3D producer ShapeWays lets consumers start their own stores. With ShapeWays technology almost every object can be 'printed': built up step by step. Consumers can make their own design in the ShapeWays environment, which then appears in their own ShapeWays shop with their own URL and their own logo. You can determine your own margin (on top of the production costs). When someone orders your model, ShapeWays prints it, ships it, does all the customer service needed and, of course, pays you the margin. The design rights remain with the designer at all times.Future Vision by Erwin Van Lun on this article
New companies know the absolute advantage that they haven’t built up any regular staff, no holy houses, no people fearing for their jobs. So you can look for people to create new things pretty easily. Existing companies will slim down to models like this. That won’t be easy. In the meantime, ShapeWays will go on. In time we’ll be able to see what our friends made, design models together, let it be wrapped specially and so on. This is just a beginning.