Engineers Build The World's First Real 3D-Printed Gun

The Liberator, for all the hoopla, was not really a gun. This 3D-printed firearm, on the other hand, is a gun. It is a copy of a 1911 made using public-domain plans and a laser sintering system that solidifies metal powder. It fires just like a real semi-automatic pistol The gun, created by Solid Concepts, is completely legal. The company has a Federal Firearms License and it's trivial to find the blueprints online. The company created a 3D model of the 1911 and then simply blasted metal powder, heating it up and creating a solid, fireable item. The finished product needed a great deal of finishing including the removal of support material and modifications to the chamber. They laser sintered the nylon grips but used off-the-shelf springs and a store-bought magazine. They have used it to fire over 50 rounds so far. “We made it to prove out metal laser sintering technology,” said VP of Marketing Scott McGowan. “We think it's a departure from the Liberator. It's not done with hobbyist printers. It's not something you're going to find in someone's garage.” McGowan expects to be able to help gunsmiths acquire difficult-to-build parts using this technology. They will only work with qualified customers and they are fully certified to manufacture weapons. The printers cost over $500,000 and McGowan noted that they are “professional engineers working with professional machines for professional clients.” “We're proving this is possible, the technology is at a place now where we can manufacture a gun with 3D Metal Printing,” wrote Kent Firestone, Vice President of Additive Manufacturing at Solid Concepts. “Now, if a qualifying customer needs a unique gun part in five days, we can deliver.” Most important, in fact, is that this is a true first. “As far as we know this is the world's first 3d-printed metal gun,” said McGowan.

Provide Commerce Acquires Mobile Gifting Startup Sincerely, Will Expand Into New Categories & Apps In 2014

Sincerely, the mobile gifting startup behind the Postagram, Ink, and Sesame apps which allow users to send everything from postcards to greeting cards to even physical gifts from their smartphones, has been acquired by Provide Commerce, the e-commerce business behind a number of big-name brands, including ProFlowers, Shari's Berries, Red Envelope, and Personal Creations, in an all-cash deal. According to Sincerely founder and CEO Matt Brezina it was a deal that “could not have been better,” where everyone made money, including Sincerely investors. The company had previously raised $5.5 million in outside funding from Spark Capital, First Round Capital, Charles River Ventures, SV Angel, and others, though only $3 million in funding had been publicly reported before now. Brezina declined to say whether this additional funding was a Series B, or when it closed, however. Following the acquisition, the entire fourteen-person Sincerely team will continue to work out of their San Francisco-based offices for Provide Commerce, and the apps will not only continue to be supported, they will also be improved upon and invested in. The team will also be doubled over the next 18 months, as development continues. Provide Commerce was interested in the company because it gives them a foothold on mobile, also at a lower price point – Sincerely's Postagram and Ink apps let users send out postcards and cards that start at 99 cents and up, while its Sesame app offers a range of gift boxes, some even under $20. Brezina tells us that under Provide Commerce, Sincerely will begin to expand to new product categories and gifts, too. And while he couldn't pre-announce any products, the company expects to have new offerings as soon as early 2014. One of those is likely to be a mobile app for ordering flowers, it seems. “Since the beginning of this company, I've wanted to make it easier to send flowers from your mobile phone, and they're the leading provider of flowers. So you can expect that's a product category we're very interested in,” says Brezina. The Sincerely suite of applications was approaching 3.5 million registered users at the time of the acquisition, and had seen 6.5 million app downloads. It had also shipped products to over 1% of American households (1.5 million unique households.) Brezina and team are very pleased with the deal's turnout, as it not only means they get to continue to work on product under the wings of a larger operation, the acquisition was a “great outcome” for all involved. “It's so rare that you find alignment between a big, acquiring company and a small company like what we're doing,” he says.

