Tag: United States

Makerbot Aims To Put A 3D Printer In Every American School

Posted on by Lab Team

3D printing has been touted (in big block letters, no less) as THE FUTURE (of everything) for some time now, and Makerbot, an American leader in the consumer 3D printing sphere is ready to make the push towards this reality by placing a Makerbot in every school in America.  The effort is being funded by a crowd funding campaign at DonorsChoose.org. Makerbot CEO Bre Pettis calls Makerbot “manufacturing education in a box,” which hints at the greater ambitions of the presently small 3D printing industry.  If Makerbot achieves its goal and places a printer in every school in America, could we be headed for a greater shift, leading to a full industrial revolution that forever changes how we think about making products?

See IPG Lab’s Makerbot in action, currently making a turkey head (’tis the season): http://instagram.com/p/gYGwQBoeYp/

Pew Research: 70% of Americans Have Broadband

Posted on by Lab Team

A new Pew Research study has been released that indicates 70% of Americans have broadband access at home. Economic factors seem to be the greatest determinants of likelihood to subscribe to broadband at home, but the study did not account for adults who opt to forgo home internet access a because they have access at work, potentially skewing broader access statistics.  After broadband subscriptions dipped in 2010, the numbers continue to rise, with the Pew statistics indicating an unsurprising all-time high broadband subscribership.

Mobile Payments To Top $1 Billion in 2013

Posted on by Lab Team

Although the mobile payments market is growing slower than projected, eMarketer nonetheless predicts that mobile payments in the US will break the $1 Billion mark this year – and then shoot up to $58 Billion by 2017. The report defines mobile payments as “transactions for goods or services made by scanning, tapping, swiping, or checking in with a mobile phone at the point o sale,” which differs from mobile commerce – defined as purchasing items on a mobile device. Those sales will hit $34 Billion this year. Mobile payments stalled this year due to the “congested landscape of competing technologies,” that will check its growth until about 2016, when eMarketer predicts a consolidation that will allow the medium to take off.

Twitter Opens Ad-Buying To All U.S. Users

Posted on by Lab Team

Twitter took a big step forward last March with its self-service ad platform that was designed for personal branding and social media marketing. And a year later, after much feedback, Twitter is ending its invite-only service and opening ad-buying up to all U.S. users. This means that anybody can now sign up and buy promoted Tweets of their own, with all the same sorts of analytics and marketing tools provided that the big advertisers and campaigns get with their promoted tweets. This doesn’t mean that you’ll see more ads on the social media service per se, but you might start to see some more unexpected promoted tweets pop up as users begin to experiment with the ad-buying service for their own individual projects.