applications for delivery we're going to see first. some of our early customers are researchers at mit who have a grant to demonstrate the delivery of vaccines and medicines and areas of africa and southeast asia where the place you're delivering to is a known quantity and the place you're leaving is a known quantity and the case is a life-saving scenario so there's a high motivation to make sure this happens. >> it's working with auto pilots, knowing your weight, you can't have that as a variable. it complicates the auto pilot. >> you mentioned the social good s aspect of drones. i would be interested to hear more about those examples of where drones are doing social good. >> given that we're building a platform so we're focused not on a single application but all at the same time broadly on a lot

of adaptations. we took a wall and started writing all over the different things on the wall we thought drones were going to be used for. we came up with a lot of the common commercial ones we talked about here. then we also kind of had a section of the wall where we wanted to come up with some of the things that we hoped and we wanted to see drones really used for. and aerial delivery of medicines. and those are two examples that we have been involved in since. >> any other -- >> one of the interesting requests we got early days, walmart found us and they asked us if this is something they publicly talk about. they do, they use satellite imagery to figure out how many people go to the stores. but they want to take a step further and find out how many

people go to the stores based on their commercials on tv. so being able to map that and correlate that based on -- i did this ad campaign and 30 people showed up at the store. globally and regionally, it's huge. >> all the manufacturing plants in china where they can tell if they are manufacturing a new one because. the truck is going in and out. they are selling this data to different people. >> we have got like five minutes before q&a. let's talk about the business opportunity where the money is. i have seen predictions by someone who is actually in the audience tonight around the drone market by 2025 driving

almost $100 billion of economic value saying in a couple years there are going to be 10,000 drones. i was wondering why the faa is coming out with a number that's quite so low. but where is the value today? how is it going to evolve over time. there's money in hardware today. >> so it starts with hardware and quickly becomes data, services, so right now they are a a way to get sensors. what you do with them is a big opportunity. we think that we make our money from hardware. we're a software company. we're happy to have other people make the hardware. nobody cares about the drone. they care about what it can do and whether that's video or still or pure data. like everything else in the valley, it turns to a cloud source.

>> going back to what chris said, what these guys are doing is enable iing the public to so of what uber did for anybody to be a driver, they are doing the same thing. you can be a real estate agent and have a drone and fly services to people that you couldn't do before. you can be a search and rescue person with the drone and utilize the drones to find people with the data and all of that. the amount of things that are going to show up in the next three to five years are going to be unimaginable today. >> so the value will accrue to services, data, it won't accrue to the hardware space? >> satellites are a presset. for this. a climate corporation said, hey, we'll take the data and sell to farmers. and so to their credit, they wept back and asked the farmers what do they want.

we got this variability in our crops. they turned it into analysis and allowed them to generate better crop insurance and became an insurance company and sold for a billion dollars to monsanto. >> i can't wait until the day when drones are boring. i've been using these every day for a number of years and i still get excited because they fly, but it's just a tool. it's just the thing that can get the camera or a sensor somewhere and you see that in most people who use these things a lot. and it changes a little bit. if you're a sport flier and fly fast, the technology is change fast enough so you're always interested in what's coming out. i'm interested in flying longer, flying more safely and getting better picture out of it. i don't think about the other

features of the drone. >> you see that with journalists t too. >> this is about robotics in general. ro the moment it works, it's a dishwasher. they just do a job. i'd love to take the word robotics out of our company name. and it's just like -- who cares how it flies. . it flies. discuss. >> our perspective, and i think chris mentioned earlier, the cost of the hardware is coming down every so many months. we have the viewpoint that just consider the cost of the hardware free. if all the hardware were free tomorrow. where is the value. the value is in the software. and software specifically that requires fewer people on the ground to operate the aircraft. that software that enables you to operate them in a fully atom

mouse way. software that has the risks with the technology. software that helps you be compliant with whatever the regulations are as they are coming out and what the insurance requirements are. so really software and then the purpose of all the software, the big giant multinational companies who are interested in using drones. they are not interested in using drones at all. they are interested in the data that they can collect by using drones. drones is just one type of data collection mechanism. they already have some way to get the data. they are doing it from the ground where it's intensive, dangerous, overly costly or time intensive to do so where any of the things can be decreased during the air. >> let's have some q&a. >> two questions, first, is

