MakerBot Hints at IoT Initiative

MakerBot CEO Jaglom indicated the company hopes to leverage its connected printer ecosystem. Image: MakerBot

Makerbot has made some difficult transitions over the past year, including refocusing on the education and professional markets, and two rounds of layoffs. Another big shift is on the way, according to this interview with MakerBot CEO Jonathan Jaglom and the New York Business Journal.

The plan appears to be to leverage the thousands of MakerBot printers linked together via Thingiverse in an "Internet of Things Meets Social Media" infrastructure. Jaglom was circumspect, but did share a broad version of the direction he hopes to take the company:

"I can’t disclose too much, but I’ll give you a direction," he told the magazine. "We have in place roughly 100,000 printers out there, the bulk of which are connected to the Internet. And you have this fantastic community, which is Thingiverse, a group of users with 1 million objects available for download. If you can find a way to tie all that together and create one experience then that is extremely powerful. The reason I even say this to you, teasing a bit about this, is there is no one out there that has anything close to that that is able to be a threat to the competitive advantage that we have at Makerbot. I think that is a space — and it’s all software by the way — where we can really gain a lot of traction."

Jaglom also indicated that this new model would enable more collaboration between users of these connected products, including sharing best practices across the network.

"If you can tie all of that together and create an experience that is seamless and easy to use, just think of the immensity, the power of that," Jaglom said.

MakerBot has also set up a new team to manage quality assurance for materials, software and hardware to address the product issues that plagued its most recent printers. The company has introduced the newest version of its Smart Extruder (which the company says can print for more than 700 hours). The original extruder was the subject of a class action lawsuit last year.

Source: New York Business Journal