TechCrunch
Hyrel 3D Printer Can Squirt Out Self-Setting Sugru And Even Play-Doh
The Hyrel 3D printer looks like any other single-extruder additive printer. But thanks to a fairly unique nozzle called the HYREL Emulsifiable Extruder (EMO-25) you can use it to squirt out usual materials like Play-Doh, air-drying clay, and even Sugru, a self-setting rubber that dries into a solid, usable object.
The creator, Daniel Hutchison funded his project on Kickstarter and is preparing to ship the printer in the next few months. The printer actually contains a full PC and raised $150,000 on Kickstarter.
These materials are important because they can be smoothed down and, using products like Sugru, you could feasibly print rubber gaskets directly inside plastic objects using a dual-extruder system.
The extruder is also good for schools and artists who may want to produce, say, stop-motion animations using clay or reusable models. Because you can squeeze the clay back into the cartridge and squirt it out again you have a minimum of waste if the print fails. You can also shave down and move the printed clay in ways that are impossible with traditional plastics.
The printers start at $1,995 and go up to $3,000. The more expensive models include a heated build platform for ABS plastic (the ABS needs the heat to stick to the platform) as well as in-built PC that can be used to slice and print models you create.
B&N To Keep Selling Nook Tablets This Year While It Transitions To Licensing Its Ebook Brand
The Nook is on life support. Device sales are down. Digital content sales are down. Revenue is down. Things look bleak, but B&N plans to keep its current crop of tablets around at least through 2013.
Today in its 2013 year-end report, Barnes & Noble detailed the sad state of the Nook but said it will continue offering the Nook HD and Nook HD+ through the holidays. The company will also continue to support the devices in retail stores. However, things are about to change dramatically with the Nook brand.
B&N briefly detailed an upcoming licensing deal that’s designed to “significantly reduce losses in the NOOK segment by limiting risks associated with manufacturing”. According to the news release today, B&N is teaming up with a yet-to-be announced 3rd party that will manufacture the Nook Simple Touch and Nook Glowlight devices, which will then be co-branded with B&N and the 3rd party.
“Our Retail and College businesses delivered strong financial performances in fiscal year 2013,” said William Lynch, Chief Executive Officer of Barnes & Noble, said in a released statement today. “We are taking big steps to reduce the losses in the NOOK segment, as we move to a partner-centric model in tablets and reduce overhead costs. We plan to continue to innovate in the single purpose black-and-white eReader category, and the underpinning of our strategy remains the same today as it has since we first entered the digital market, which is to offer customers any digital book, magazine or newspaper, on any device.”
The Kindle’s success clearly states that consumers want e-book readers, and despite B&N’s huge retail footprint, the company’s early success in the segment didn’t translate to a long-term win. It’s clear, with a year of declining sales data, the bookseller isn’t offering a product that interests its customers.
A Year After Microsoft Bought It, Yammer Nears 8M Users, Deeper MSFT Integration… And Klout
One year to the day after Microsoft announced that it would acquire enterprise social networking tool Yammer for $1.2 billion, the pair are today publishing some updated usage numbers and news about a raft of new features to demonstrate that Yammer is on the up and up, and that Microsoft is riding the wave. This includes more subscribers, more people paying for service and much tighter Microsoft integration — but also partnerships with companies outside of Microsoft’s walls, such as a new partnership with Klout, to enhance what users can do with Yammer.
The company says that in the last year, total subscribers are up 55% and are now approaching 8 million, with usage activity — that includes messages, and photo/file exchanges — doubling in that time. Yammer says that paid networks increased by 200% over last year, although it doesn’t give an indication as to how much that translates into in terms of actual revenues or users. Recall that when Yammer was acquired, the company said that 20%, or 800,000 users, of its total subscriber base was paying for services; but at the time it didn’t break out how many networks made up that number. And in February 2013, Yammer noted 7 million users and paid user growth of 165%, adding 290 in Q4 of 2012.
“A year ago, Microsoft presented us with an amazing opportunity to accelerate our business in the areas of both product and distribution,” Yammer founder and CEO David Sacks writes in a blog post. “Today we are seeing those benefits come to fruition.”
But Yammer and Microsoft have to keep a fine balance in how they go forward. On one hand, they are trying to show that Microsoft is putting its $1.2 billion social acquisition to work — if not in specific revenue terms, at least in terms of value-add for the wider range of software products that Microsoft offers. But on the other hand, mindful that Yammer has a number of subscribers who extend beyond those using Microsoft products, it is trying to show that the company remains independent and not simply another extension of the Microsoft shop, by continuing to link up with third parties.
First to the Microsoft enhancements. The company today said that Yammer will be getting a boost in coming months with significantly more integrations with existing products. These include:
- Further integration between Yammer an email. No details yet on how this would work, and whether this is Outlook-exclusive or would extend to other platforms;
- Enhanced document collaboration. This will give users of Yammer and Office 365 more document editing capabilities. (Looks a bit like a Huddle competitor in that regard.)