there any definitive website or publication or something where drone people go periodly. so if somebody wanted to issue an rfp for a particular drone, there's a new drone company every week so they wouldn't know who to send it to, that's the first question. second, how will the new faa rules get made? is there going to be a prosed rule making and what's going to prevent the bozo factor. for example, having a two-pound limit on drones to me is kind of dumb because you could get killed by one-pound drone falling out of the sky. so what would make sense to me is kind of the harm factor. what is the terminal velocity divided by hardness. a 20-pound styrofoam drone would do less harm. >> that's how france looked at

the regulations. they have jewels of energy that they can have at any point in time. i think one of the biggest problems in the united states actually is that congress mandated that the faa come out with regulations and said one of the dividing points is 55 pounds. it's unfortunate. they should have said to the faa you come up with regulations that you think are appropriate and the faa would have likely looked at this problem and said 55 pounds does not make sense as a dividing line. it's a certain number of joules of kinetic energy. other countries like france, they have dividing lines at much lower weight classes. >> the way to think about it is is really there's the territory and the unmanned, the space where they don't fly. above 1,000 feet, what you're worried about is plane to plane collisions. what would take down a jet liner? 55 pounds would take down.

2 pounds, that's bird sized. but you kind of say, if it jet engine ingested this, would that be a terrible thing? that should be the limit. below 1,000 feet, now you're talking about trees and telephone lines and children and that kind of stuff. there you're talking about personal safety and i don't want 2 pounds landing on my head. >> the other thing that exists at lower altitudes and 1,000 feet is manned helicopter flights including search and rescue, police, as well as life flight flights. they are almost always below 1,000 feet. they are more efficient the closer to the ground they fly. especially in agriculture, crop dusting, within the last two years, there's been multiple incidents of small unmanned aircraft colliding with crop duster aircraft. the 2 to 4-pound aircraft is a large obstacle to hit at 70 miles an hour in a plane that only weighs 1,000 pounds.

>> the question is what is the right sand box? 83 feet happens to be a number arbitrarily in the law. 83 feet was some chicken farmer back in world war ii decided that airplanes below 80 feet were scaring his chickens. so you just tell me what the number is. 6 ounces, 83 feet, whatever. we can innovate around that. >> there's a committee -- >> the question was how are the rules going to get made? >> part of the process is there's a subcommittee 228 in which there's both people from the faa as well as several industry companies involved in coming up with part of the process and proposed rules later this year. the faa is supposed to actually release with their proposal for the rules will be which won't take effect until next year.

that's sfr smaller unmanned aircraft. >> the other question is how did you keep up to date? is there -- what's the forum that you're all -- that once you go through. >> which is tasked with creating the act. so once rules are in place, what are the standards, your hardware and your software have to comply with in order to be used? >> should we answer the next question? >> that's where i go. he collects a lot of break news about this space. and then unfortunately in the consumer space if you're interested in hobby flying, you have to go to the forums. they are vnot very friendly. >> there's a couple of where the head of the faa talks about the

challenges of setting up the law. one of the biggest challenges in this is we have a lot of relationships with the faa as well is working with law enforcement. working with cities. how are they going to enforce these laws. and it just becomes extremely expensive if you start thinking about having these guys flying around and police having to be responsible for enforcing these things. you'll see cords filled up with people claiming they didn't break the laws and have no proof. it's definitely a a big challenge on that end. we are tackling the private space area where a lot of these companies we're working with is having insurance for things falling off the sky. so they are massive companies. they are sort of having -- they are proactive in working with

the faa a plan of attack with them rather than trying to circumvent them. >> great, next question please. >> i'm eric cline. chris, you made a a great comment which is we're digiti digitizing the world. and my question to the panel is about privacy and ownership, which is what happens when i digitized my neighbor or what happens when i digitize my competitors or valuable data. how do you look at that going forward? >> i get this question a lot. the first thing is that a lot of people just are not aware of what the faa regulars already are. flying over your neighbor's backyard is illegal. it's banned by faa regulation, whether it's a law or not isn't a matter of debate. you can't fly over populated areas. so anybody who is flying over your backyard is essentially in faa violation subject to a cease and desist. privacy aside, and privacy in the united states is fragmented