Google Glass Gets Easier Access To Calendar Info And Directions To Home And Work, Kills Long Press

As Google gears up to expand its Glass Explorer program, it also continues its regular pace of Glass software updates. This month's update (X11) isn't all that big, however, and only introduces two features - a new setup tutorial and an easier way for Android users to start a screencast from Glass. One feature that's gone, however, is the long press on the touchpad that used to take you directly to Google Search without the need to use the “ok glass, google …” command. As the Glass team notes, “it turns out that a lot of people long pressing the touchpad to activate a Google search were doing so by mistake.” So to avoid that, the X11 update turned this feature off. As for the new features, starting today, Glass users will be able to get directions to home and work by simply using a command like “ok glass, get directions to home.” Glass gets this information about you from Google Maps or Google Now, where you can input this data by hand (and if you are a Google Now user, it will also try to guess this information based on where you spend your time during the day). The second new feature allows you to quickly get a glance of your calendar details by asking something like “ok glass, google my agenda” or “ok glass, google what am I doing next week.” If you have followed along with Google's updates to Search, all of this will sound quite familiar. I wouldn't be surprised if the next few Glass updates continued this trend of bringing this kind of data – which was previously only available through the oddly named “Gmail Search Field Trial” to Glass and its repertoire of voice commands. Setting up Glass is pretty easy, but in this new version, Google decided to tweak the setup tutorial a bit. This tutorial shows all of the usual Glass features, including how to use the touchpad to swipe through card and how to connect a phone. For users who want to screencast their Glass experience to Android, the MyGlass app now features a “Start Screencast” button underneath the MyGlass notifications in Android's notifications drawer. That makes it a bit easier to start a screencast, though unless you screencast from Glass for a living, this isn't likely to set your world on fire.

To Buy Or Not To Buy? The Twitter Question

As the offering date for Twitter approached, the bankers could not seem to make up their minds on the pricing, with the offering price rising from $17-$20 barely two weeks ago to $23-$25 last week to $26 yesterday. The stock opened today, about an hour later than expected, at an eye-popping $45.10 a share, up 73 percent from the offering price. As you watch this process unfold, with a mix of wonder, greed and cynicism, the question that is begging for a response, is whether you should try to partake in this frenzy. Assuming that you were not able to buy the shares at the offering price, should you buy now? And if you did get the shares at the offering price, is it time to cash out? The answer depends upon not only what you think about the company and its prospects but also on whether you view yourself as a trader or an investor, since it is not only possible but likely, in my view, that Twitter was both underpriced and over valued at its offering price. In the pricing process, bankers gauge market mood and momentum, trying to determine the "right" price for the stock, not wanting to relive the Facebook fiasco, where the stock went into a tailspin after the offering, but also not trying to avoid the LinkedIn scenario, where the stock doubled on opening day. The preferred script for both the bankers and the current owners of the company (founders, VCs) is for the stock to have a healthy "pop" on the offering date, the former because it reduces their underwriting risk and the latter because it acts as a lead-up to their cashing out on their holdings, months later. At a 75 percent jump on the opening day, Twitter's price jump is uncomfortably close to LinkedIn territory, but the effect of the underpricing on the existing owners (founders, VCs) is mitigated by the fact that only about 12 percent of the shares were available to the public in the IPO. If