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Inside 3D Printing Melbourne 2014 Preview

Inside 3D Printing Melbourne being just a week away (7-9 July), I thought I’d look into what is there to be expected. After an amazing Inside 3D Printing Seoul show, I am very excited to be heading to Melbourne. Not only because we will actually be able to communicate with the show visitors in English, but also because it will be my first trip there, I and don’t know much of the Australian 3DP scene first hand. The show is promoted to be the ‘first significant 3D printing show in Australia’ featuring 29 speakers and 25 seminar sessions. Let’s have a closer look.

Speakers

The speaker line up looks impressive, featuring a lot of local speakers and topics covering 3D printing in Australia. There are two featured keynotes. The first one is Terry Wohlers, probably the most well known 3D printing consultant in the world, who will be speaking 9am on the first day July 9^th. The second is Milan Brandt, a Professor of Advanced Manufacturing in the School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, and Research Director Advanced Manufacturing Precinct, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Milan Brandt will be speaking 9am on the second day July 10^th.

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Inside 3D Printing Seoul 2014 Recap

Inside 3D Printing Conference and Expo 2014 moved to Asia and Pacific after three shows in Berlin, New York and Sao Paolo. The year so far has been extremely successful for the organizers and expectations were high for the Korean show held in Seoul last week, June 12-13. The event turned out to be the largest Inside 3D Printing show so far in terms of exhibitors and the number of visitors. It promises very good for the other up coming shows in the region, Melbourne being the next, followed by Hong Kong and Tokyo.

Inside 3D Printing Seoul

The Inside 3D Printing Seoul was held in Korea International Exhibition Center (KINTEX), which had partnered up with Mediabistro to organize and promote the show. KINTEX, which is owned by the government, had really put effort to deliver a world class tradeshow. The whole event was incredibly well organized; the exhibition area was well set up and the size of conference banners were literally all over the place and nearby streets. The largest banners were close to half of the size of a football field.

The number of exhibitors was incredible, especially the number of local companies. Stratasys and a local entry level 3D printer manufacturer, ROKIT, had the largest expo spaces, and their booths seemed to draw most of the crowd.

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Hotel Quickly App Review

Hotel booking, especially in Thailand, can be sometimes slightly challenging. There are so many options to choose from. Not only discovering the most suitable from the endless hotel offering, but also finding where to get the best price for the chosen hotel. Usually the online hotel booking services are the places to go, as they tend to offer better prices than booking directly through the hotel website, although not always. The big players in the field of online hotel booking such as Priceline.com with Agoda and Booking.com, and Expedia with hotels.com have been dominating the scene for years, but it seems that more and more new players with different concepts are moving into the lucrative hotel booking market.

hotel booking websites

I was recently introduced to one of the new comers called Hotel Quickly. They are targeting mobile only bookings through an app, which is available for iOS, Android and BlackBerry users. The founding team behind the app is also quite convincing, including startup veterans and former Foodpanda.com executives. Hotel Quickly tapping into the fastest growing ecommerce market in Asia – smartphone users – doesn’t really come as a surprise.

Enough with the introductions; lets dig into the app review.

App overview

The concept of the Hotel Quickly app is quite simple.

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Wind Energy and the Future

I have been researching wind energy lately for a very interesting project. The more I have dug into it, the more interesting it has become. To be honest, couple weeks ago, if someone had asked anything about wind energy I wouldn’t have been able to even have a two-sided conversation. It’s amazing how much one can learn in just couple weeks with the right resource of information and by talking to right people.

Offshore wind farm

The global power markets are huge. Annual sales reach $2.2 trillion and are expected to grow up to $17 trillion by 2035. While the world is struggling with pollution problems, the clean options have become more and more popular. Now it’s another question how green they actually are, but surely they are more environmental friendly than using fossil fuels, which now constitute almost 80% of the world’s energy consumption.

Despite counting for less than 1% of global energy, the markets for wind turbines in the future may look very positive. China is the global leader in terms of annual market and cumulative wind capacity. In 2013 new wind installations were up by 24.1% from 2012, with 16.1 GW of new capacity connected to the grid, bringing annual total capacity up to 91.4GW.

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Online Guides: Behind the Scenes

When we want to learn about a new topic, we don’t go to libraries anymore to browse through dozens of books only to be left confused. Schools only cover limited subjects, and if you don’t have a lot of money taking a course on the new topic might not even be an option.

So what do we do then? Internet has become the new “educator” for literally everything. We might ask help or recommendation through a social media, but usually the leg work is carried out in Google, YouTube or Wikipedia. Of course there more targeted channels for asking from the expert such as Quora or LinkedIn groups, but the three above are still the most used as we sometimes are shy to ask help from strangers.

Why?

For Wikipedia the answer is quite obvious, being probably the most comprehensive source of information for anything. Google and YouTube, the two most popular search engines are getting smarter and smarter. That means that they can better service the query with more accurate search results. This is really the key. Before you had to try several queries and try to guess the exact keywords to lead you to happiness.

Along being the most used tools for learning, search marketers have realized that various guides and easy to understand –approaches are being received with gratitude, and often work well as link builders and traffic magnets.

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