Category Archives: Events

Shanghai trip and Inside 3D Printing Shanghai Event 2014

After successfully getting the Chinese Visa done at the Chinese Embassy in Bangkok, we were all set to travel to Shanghai. The first edition of Inside 3D Printing Shanghai took place over 2 days at the Shanghai Exhibition Center. The show was coined to be a large one, and I think the local partner did a good job attracting visitors to the exhibits and conference. The total number was estimated between 2500-3000 over two days.

3DPI team this time consisted Ari and myself, and our goals for this show were to get video interviews with a number of industry experts including Wim Michiels from Materialise, Harry Kleijnen from Philips, Lionel Dean from FutureFactories, Maltesh Somasekharappa from Wipro and Ian Gibson from Deakin University. The video interviews is somewhat new concept to 3DPI.TV and we are still learning to climb the ropes. Filming in a noisy tradeshow environment can be tricky and changing the location constantly adds a little extra challenge to it.

The whole trip was amazing. Cathay Pacific treated us well from Bangkok through Hong Kong to Shanghai and back. The hotel we stayed in was probably the nicest I have ever been in: Langham Xintiandi. Just simply amazing service.

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Inside 3D Printing Santa Clara 2014 Recap

We finally landed in San Francisco after two long flights. First one from Bangkok to Dubai took only 7 hours, and then another 15 hours from Dubai to San Francisco, where we continued by taxi to Santa Clara. Flights went well, luckily I got some sleep, and felt alright despite the 14 hours time difference. We stayed in Hyatt Regency Santa Clara, the hotel attached to the conference center. It was very pleasant stay in many ways (although it was slightly freakish of them to reply with commercial messages to my instagram posts about the show). The breakfast surprisingly served more than toast, bacon and eggs, and after five days I still fitted into the same pants.

The first conference day was mainly workshops, which I didn’t attend as we were quite busy putting our booth together and organizing interview schedule for 3DPI.TV. From what I heard from some of my friends who attended, the workshops were good. We managed to get two interviews done on the first day. The first one was with the couple behind Table Top Inventing: Steve and Debby Kurti. Both very nice and professional. Steve seemed to be more of the tinkerer and Debby taking care more of the admin side of things.

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Inside 3D Printing Santa Clara 2014 Preview

Inside 3D Printing travels back to the US next week to see the second show in Santa Clara Convention Center. Unfortunately I missed the show last year, but what I heard from our team that was present it was a great show. So, a lot to be expected this year as well. 3D Printing Industry is co-producing the show with the organizer MecklerMedia, and we have a team of four at present including the US based writer Scott J Grunewald, video producer Tony Hofmann, Ari and myself. We’ll have a booth at the show and will be filming video material as well as covering the show on 3dprintingindustry.com as usual.

The latest shows in Tokyo and Hong Kong were successful as always. Tokyo show attracted over 35,000 visitors in total for the cluster of tech shows bundled together. Despite being based in Asia, I do prefer the trade shows in the western countries. People in western countries are perhaps more extrovert and therefore easier to engage with. In Tokyo we did a small survey through a translator. Getting answers from the visitors seemed to be tricky even for the local translator.

The show in Santa Clara this year is coined to be quite big.

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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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