It has been 6 years since I first wrote the very first sentence of the business plan behind Digital Reality and Digital Factory which led to Kraftwurx.com. Everything started just like they say, a conversation between myself and a good friend named Chad Oliver who is a senior software developer, a pen and a few napkins at Jason's Deli, just outside the headquarters of Dell Computer in Round Rock Texas turned into what you see here today.

In 2005 we were talking about jewelry and by 2006 it had morphed into something akin to many similar websites that were starting to appear such as Zazzle.com and Spreadshirt. We also watched the appearance of a company called Customatix or C-max.com begin a configurator for custom shoes years before Nike ID appeared. At one time I even tried to track the creators of C-Max down, just to talk to them.

By the spring of 2006, I had spent 8 months writing and refining a patent with the help of Don Jarrell of Digital Thinking. It was my first attempt at a patent and it took an immense amount of my time. Just weeks before attending Rapid in 2006, we filed the patent and flew to Chicago and met Terry Wohlers, Todd Grimm, and a lot of other people involved in the Rapid Prototyping industry. I left that year armed with the knowledge I needed and set out to build the worlds first Mass Customization portal for 3D printed products. I published a demo that was picked up by someone and publicized on Madeforone.com and Make Magazines Blog and a few other tech venues but it was not meant to be. By the end of 2006 my wife's mother fell ill with cancer and with a growing family, Digital Reality was pushed aside but not forgotten.

By 2008 I had turned Digital Reality into a successful Marketing, Branding and Promotional Advertising company with Web Development staff. Mass customization continued to be on my mind and we continued prosecuting our patent which was becoming extremely expensive. If you have never created a lengthy and complex patent, perhaps you might consider divorce instead!

Also in 2008, I received a phone call from Carl Dekker, President and CEO of Met-L-Flo, a successful RP bureau in Chicago. He was calling me to announce that someone had beaten me to market, a company that we won't mention by name but we are sure you will know who they are...I was devastated at first but it quickly turned to jubilation because my business model had been proven...better still, they did not get everything correct, leaving me with opportunity to learn from their mistakes and solidify our position.

Fast Forward to 2011,backed by private investment, Digital Reality has formed a new company called Kraftwurx.com. We've been quietly working on this site and system since 2006 and will be rolling out our complete capabilities in several phases over the next year. By the end of 2012 (if the world does not end), consumers will be creating their own products like never before!

We've worked very hard to build a site and system made to encourage creative people to bring their ideas to market. We've also worked hard to ensure that the system is easy to use. We hope you will get involved and take advantage of our hard work.

We envision a digital future where products are produced by people just like you and we empower Kraftwurx to enable consumers for customization and Digital Reality empowers manufacturing to deliver it!

If a truly disruptive business model that enabled 3D printing to take market share from mass manufacturing existed, what would it look like? We think it would look like www.kraftwurx.com. It has been just over 5 years since Digital Reality made some noise about 3D printing with a demo website.

3D printing is headed for mainstream production through Digital Reality, a Solidworks Corporation Research Associate since 2006. Digital Reality announces the release of Digital Factory™ and the web portal www.kraftwurx.com. Kraftwurx is the new Nexus of 3D printing, serving as the world’s first and only global Social Network, sales & e-manufacturing system that turns 3D artists, engineers and Industrial designers into entrepreneurs. Simply open an account, upload your 3D models and Kraftwurx turns your models into products and lets you sell them to the world, printed in 3D.

Digital Factory goes further with the ability to sell assemblies of products made form many materials, including kits with electronics, lights, batteries and much more. Simply upload the specifications for each part and it becomes part of the Bill of Material for any product a consumer might buy.

What sets Kraftwurx apart is the automation and the flexibility of the system. Its a very open platform that does not hide aspects of the business model. Everyone participates and everyone has a vested interest in seeing the business model succeed because it empowers small business to make products for consumers at large, not just the makers themselves.

Kraftwurx also announces a list of firsts in the 3D printing world:

• Kraftwurx is the first 3D printing company making consumer products via 3D printing with Collegiate Licensing
• Kraftwurx is the first Social Network Just for 3D printing that is truly global! Make friends, talk and share anything!
• We have over 40 materials We have over 600 bureaus in our network!
• We have the ONLY chat system that lets you actually chat in your own language with anyone worldwide! Set your default language preference and no matter what someone else types, you get to read their messages in your language!
• Alchemy lets you post ads without design experience and create teams to co-create a product into existence. Get paid for modeling or share profits down the road!
• We have a charity system where you can donate a portion of your proceeds. Real-time scaling: Adjust the size and cost of your models.
• Model Validation – Automated validation. We also offer design, scanning and other services in house. We have 9 employees. We are privately funded. Testing is done and we are now loading our collection of models…that will take some time.
• Digital Factory™ is alive and goes on sale next year. Patent Pending. It’s a Factory in a box system and it is what runs Kraftwurx e-manufacturing system.
• We have our own printer! Share your products directly on over 30 social media platforms!
• We have an API allowing you to sell on your own site! We are on Facebook & Twitter as well as Delicious, Blogger, and 30 other social media platforms.
• We produced awards for James Coney Island fast food chain & are currently working on a second corporate client in the shipping industry.
• We have had over 3,000 visitors already after launching Monday. If the trend continues, we will have 1000 visitors a day by the end of this week.
• Expect a Huge amount of simple customization available by March!

Washington State University researchers have used a 3D printer to create a bone-like material and structure that can be used in orthopedic procedures, dental work, and to deliver medicine for treating osteoporosis. Paired with actual bone, it acts as a scaffold for new bone to grow on and ultimately dissolves with no apparent ill effects.

The authors report on successful in vitro tests in the journal Dental Materials and say they're already seeing promising results with in vivo tests on rats and rabbits. It's possible that doctors will be able to custom order replacement bone tissue in a few years, says Susmita Bose, co-author and a professor in WSU's School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering.

"If a doctor has a CT scan of a defect, we can convert it to a CAD file and make the scaffold according to the defect," Bose says.

The material grows out of a four-year interdisciplinary effort involving chemistry, materials science, biology and manufacturing. A main finding of the paper is that the addition of silicon and zinc more than doubled the strength of the main material, calcium phosphate. The researchers also spent a year optimizing a commercially available ProMetal 3D printer designed to make metal objects.

The printer works by having an inkjet spray a plastic binder over a bed of powder in layers of 20 microns, about half the width of a human hair. Following a computer's directions, it creates a channeled cylinder the size of a pencil eraser.

After just a week in a medium with immature human bone cells, the scaffold was supporting a network of new bone cells.

Provided by Washington State University

My eleven year old son Kyle has been around me a lot during the creation of Digital Reality and Kraftwurx since we first started this venture in 2006. He expressed an interest in 3D and has even learned Solidworks at 9 years old!

We all know that we have a duty to educate the younger generations and Kraftwurx wants to be a part of providing education for future generations too. That is why we are announcing the launch of Kidwurx, a new section of our website run by Kyle Norman. This segment is intended to bring the ideas behind 3D printing and CAD down to the level that kids can understand. Kyle will literally be taking charge of the early part of how this part of the website will be set up. He promises to ensure that his grades won't suffer and I'll be sure to enforce it but how can you refuse someone who has shown to be just as interested in this as he is.

Look for his blog beginning next week and the roll-out of the new sections of the site soon afterward.