you were one of the lucky (or preferred) clients who got the shares at $26/share, you have nothing to complain about, but what if you were not? You can still try to play the trading game hoping that the positive news stories from the offering will draw in investors from the sidelines, carrying the stock higher, and wait to sell just before the tide turns. What are the odds? I know that they are not good for me, since I am hopeless at sensing market mood swings or momentum shifts. The answer may be different for you, but if you do trade, I hope that your timing is impeccable and that you are not operating under any delusions of caring about value. In the valuation process, you are trying to assess the value of Twitter as a business. In making this assessment, there are three key estimates that will drive your value: Potential revenues: While Twitter generated only $543 million in revenues in the most recent 12 months of its existence, the company has two key components working in its favor. It has more than 235 million users, some more active than others, giving it a reach and visibility that is difficult to match. The second is that the company is entering an online advertising market that is growing fast, often at the expense of old-time media advertising. In 2013, the online advertising market generated $117 billion in revenue and could potentially grow to be $200 billion or larger in the next decade. Profitability: Twitter reported an operating loss of $135 million in the last year, largely because of R&D expenses incurred during the year. Assuming that Twitter is able to get its users to click on sponsored tweets and generate ad revenues, the company still has to generate profits. While we have no idea what these profit margins will look like a few years from now, Facebook, the company closest to Twitter in its user model (immense user base, focus on advertising revenues), generates a pre-tax operating profit margin of 30 percent. Investment requirements: To grow its revenues, Twitter will have to reinvest not only in R&D but also in acquisitions of promising technologies that will allow it to monetize its user base. While Twitter has generated only about $0.50 to $0.60 in revenues for every dollar of investment in the last couple of years, the average for social media companies is closer to 1.40, and that number may rise a little over time, as the companies mature. My valuation of Twitter yields a value of $18 per share and assumes that revenues will climb to about $11.5 billion in 2023 (giving Twitter about 5 percent to 5.5 percent of the online advertising market then), that the pre-tax operating margin will increase over time to 25 percent (about 5 percent lower than Facebook but about 5 percent higher than Google) and that a dollar in additional capital invested will generate $1.50 in incremental revenues. To justify the $45 per share, you would need the company to reach much higher. By my calculations, Twitter will have to generate about $32 billion in revenues in 2023, giving it, by my estimate, about 15 percent of the online advertising market in that year. If you are interested in Twitter as an investment, I think you should make your own judgments about these variables, notwithstanding your uncertainty about the future, and come up with your own estimate of value. Arguing, as some do, that there is too much uncertainty to even try to value companies like Twitter strikes me as an abdication of a fundamental responsibility of investing. I think Twitter is a good company, with the potential to be a great one, but based on my views of the company, it is not a good investment for me at $27, $35 or $45 a share. There are two potential developments that can change that conclusion. The first is if the company finds a new market to enter or an innovative way to break away from its online advertising competitors, which increases potential revenues and value. The second and more likely scenario is that the company stumbles in delivering expectations and that the same momentum investors, who bid it up, abandon it in droves, causing its price to collapse. For the moment, I have my popcorn ready and plan to watch the circus. It should be fun!

