printer. okay? and instead of the ink that the printer uses, i don t even know how to use it. instead of ink that the printer squirts out, this thing that we re going to tell you about actually squirts out plastic and builds plastic components that you can make something out of. let me introduce our guest christina, tell me a little bit about our guest. there he is. there he is. he s right there. he s the founder of maker-bot and he s got one with him. hard to see there. is that something that you can pick up or is that all we are going to see of it? this is a maker bot 3-d printer and i just finished making a bunny here in the cnn offices. you can use it to printout all sorts of things from gears to alien heads to dna structures. anything you want. i have a little ring here.
kevin fall loves bouncing ideas off fellow makerhaus members to see which of his electric products resonates the most with them. reimagining the extension cord, his business has all the tools and equipment at his command so he s free to design without worrying how he s going to tackle each step. we can basically start with an idea in the morning and have a prototype at night. so we do everything in here. we ll use lathes, we ll use mills, we ll use the wood shop. and then we ll grow parts using the 3-d printers so that we can custom design just about anything we need. i think of this one as magnum p.i.s. the ceo of 3-d printing company maker bot is the ultimate maker entrepreneur success story. he and a couple of friends got to the at a hacker space they created in brooklyn, new york, and cobbled together a 3-d printer. now, the company is at the hub of the 3-d maker revolution. we got our prototype to work, we quit our jobs and started
can t do? only time will tell. the inherent benefit of 3d printing is the complexity is free of charge. what that does for creators and innovators and artists is give them complete freedom of creation without the costs, without the inventory, and the ability to create shapes that we haven t even imagined. putting it all together, it s a formula for a great deal of entrepreneurship and excitement. it is truly astounding to see what one can do with these 3d printers. there are so many opportunities for entrepreneurs to incorporate them into their business plan. terry wollers is a leading authority on rapid product development and 3d printing. great to see you, terry. tell me a little bit about the economics of it. to buy a maker bot or put something on shape ways versus
nozzle and it draws and then it lifts up a little bit and draws another picture in plastic on top of that picture, and layer by layer, it builds up the model. bree and a group of gear head friends got together and cobbled together a 3-d printer a couple of years ago, and now his brooklyn based company is at the hub of the 3d maker revolution. when we got our prototype to work, we quit our jobs. our goal was to change the game and bring 3-d printing to people, so they could put them on their desktop and actually innovate personally. and just like the replicator in star trek, maker bot s replicator is turning people into entrepreneurs. chris came up with an idea that makes the square, a device that allows you to accept credit cards, work better.
we made this contraption that goes between the scare and your ipad and makes it more stable. i had a proper prototype made and showed it around. it s a big hit, people need it, people want it. the next question is where do i have this made? i go to china, i look at injection molding. i found the best case scenario is about $4,000 to $6,000 to have molds made and they wanted to charge me 30 cents a piece. he could have gone the traditional route of making tooling which is taking a couple months to get up and running, but instead he got a maker bot. he manufactures them on his desk at home. people order them on his website and he ships them out. i got a tool instead of a die, and that tool makes all sorts of things. before six months ago, i had