because it's based on a community standard, which varies from region to e region, so we have 80 city and town legislative processes right now. and privacy is also a moving target thanks to traffic cameras and facebook. so i think that at least in the united states where e we don't have a monolithic privacy rule, it's going to be sofled more on safety purposes rather than privacy. we don't want that flying over our backyard whether it's taking pictures or not. >> any other comments? >> i would just say there's a lot of existing tort law in the space as well around privacy. in many cases flying over your neighbor's yard and taking pictures is more of a civil case than it's going to be a criminal case or a case where the faa needs to be involved at all. >> a lot of these people don't know whatter they are yet and don't know what kind of cameras

they carry. it's really not the case. two weeks ago, a guy was attacked by a woman on a public beach because he was flying one. he caught it on video. and the complaint was that it was vertical video. and he posted the footage he got, which is very high level. if you're looking at the grand canyon, that's the kind of shot you get. she didn't understand. she chose to attack him for it instead. >> also one of the things people don't think about until they see them is you can put your camera phone and hold it over the fence and take a picture and they have no idea. you fly one of these buzzing thin, they totally know.

>> if i made my business. out of operating a crane camera or doing helicopter shots for mov movies, i would be looking at this as rather threatening. >> they are looking at this as a tool. it's also something that's going to increase the total market size. so companies who are doing existing power line inspections by a manned helicopter are actually very excited about adopting this technology so they can actually do some of the miles of inspection of power line that maybe are not economic to do today via manned helicopter with drones. . >> the whole space gets a lot bigger. you have these existing players doing perhaps something the old way. there might be a good. reason for putting a helicopter in the air. they have already been using

these. when you see aerial shots, chances are they are taken with a drone or something. they have been under the radar because it's not allowed. but now that's starting to change. we're seeing conversations between hollywood and the faa and some exceptions to the rules. >> unlike most robotics which we think of as replacing jobs, these create jobs. it's hard to get cameras in the sky. you train pilots, et cetera. so the guys are largely empty. it's not like these things are replacing pilots. these are doing jobs that are not being done at all. >> we were working with the university and we went to one of their u farms. we were introduced to the farmer and he did not like us at all. he looked at us like, ugh. and the professor introduced us,

look, we want to try this new technology. this is going to help us automate the process of agriculture. he was completely u opposed to using this. he's like, i walk my farms. i don't use these tools. and the funny thing that we sort of just understood the whole process. we went ahead and flew the drone around, got a lot of imagery. we were using these things so see what the drone is is seeing. and we invited him to fly with us. he refused to do it. we had one last battery. do you want to try them on? he finally agreed. he said, all right, i'll put them on. he put them on and he's like, can you fly to the left a little bit? can you fly to the right? can you go forward a little bit? so that was beautiful. you're never going to get -- you always need someone to analyze the data. that's what he was doing. he no longer thooz walk, but he

can analyze the data using these tools. >> next question. >> hello here. i have heard about facebook and stuff like that. they want to provide internet signal to everywhere to remote places. what's the biggest challenge you see here for facebook internet with drones. >> one of the big challenges is flying at such a high altitude. the way they are proposing doing this is flying at 70,000 feet. the benefit of flying at 70,000 feet is the controlled air space ends at 60,000 feet. the challenging part is getting up to 70,000 feet and operate where there's little air and where you need an incredibly light aircraft, which is in most cases, not incredibly sturdy, but you have to fly through all

t the other layers of air space to get there. that's the altitude that's nearing space so you actually have to harden your electronics and your software to deal with things like radiation. >> you were talking about the peace dividend extending the fundamental technology. this is similar to the technology. >> are we competing with satellites? between the musks and the planet labs and the we saw this before. 15 years ago it was satellite phones versus cell phones. you put 64 satellites out there and cover the world. why would you put cell phone towers every three miles? that's crazy. it's so expensive. we saw how that ended up.

it turned out the higher band with, the resolution of the network beat the reach of the satellite network. right now, these things have 100 times resolution better than satellites and they are under the clouds and they are free. the dispatch you can get any time access to the skies. the getting cheaper. and so i think this is going to be one of the. epic battles. >> you get the system with these now with technologies. >> that's correct. one thing i want to answer his question about facebook. getting social networks interested in flying things is phenomenal. it helps all of us. free robotics helps all of us. it helped me. it helps everybody.

