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from the story-not-written-by-Ernest-Hemingway dept.
It’s with a heavy heart that we must report Printrbot has announced they are ceasing operations. Founded in 2011 after a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign, the company set out to make 3D printing cheaper and easier. Their first printer was an amalgamation of printed parts and wood that at the time offered an incredible deal; when the Makerbot CupCake was selling for $750 and took 20+ hours to assemble, the Printrbot kit would only run you $500 and could be built in under an hour.
Printrbot got their foot in the door early, but the competition wasn’t far behind. The dream of Star Trek style replicators fueled massive investment, and for a while it seemed like everyone was getting into the 3D printing game. Kit built machines gave way to turn-key printers, and the prices starting coming down. Printrbot’s products evolved as well, dropping wood in favor of folded steel and pioneering impressive features like automatic bed leveling. In 2014 they released the Printbot Simple Metal, which ultimately became their flagship product and in many ways represents the high water mark for the company.
Too bad they couldn't have used them to print money.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday July 20 2018, @02:04PM (1 child)
Today it's the blockchain.
"The" blockchain, is if there is only one.
Somehow, some way, the blockchain startup founders are able to raise VC even for blockchains that has a trusted party. That's being done by lots of financial companies who require their own approval for new transactions on their chains.
That defeats the whole purpose of blockchains, that being the distributed consensus. Somewhere - Medium I think - I read of such trusted-party blockchains as being nothing other than "unwieldy databases" that to a far-poorer job of everything they do at all, than would real databases such as MariaDB.
But it's cool that your database is unwieldy, provided your venture firm keeps those hookers and that blow coming every single work day.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 20 2018, @02:22PM
3D-printing the perfect blockchain dildo.