Skip to main content

3D printing company New Matter is shutting down this month



Perhaps 2014 wasn’t the ideal time to get into the 3D printing game. After years of hype, the even the biggest names have been struggling to stay afloat. Pasadena startup New Matter is joining the growing list of companies who’ve unsuccessfully made a go at it, announcing that it will be closing up shop by the end of the month.

It’s not for lacking of trying — and the company’s MOD-t printer was met with decent reviews when it launched in 2016. In his writeup, John praised the pricing ($300 or $400, depending on where you picked one up) and ease of use, though added cautiously, “you get what you pay for.”

Initially funded on Indiegogo, the company went back to the crowdfunding well last year, this time taking to Kickstarter to pay for a Model 2. The project managed to exceed its goal in five days, but New Matter still pulled the plug. The company says it ultimately wanted to go back to the drawing board.

“We have always strived to listen closely to our customers’ feedback, and given the overall reaction to the MOD-t (2nd Gen),” New Matter wrote, “we decided that the best course of action would be to discontinue the Kickstarter campaign effective November 15, 2017, rethink our next generation offering, and return with additional updates in the coming year.”

By the holidays, the company was offering up its first-gen product for $200, which now appears like another red flag. The truth is that much of the shine has worn off consumer 3D printing, and even those companies that have found success have ultimately found it difficult or impossible to compete with low cost juggernauts like XYZ, which have simply undercut the competition.

In his announcement, New Matter CEO Steve Schell acknowledges that market difficulty was a major factor in the company’s decision to cease operations, writing, “It has become clear that our aspirations to transform the industry simple don’t fit profitably into the current market dynamics in desktop 3D printing.”

While it’s ceasing operations by end of month, the company will offer some technical support through the summer. After that, however, the machines will lose some functionality, so go forth and print like every day could be your last.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Five budget-friendly open source storage servers

Storage is essential for the enterprise: Data must be stored. Data must be retrieved. Data must be shared. Data must be secured. At the same time, storage must not consume the entirety of your IT budget. Fortunately, you can find effective solutions in the world of open source. Outside of cost effectiveness, one of the biggest benefits of these solutions is the ability to modify them to perfectly fit your needs. You can make minor changes or even roll your own storage solution based on one of these tools. If you want enterprise support and a "solution in a can" that will meet just about any enterprise storage need, you should turn to Red Hat or SUSE. Both Linux-based companies offer some of the most powerful enterprise-ready tools on the market. But if you'd rather get your hands dirty and craft something of your own—something that won't demolish your budget—these five open source tools are a great place to start. 1: ownCloud ownCloud ( Figure ...

Facebook Now Supports PGP To Send You Encrypted Emails

You can now instruct Facebook to encrypt every email it sends to you so nobody — not even the NSA — is likely to be able to read your messages anytime soon. All you have to do is import your public PGP key into your Facebook settings and you’re good to go. The problem here, of course, is that most people have no idea how public/private key email encryption works and how to even get started with it. In the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks, a number of organizations, including Google, promised to completely hide the complexities of end-to-end email encryption from regular users. Very few of these products have materialized so far, however — not for lack of trying, but because this is actually a very complex problem, both from a technical and user experience perspective. Facebook uses the well-established PGP scheme (the GNU Privacy Guard implementation of  OpenPGP, to be precise) to encrypt messages and tools lik...

Visa confirms Coinbase wasn’t at fault for overcharging users

Yesterday, we wrote that Coinbase customers were being charged multiple times for past transactions. While some speculated that the erroneous withdraws were down to a Coinbase engineering issue, Coinbase issued a statement saying it wasn’t liable for the duplicate charges. The blame, instead, rested with Visa for the way it handled a migration of merchant categories for cryptocurrencies, Coinbase said. While you can read my post yesterday for an in-depth description of what happened, the basic gist is that Visa refunded and recharged (under a different merchant category) a month of old transactions. Many users saw the recharge come through before the refund processed, making it look like they were double charged. Honestly, the issue was likely exacerbated by existing payment rails — it’s normal for refunds to take multiple days to show up on credit and debit statements. But here’s where it gets weird — this morning Visa issued a statement to some publications shifting the blam...

Microsoft allays privacy concerns of Windows 10 users

Microsoft attempts to put all rumours related to Windows 10 privacy concern to rest GettyImages Allaying concerns of Windows 10 users over privacy, Microsoft has said information is collected only to offer a better OS experience. Besides, it provides users the ability to have control over the information collected. Microsoft asserts that Windows 10 is based on these two major principles. Besides, the data collected from every system is encrypted to the company's servers and remains in secure facilities. The company says information such as device ID, device type and application crash data is collected in order to help the user obtain an even more secure OS experience. Microsoft clarifies that the data does not include the user's personal files or content. Another reason that Microsoft collects data is to offer a better personalised windows experience. This includes updates on game scores, app recommendations and the common words one types in messaging. If users are ...