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posted by azrael on Wednesday July 30 2014, @12:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the wake-me-up-for-4D-printing dept.

Promising "an appstore for the physical world," Amazon's just unveiled their new online market for products created using a 3-D Printer.

"Customization gives customers the power to remix their world," explains the co-founder of Mixee Labs (an Amazon partner), "and we want to change the way people shop online."

Amazon's ability to sell you things before they've even been built is currently limited mostly to novelties like iPhone cases, jewelry, and bobbleheads that look like you. But as one web page explains, you're also buying a chance to experience the beginning of mainstream 3D printing.

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  • (Score: 2) by gringer on Wednesday July 30 2014, @01:59AM

    by gringer (962) on Wednesday July 30 2014, @01:59AM (#75349)

    How is this different from Shapeways [shapeways.com]?

    --
    Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
    • (Score: 5, Informative) by c0lo on Wednesday July 30 2014, @02:14AM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 30 2014, @02:14AM (#75353) Journal
      How it works on:
      1. shapeways [shapeways.com] - essentially, "print on demand your own design" + "share/sell your design". Marketplace for makers-meeting-consumers.
      2. amazon [amazon.com] - "pick from our design catalogue, will print and dispatch the trinkets for you". Essentially, a "publisher offering print-on-demand" - a way to sell overpriced 3D-printed items without the hassle of managing inventories.

      Clearer now?

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
      • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Popeidol on Wednesday July 30 2014, @03:59AM

        by Popeidol (35) on Wednesday July 30 2014, @03:59AM (#75370) Journal

        Think of it as less selling things without inventory management, and more a way to keep low-demand item in stock. If you're only selling 50 of an item per year, you currently have the option of getting a big production run and paying for storage for decades or getting a small production run and increased per-unit prices. Either way, the item has to sell for a lot more to be worthwhile. There are plenty of companies out with a business model of 'buy lots of parts now, wait 10 years, and sell them at a huge mark-up when there's no official support'

        Amazon has a good chance of partnering with manufacturers. I recently paid $12 for a small plastic part that holds the filter in place in my washing machine - ebay prices, it was a lot more from an actual dealer. If it breaks again in ten years, will I be able to do the same? Somebody might have had the same problem as me and put up the design online. We may all have handheld 3D scanners by then, so I could do the job myself. But if the washing machine maker threw up print-on-demand designs for all their models from the last 20 years on amazon? I'd go with that just for convenience. Pick model, pick from parts list (with pictures), maybe choose printing material, and it's at your door a few days later. Amazon gets a cut, I get a better experience, and the manufacturer gets to make a profit stream off older models. Some companies will run their own stores, but my guess is amazon will make it very cost effective and simple to outsource the service to them.

        Sometimes it feels like everything I own is missing a small part. The first company with a comprehensive enough parts list and an easy way to find them will probably make a fair bit of cash from me.

        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Wednesday July 30 2014, @04:41AM

          by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 30 2014, @04:41AM (#75378) Journal

          and the manufacturer gets to make a profit stream off older models.

          A bit unclear how, do you care to elaborate?

          Sometimes it feels like everything I own is missing a small part.

          Most of the time, your feeling will be quite right [wikipedia.org].

          The first company with a comprehensive enough parts list and an easy way to find them will probably make a fair bit of cash from me.

          I tend to like this line of thought (wishful thinking to be more accurate) but I'm old enough to have a hunch this kind of thinking is not representative for the "consumer market" and it won't happen unless special circumstances exist - e.g. the whole is simply too expensive and/or has a limited niche to hope to sell another whole product only because a trivial part is defective (e.g. a car)

          I still remember a chef/butcher knife my grandpa has had - a made in Solingen [germanysolingen.com] - it was passed over by his dad; the edge was no longer quite the original shape but the steel allowed it to stay sharp longer between one honing and the next one. Now, this kind of thinking about quality and/or long term usability is quite unusual today - because it is self-limiting in regards with sales: not a bad thing for environment/sustainability/what-not but very bad for the bottom-line.

          --
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
          • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Popeidol on Wednesday July 30 2014, @07:28AM

            by Popeidol (35) on Wednesday July 30 2014, @07:28AM (#75409) Journal

            In answer to the extra-profit-stream part:

            As 3D printing becomes more mainstream, people are going to be printing parts for their older and unsupported devices. These days they may have to dispose of them and replace the whole thing, but if you can easily buy a $20 part? A decent percentage of the population will be keeping their devices for longer (to use a washing machine example again, the last one I threw away was about 20 years old. It worked fine, but the pins holding the lid on snapped and the dials cracked apart from age. If there was a cheap repair option that didn't involve hunting hopefully through junkyards I'd probably still be using it)

            At some point, companies will notice this. They will initially crack down on it because it's hurting their New Model sales a bit as well as seriously cutting into the much smaller 'spare parts' sales they're doing. If this follows the same trajectory as other technology, this will not work at all. The first companies to break through and embrace 3D printing this will probably see a jump in sales from people who like cheap repairs, and the rest will reconsider their stance)

            After they come to accept it, they have an additional bonus: Selling parts has zero ongoing costs for them. They can grab the CAD models for the last 20 years worth of products, convert them into a usable format, and throw them on Amazon. No inventory costs, no production runs, and therefore no point when selling parts becomes financially unviable. Every additional part printed is basically free money, so they're motivated to put up as big a back catalogue as possible. Amazon (or whoever) would charge similarly to how their cloud services work: set rates for resources and time taken, and maybe a small percentage of the profit on top of that. Everything else will go to the manufacturer. Prices will tend to be kept below the 'piracy point' of most people to maximise profit - so small parts might be going for $5 to $10. Just enough so that the convenience outweighs the trouble of going to The Printer Bay and downloading the right part number and hoping it's the right match.