i think a lot of the stories out there specifically on that technology, i don't think none of it has been tested necessarily. but at least we're thinking big. and i think that's huge. going back to what chris said, taking satellite companies, i think that's going to happen. it's becoming easier and easier, flying under the clouds. it's going to happen. >> whether analyzing a field or photographery, what kinds of interactions to do you see drones with nature? a bird landing on the drone or maybe colliding with it. tell us about your experiences that are interesting. >> i'm smiling because i wrote an article that talked aboutx>ç

there are a lot of rules against these things. so bird strikes are a factor. this goes back to safety. if you can design these things so they are resistant to be struck by something, accidents can happen.

>> regarding birds in particular, the continuer is not a problem but the airplanes are perceived as intrusions into territorial space by the birds of prey. so hawks often attack planes. and i can tell you the hawks win. . . >> they usually flying a away from these things. some elephants have been known to be afraid because they sound like bees and elephants don't like bees. you have to see how it might respond. but mostly it's looking at where you're flying to determine whether you should be flying there. that's the most important thing. >> one interesting thing related to birds, we had a big company come to us asking when we were saying we were about data and multiple companies came to us, which makes me believe this is going to be massive space.

this company basically wanted to hire us to sway birds away from these, what do you call it, turbines. the contract and the deal was attractive enough for us to say, you know, let's try it out. we did a test. it's extremely challenging. you try to keep birds away from the turbines. and birds get used to you. they get scared first, but they get used to you. it's sort of as we put more things in the air, birds are going to get used to these things flying around. >> so california condor is an endangered species. they have been attracted north by ranches, by cows. but their natural territory is down in baja. so people were in charge of the

zoo and others in charge of helping with conservation wants to encourage them to move down south. so what they do is drop these cow carcuses down south. how do you tell a condor there's a dead cow ten miles away. these birds look for these circling columns of other birds. how do you ensure -- you don't have a lot of time. you drop a dead cow, you want to get a circle of birds going. the answer is a drone. you get a drone to circle l over a dead cow. from a distance it looks like another bird of prey. and they keep doing it every ten miles all the way down to baja. >> wow, that was a good question, thank you. next question please. >> awlqhi, over here. we have been talking a lot about

drones as flying objects in terms of pound to pound, but as you said, chris, they could become like dust. so i'm wondering about how you are interacting with your clients and thinking about perhaps the drone is in our center piece tonight and able to view and listen to our conversation. while privacy you mentioned was kind of on the side, i don't think in those contexts that's really the case. how are you thinking about the evolution of drones in terms o of embedded sensors into everyday experience because humans do not have the capacity perhaps to sense that there's a sensor. >> it may be more obvious now

because you have to take it out. we're going to have to catch up. this will catch up to the phone at some point. but these are getting more and more interesting. we have only gone in one direction historically. i don't know if that can sustain itself forever. >> people are building drones. the boats that fly around. they navigate on the water. you're going to see a lot of innovation beyond flying things. the flying things get center stage and the most attention. there's innovation in robotics everywhere. so industries they are looking for automation, remove human

from dangerous places. is so that's going beyond just flying things. >> there's got to be a privacy discussion. it can move in space and record. we have o to think about privacy as a fundamental issue. no matter what tool you use, you have still violated their privacy. i would love to give a discussion of drones and treat them just as sensors and make policy around the entire class. >> great, next question. >> this question is in response to jonathan's statement about hardware becoming free. i think in the course of technology in the recent years is software has become free. probably about every new service i enroll in today is with free software. you see maybe not so concerned about the trend and i was

curious how that mentality works and the business model works around that. >> certainly a lot of web-based software begins as free. it's definitely the case that a lot of people, especially large enterprises end up paying for a lot of that software. i know i personally pay for software as well as our company p pays for a lot of software. >> some of the scenarios where you're using multiple drones, driving significant value. >> i think the drone industry in its date today is having a lot of corollaries to the computer industry. it's certainly the case that people started by building a lot of hardware building it in their garage where what you bought was