- Expanded Yammer messaging and external communication. This is something of a holy grail in my book with Yammer. Will this be long-awaited Skype integration? In any case, Yammer has been sorely in need of more real-time elements and hopefully this will mean more of them.
- SharePoint search integration. Again, this is another way of using Yammer to enhance one of Microsoft’s existing products and make both more useful; although it would be great if it could be used with other platforms that were non-Microsoft-based as well.
These plans come on the back of recent integrations that have included adding the Yammer newsfeed for users of SharePoint Online and Office 365, and plans to add the new Yammer app to the Office Store to drive more users. The latter, Microsoft says, will be in place by the end of June and will let users embed Yammer group feeds into SharePoint sites.
It’s not too much of a surprise to see that for now most of the efforts for new services at Yammer are aimed at improving channels with other Microsoft products but the company continues to try to show that Yammer is doing more than just expanding on that front. To that end, the company today noted that it has doubled the number of partners in its app directory — Yammer’s smaller equivalent of Facebook’s App Center — in the last year, with developers using Yammer APIs now up by 70%.
As with those numbers around paying users, Pavan Tapadia, chief product officer for Yammer, doesn’t spell out what that growth translates to in actual figures, but today the company is highlighting one of their new, and more high-profile partners: Klout.
This integration will let Yammer users publish Klout scores and expertise on their Yammer profiles, and for those companies that choose to do it, they can also turn on an additional feature which applies Klout’s algorithm to a user’s internal activity on Yammer itself to create network-specific Klout scores.
As with Klout’s role in the wider world, it’s hard to decide whether there is really any merit to knowing about how influential a person is, but presumably if you are in a large enough work network that you don’t know certain colleagues all that well, it can be a useful bridge to collaborating more closely with them in the future.
“If you’re someone who has a lot of influence in the public social-sphere, this is a cool way to showcase your Klout score in the workplace,” writes Tapadia optimistically in a blog post. “The second aspect of integration allows Yammer admins to turn on a deeper integration with Klout to produce Yammer-specific Klout scores for employees based on their activity within their company’s Yammer network. This is a great opportunity for organizations to identify top contributors and subject matter experts based on their Yammer participation.”
Barnes & Noble Reports $118.6M Loss On Revenue Of $1.3B In Q4, Plans To Open Nook Brand To Tablet OEMs
Barnes & Noble reported its fiscal fourth quarter earnings this morning, and the financials make it clear that the company is still struggling to figure out how it fits into the larger digital reading ecosystem. All told, BN reported a quarterly net loss of $118.6 million (compared to $56.9 million from the year ago quarter) which works out to a loss of $2.11 per share on $1.3 billion in revenue.
Analysts weren’t expecting much going into this quarter (and BN’s own anemic guidance from Q3 didn’t inspire much confidence): the consensus according to Bloomberg was for the company to report a loss of $0.96 per share on $1.3 billion in revenue. They also predicted a 4% drop in annual revenue for the company, which was just about right on the money — the company reported $6.8 billion in revenue for fiscal 2013, as well as a corresponding loss of $154.8 million.
Ouch.
BN’s retail business didn’t look too hot this time around, as quarterly revenue was down 10% year-over-year to $948 million (though the company cites the strength of series like Hunger Games and Fifty Shades of Grey as inflating last year’s numbers). That may not be BN’s problem for too much longer though, as company founder Leonaro Riggio started openly opining on the notion of buying back the company’s 689 brick-and-mortar stores (not to mention bn.com) back in February. Should the transaction eventually come to pass — which is by no means a given — Barnes & Noble will effectively be left with its Nook Media business.
Meanwhile, Nook Media (which BN owns 78% of after you factor in Microsoft and Pearson’s stakes) continues to look like a real stinker this quarter. It reported a relatively scant $108 million in quarterly revenue, which represents a staggering 34% drop from the year-ago quarter.
The intensity of that dip is surprising, but not to some — some analysts have pegged the sales slump on the fact that Nook tablets lacked the productivity acumen and app access to compete with other low-cost devices. Barnes & Noble finally managed to fix that this past May by striking a deal with Google to fold Google Play Store access and a few stock Android applications like Gmail and Chrome into Nook tablets, while simultaneously trying to jump-start Nook sales by announcing slashed nook prices put in place for Fathers’ Day will stay in effect for the foreseeable future.
What is new is that Barnes and Noble is looking to open up the Nook brand to other OEMs itching to make their own tablets. The company will continue to offer its own first-party e-readers like the Simple Touch series as time goes on, but in a bid to minimize the risk inherent to churning out tablets in a crowded market, BN is leaving that work to third-party manufacturers. There’s no word yet on exactly when the company will officially kick off its so-called partnership program (though I suspect they’re already in talks with some OEMs), but it seems likely that the existing Nook HD and HD+ will be the last to bear BN’s fingerprints. Don’t expect them to disappear completely just yet though — they’ll be around at least through the holidays.
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