            So the additional profit stream isn't going to create boundless wealth for executives, it's a consolation prize. It answers the question of 'if people are going to 3D print parts anyway, how can we maximise our benefit?'

            (Bonus point: I'd expect smaller manufacturers to jump on board first; They can appear to be customer focussed while really just taking advantage of Amazon's much bigger distribution network.)

            • (Score: 2) by carguy on Wednesday July 30 2014, @03:32PM

              by carguy (568) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 30 2014, @03:32PM (#75558)

              As 3D printing becomes more mainstream, people are going to be printing parts for their older and unsupported devices. These days they may have to dispose of them and replace the whole thing, but if you can easily buy a $20 part?

              This could be good for you and me (and maybe a high % of Soylentils?), but in the general population I don't meet very many people who are interested in repairing things. What might have been called "Yankee ingenuity" is getting pretty scarce, at least in USA.

        • (Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Wednesday July 30 2014, @04:55AM

          by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 30 2014, @04:55AM (#75380) Journal
          Ah, BTW, I reckon you have more chances to find replacement parts published by others [shapeways.com] which had [shapeways.com] the same itch as you rather than on a manufacturer site.
          --
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by yellowantphil on Wednesday July 30 2014, @02:37AM

    by yellowantphil (2125) on Wednesday July 30 2014, @02:37AM (#75356) Homepage

    Promising "an appstore for the physical world..."

    Isn't that just "a store"? Sort of the way a real-life version of a computer baseball game is just called "baseball"?

    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday July 30 2014, @03:09AM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 30 2014, @03:09AM (#75361) Journal

      Promising "an appstore for the physical world..."

      Isn't that just "a store"? Sort of the way a real-life version of a computer baseball game is just called "baseball"?

      Bad choice of an example, mate. May I kindly ask you to use... say... a car analogy?

      Because, you see, for me there's little-to-no-distinction between "computer baseball game" and a "real-life version of baseball" - if I were to watch any of them (which I don't), they'll both be rendered on an electronic display.
      That little distinction would stay in my capability to influence what happens on the screen. However, the distinction is still irrelevant: my reaction would be to switch the channel or switch off the display - giving me absolutely the same level of control over both.

      ...

      (Besides being a couch-potato, a significant population of Thylarctos plummetus [wikipedia.org] is present in my area, making baseball uninteresting
      Other valid motivations may exist in other life-styles/geographies/cultures)

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday July 30 2014, @11:54AM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 30 2014, @11:54AM (#75475)

      The true irony is that it is, in fact, a store.

      The news that isn't being talked about is they're categorizing their 3d printer stuff into a 3d printer group and then doing their legendary fulfillment thing.

      So if I need a replacement Prusa hot end, as a prime subscriber and them stocking prusa hot ends as a "prime" item, I know they are in stock, I don't have to F around with crappy vendor sites, I don't have to give paypal a cut, and I know it can be sitting on my desk with free shipping in less than 48 hours from now (or faster if I wanted to pay the bucks)

      I've bought kapton tape from them before for electronics work (long story) but I see they have kapton tape and the filament and whatever other consumables that are for 3-d printers in their new little categorization.

      Amazon is pretty good at consumer marketplaces and billing and fulfillment. Better than any other 3-d printer site out there. Its an open field. Their competition could be mouser / digikey / McMaster Carr but instead its like one dude with a linux server under his desk and a PHP shopping cart from 1998 in .eu who only accepts Dwolla for payment and takes 5 days to pack and ship your stuff. Amazon is going to absolutely own this market.

      I've daydreamed that Radio Shack no longer has a corporate purpose in life and is dying, so as a hail mary they should try something, anything, rather than just waiting for bankruptcy in a couple years. Imagine if every Radio Shack in the country rebranded and restocked as a 3-d printer store. I mean, why not? If they fail they go out of business, but they're going out of business anyway so ... That kind of thing is the only competition Amazon could possibly fear.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Wednesday July 30 2014, @04:19AM

    by opinionated_science (4031) on Wednesday July 30 2014, @04:19AM (#75374)

    so, will they print a protein stucture out? Y'know , except the hydrogens...?

  • (Score: 2) by DrMag on Wednesday July 30 2014, @03:45PM

    by DrMag (1860) on Wednesday July 30 2014, @03:45PM (#75567)

    The link in the article to Amazon's actual printing service page is broken for me; This [amazon.com] may work better for others as well.