a big brick of hardware. then there was the emergence of the personal computer where initially you're buying hardware and the emergence of operating systems, which e we all saw dos and windows become the platform of choice for a number of decades and software moved into the web and then i think we began to see eventually a model that was a lot more around software that's free, but data that's paid for. so i wouldn't be surprised at all if we see a similar progression in where a lot of the value is in this space as well. >> i agree. so our model is we give away the bits and sell the atoms. we give away all the source. we happen to make money by standpointing the software and hardware. we get our share. i agree. ultimately the data is going to

be where the value lies and the services around that data. >> you see the services for free. they are not free. the product is you and you're paying in a different currency. so the data is what is important and that's why it's free. there are consumables in all of this stuff aso i think all of te other stuff may be free, but bat raies tough replace and they are not going to be free. >> next question. >> hi, so eric you mentioned a few times that the drone is just a tool. so we have heard how it's a cool to collect data and stuff. i'm curious about specifically in the world of art, whether it be the next blue planet, what is it that the scinemaing to fer will be able to do that they have never been able to do in the past ignoring legality and

privacy? >> the create thing about creative arenas is it's really up to the people that are out there with the tools. it's whatever they can dream up, they can do. we really think about these as cameras you can arbitrarily position. so it's mostly the low altitude stuff. anything that's close to the ground that's beyond reach is new territory. and what we're seeing now is a mad rush for people to collect as much of that footage as possible because it's all new. the first video i had go viral was a video of surfers. no one had filmed surfers from 15 feet up before and tracked them as they were going down waves. it's not a great video because it was done a year ago, but it captured the imagination of a lot of people. so it's really cameras that can

stay in one place, hover precisely at low altitude that create opportunities. there's significant challenges. they make noise. they are big, they have the possibility of crashing and you don't want the damage of fraudulence. so there are challenges, but if you go -- if you just do a youtube search on drone videos, you'll find every kind of low altitude imagery imaginable. some of it is incredibly creative. a lot of it is actually people having fun in the backyard. it's the whole spectrum. >> it's interesting. if you look at the rise of gopro being used professionally, one of the things that's amazing is for gopro is it's disposable. when will drones be considered disposal? >> this costs less than the high end gopro.

well, you have to add a goepro to it. i think of them as being tools that are disposal. if you're working in imagery, you have spent a lot of money on time and gear and travel. these are relatively inexpensive compared to the other costs. the thing that i'm worried about when you talk about them being disposal is littering. you don't want to really consider them to be dispoez sal. if you go to some national parks, you'll find phantom propeller parts because everyone has tried to fly through it. you want to think about these things. batteries can catch fire. there's potential for bad things to happen. one of the things we've been working on with the scientific thing is disposal drones where the airplanes is made out of corn-based foam. they send 100 out and none come

back, but the data comes back. they are measuring the temperature. of pools. what happens when they don't have to come back, it doubles the range. they land in the water, the foam melts. the very small number of metal bits sink to the bottom. the batteries are a slight issue. but the foam, we have solved the foam. just one last thought on the creative elements. this is the golden age. in our pacts, we have the most extraordinary cameras and software and standard based on youtube that we have the ability to record our own lives in sinmatic quality. this is just one more of those tools. if you watch espn or an nfl game, you get these cameras on wires and incredible aerial shots. why shouldn't your kids soccer game be recorded with the same fidelity? now you can. >> time for one more question.

>> regarding drones for delivering goods and looking ahead when we're going to have hundreds of drones flying, how do you consider it a problem of the air traffic control? it's going to be private or public agency? >> we're working to explore options of building out what is considered an air traffic management system. specifically for small uavs for this futuristic application of aerial delivery. i think some of the key elements of that is connectivity, interpret connectivity with the drones themselves so they can all be essentially relaying in realtime where they are positioned and coordinate in a way like the robots are all

communicating their locations with each other in realtimes so what looks like a near miss between two robots is a well-orchestrated system by which the two could have never hit each other even if one of them had lost communication. >> basically it's a transponder where aircraft carry this thing and appear at the air traffic control. it doesn't have to be a physical device. since we already have a link, it can be a virtual signal by which the aircraft senses its position and broadcasts that the faa may run. our vehicles can already report their positions. >> we have cards that have registration and they are tracked by cameras in every corner and police and

everything. i think early days, i was working on this thing called air highway. and we basically took the initiative to figure out how they can benefit with these things flying around. we created a structure to focus on how the city benefits and from registration, from toll payments, basically tracking every single move so that the cities also benefit from these things flying around. then then we layer on top of that what the technology would be to lay out this sort of -- it was a very ambitious project. sort of like 15 years from now. that's why i never did it. >> i want to say thank you to our speakers so much for being so sharing with your perspectives. it's really appreciated.