Twitter's Underwriters Stand To Reap More Than $200M Following The Company's IPO Spike

After strong demand, Twitter priced its IPO at $26 per share. Today Twitter went public, first trading at $45.10. The company is having a hell of an IPO day. But there is another group of folks who are giggling: Its underwriters. Here's Twitter's S-1 document explaining how many of its shares its underwriters can purchase: “[The] underwriters have the option to purchase up to an additional 10,500,000 shares from Twitter at the initial public offering price less the underwriting discount.” So, the underwriting banks get to buy 10.5 million shares of Twitter stock at a discount to its IPO price. Even if they were only allowed to buy the 10.5 million shares at a flat price of $26, they would stand to reap a huge sum. Let's do some math: At $26 per share, the 10.5 million shares would cost $273,000,000. At current market price of $45.89, those shares are worth $481,845,000. That's a profit of more than $200 million. And since the underwriting banks get to buy there shares for less than $26 per share, the profit they are walking away with is worth even more. This, of course, is mild pushback against the argument that Twitter's bankers will be fired for “miss-pricing” its IPO. Really? They just wrote themselves a nine-figure check, in addition to their normal underwriting fees. Hardly a bad day for Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Twitter's other banks.

Upstagram Is A Flying Raspberry Pi That Publishes Live Pictures On Instagram

What do Instagram, the Raspberry Pi and the movie “Up” have in common? When you mash all these things together, you get Upstagram, a neat hack that the Hackerloop team just unveiled. First, the team made a replica of the house in “Up” using paper and foam. It was just big enough to fit a Raspberry Pi and its camera, a battery and a 3G hotspot. The Raspberry Pi, an open source and very cheap mini-computer to tweak, experiment and try new things with, is a hacker's dream. Then, the team used about 90 helium balloons to make the house fly above Paris' landscape. While Instagram is only available on iOS and Android, they reverse-engineered the posting process to transform the Raspberry Pi into an Instagram-taking machine. Flying 300 feet (90 meters) above the ground, the little house took more than 400 photos and posted them automatically to an Instagram account. The team kept the 15 best shots and shared them on Hackerloop's account. “It's not about hacking Instagram, it's about using it to build something that we were convinced would be awesome,” Hackerloop co-founder Valentin Squirelo wrote. “Creativity is also about pushing existing tools further, in a way they weren't initially designed for.” As reverse-engineering the Instagram uploading process certainly breaks the terms of service, the team expects that its Instagram account will soon be shut down. But for now, this hack certainly looks cool. 112415-a11ccf1d-7cff-4065-8412-5dd44e8b5712-upstamontmartre-original-1383223883 112417-91993708-978b-45a3-b506-4e6b735f2e92-10405160034_379a626d46_b-original-1383223962 112418-583365d6-32b1-41cf-b5e6-af9c4df00b74-10404445774_228949f475_b-original-1383224277 112419-3655987a-479a-4c4e-aa37-0431e8ea48e5-10494484925_9684599720_b-original-1383224280 112420-d5fdde1c-afaf-4399-a34c-8f45ed2dfdfa-10404970716_c18e580c8d_b_2520_2_-original-1383224281 112421-e2a0f471-bbe7-47dc-af42-782f1445618c-10404924335_226340f3d0_b-original-1383224282 112422-151b15ff-2db2-4e4b-8e0b-3c5e97f3487f-screnshot_2520instagram_2520account-original-1383224338 112860-b21cd7cf-7ff0-431f-8147-1fc2c7c21445-sample-upstagram-4-original-1383661892

Motorola Patent Points To Electronic Neck “Tattoos” That Double As Microphones

You've got to give Motorola credit these days: it's certainly not your average smartphone player any more. The company is trying to upend the traditional notion of a smartphone with Project Ara, and behind closed doors it's building a new group devoted to designing and developing “world-class” wearable tech. Thanks to the patent process though, not all of Motorola's potential wearable projects are a secret. Engadget scrounged up one such patent earlier today. Just take a look at this recently published Motorola patent application, titled “Coupling An Electronic Skin Tattoo To A Mobile Communication Device,” and let it sink in. The idea is that an “electronic tattoo” nestled on a wearer's neck could directly capture sound “emanating from a throat” and transmit it to a smartphone (or a similar computing device) by way of a Bluetooth, Zigbee, or NFC connection, thus eliminating the awful background noise that mars many a phone call. Other potential applications could see the tattoo fitted with a display of sorts, or a galvanic skin response detector that could basically service as a lie detector. As is usual for patents, Motorola has chosen to paint a portrait of these electronic tattoos with broad strokes but in short it's a smart, if mildly kooky way to tackle an actual problem people face. And of course, there's nothing about the patent application that makes such a tattoo anthrocentric, and Motorola itself mentions the possibility of slapping these things on animals. Why? I have no idea. Now before you start freaking out at the mental visual of a tattoo artist weaving electronic components into your neck flesh, know that Motorola has a history of playing fast and loose with its interpretation of the word “tattoo.” At AllThingsD's D11 conference held earlier this year, the head of the Google subsidiary's Advanced Technology and Research Group sat onstage wearing what she referred to as an “electronic tattoo” consisting of a thin, pliable device that adheres to a user's skin and could be replaced on a weekly basis. Even though Motorola has already developed RFID tattoos and authentication tokens that can operate from the depths of your gut (with help from outside parties, anyway), you shouldn't expect this thing to hit store shelves any time soon. There's a good chance that Motorola is just cooking up concepts and patenting them to prevent any opportunistic outsiders from trying something similar. But who knows? They may actually want to turn this into an honest-to-goodness product.