been around for a while. What’s changed is the variety of materials and lot sizes you can choose from, and speed at which you can do […]

A 3D Printing Stock With Diversified Business Lines

The herd behaves in strange ways. Last time we looked, data science stock Alteryx was down -40% because they revised guidance. Like that was some big shocker. We all know about “the rona.” We know the entire global economy has taken a dramatic productivity hit. Yet, we all act surprised when a company revises guidance […]

Ten 3D Printing Startups That Took Funding in 2019

It’s that time of year again where we talk about how disappointed we are with the poor performance of the current crop of 3D printing stocks, pinning our hopes on the next generation of 3D printing startups to fulfill the promise of the much-hyped technology. The latest publicly traded 3D printing company, SmileDirectClub (SDC), cut […]

Is Protolabs a 3D Printing Stock Yet?

We recently wrote about the dismal performance of 3D printing stocks which might be explained by a shift in the business model for the 3D printing industry from a 3D printer on every corner to what we used to call “3D printing bureaus.” It’s a revolution for the manufacturing industry, something that’s now being called […]

The “On-Demand Manufacturing” Business Model

In a recent piece on Some of the Latest Trends in Artificial Intelligence, we noted that innovation lies not only in the technology itself but also in the business models used to deploy the technology. The same holds true for 3D printing. In our last piece on the topic, we noted that there are at least […]

10 of the Most-Funded 3D Printing Startups in 2018

Futurists make a living – or at least headlines – by offering predictions about how trends and technologies today might play out in the future. We’ve quoted one or two of them in the past here, such as Ray Kurzweil or SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, who both believe we are nearing the Singularity, when machines will […]