Listen to this article3dNinja offers the widest range of 3D printers for every possible application. 3dNinja has had the largest customer base so far ranging from consumers, hobbyists, schools to real estate agents. Below is our recent interview with Nikolai Leuveld, Co-Founder of 3dNinja:
Q: Tell us something more about the company and your products?
A: 3D Ninja has been in the 3D printing industry for quite some time now, we are the largest reseller of 3D printers in The Netherlands and we sell almost every popular desktop 3D brand. We have a team of highly dedicated 3D printer experts, a very committed IT staff but we also have 3D printer mechanics. Good service is our number one priority. We sell to companies, small and large. To agencies, governments but also to consumers.
Q: You’ve recently launched the beta version of your new search engine for 3D printable models; tell us something more?
A: Yes that is correct, the focus for this project is purely consumer based. 3D printers are getting more affordable by the month and great quality consumer printers already start as low as 300 USD, this made the consumer market explode over the last year. Unfortunately not every consumer can work with CAD / 3D model software making them rely on 3D printable models that can be found online. It’s quite hard to find quality designs because although there are a lot of libraries out there it is a lot of work to search them all. You can compare it with the beginning days of the internet before the time of the great search engines, looking for quality content was like finding a needle in a haystack. This is the reason why we started working on iFind3D, one easy to use search engine that has a index of all the 3D printable designs out there.
When we started the project about one and a half year ago the goal was to build this purely as a extra service for our own customers but things got a little out of hand from there on.
The interest for this project was huge and we started getting mails and phone calls daily, so we decided to clear a larger budget, assign more staff and from there on things got a different approach.
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Q: How does IFind3D work? What is under the hood?
A: IFind3D is finally in beta after one and a half year, the reason why this has taken so long is because the tech behind it is quite complicated. Not only does the infrastructure be able to process high numbers of data, we also needed to create multiple algorithms to make sure data is being processed the right way. For example we connect with IBM’s supercomputer ‘Watson’ via a third party integration so we make sure data process structuring is self learning. Our search algorithm uses almost 100 different variables to provide the best results to every user.
Q: What advantage does 3D Ninja have over its competitors?
A: Well, quite a few. We are the only one that offers 100% 3D printable designs, the only one that uses algorithms but we believe that we are also the only one the can easily scale without problems. 3D printing is starting to get more popular by the day and the amount of designs that are uploaded to the internet grows with the minute. You need to have some serious hardware to keep up, as well as a good and solid infrastructure.
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Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: A lot still needs to be done and that is also what this beta is for. We indexed about 60% of all 3D printable designs out there, before the end of the year our goal is to index 90% of all worldwide designs.
It will not stop there and also before the end of the year we will integrate a ton of great features to make sure we keep on top of the current market and give our users the best experience possible.
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