>> your guidance preand during this conversation, you did a wonderful job. we have a small gift for you. it is the speaker t-shirt of the club. please wear that in good health. the video of the program should be available by tomorrow or next day on our youtube channel. and you have been a wonderful audience as usual. thank you so much. hope to e see you next week. good night.

wednesday night, c-span 3 in prime time features events from the new york ideas festival. we'll have a panel on efforts to include more minorities in the technology industry and the importance of mentoring. that's 8:00 p.m. eastern here on c-span 3. wednesday the first statewide broadcast of the debate between the candidates for the minnesota governor's seat. markdayton faces challenger jeff johnson and independent hannah nick let. live coverage at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. you can see other debates we have covered this campaign season on our website at c-span.org. here's a look at the candidates for oregon's governor seat.

let's remember oregon was the first state to institute minimum wage. so this has been a core value of oregon for o over a century. i believe the minimum wage should be higher. i don't think it should be $a 15 but it could be $11 or so. raise i raising the minimum wage by itself doesn't solve the problem. there's a cliff where your income goes up and daycare start to fall off. you move from $9 to $13, you have less money in your pocket. so moving up the minimum wage is very important. no one can live on the minimum wage today. many require social services to support them. we have to address the income cliff so work actually pays. with you get a minimum wage increase, you actually end up with more money in your pocket. that ought to be our objective.

giving people the ability to take care of their families. >> in 2015, $9.25 an hour. should it be higher or stay the same? >> focusing on the minimum wage, it's important to know that oregon has the second highest in the country and the index with inflation, which is something that other states do not have. we need to focus on the fact that minimum wage is supposed to be an entry wage. just looking at how we're going to be able to raise the minimum wage, we need more jobs, family wage paying jobs in our state. and that requires us to focus on those things, the barriers that revent us from having good jobs in oregon. i want us to expand our gross domestic product because when there's greater demand for services, that creates more desire for those products and that creates jobs. minimum wage is an entry level wage. we need to provide more jobs to

allow people to raise their families and pay their mortgages and have a future here in oregon. >> 30 seconds to respond to that. >> just growing the economy doesn't help people at the bottom. we have the second fastest growing and most of those jobs are flat out on the bottom. people are trapped with no way up and no way out. no one can live on the minimum wage. you try to take care of a family and it is impossible to do. if we care about each other and the future, we will pay people in this state a wage that allows them to take care of themselves and their families. >> governor, thank you. representative richardson, i want to ask a quick clarification on that question. in 2015, ts minimum wage will be $9.25 an hour. you talked about that being an entry level wage. do dwrou think it should be higher or stay the same in 2015? >> i think minimum wage should probably stay with the same program that we have now because it is indexed. we need to not focus on minimum

wage but focus on people and that takes a vibrant economy. our unemployment has been higher than the national average for 18 years. >> c-span's student cam competition is underway. this nationwide e competition for middle and high school students will award 150 prizes totaling $100,000. create a documentary on the topic the three branches and you. videos need to include c-span programming and must be submitted by january 20th, 2015. go to studentcam.org for more information. grab a camera and get started today. last week ups announced the expansion of its 3-d printing services citing demand by small businesses. next the house small business committee hearing on commercial 3-d printing use. this is an hour and 15 minutes.

>> i'll go ahead and call the hearing to order. ranking member will be delayed for just a little bit. but we also have a vote o coming up at any moment, which will delay the hearing slightly, which i apologize for that. we never know when they are going to schedule votes. unfrptly it will be in the middle of our hearing. we'll go ahead and get started and see how far we can get before they do call that vote. 3-d printing is a process of creating objects from a digital model. typically through the material layer upon layer until an object is formed. we're here to discuss how it's spreading innovation all across this country. technology has been around since the 1980s, it's been used by large companies for rapid proto typing. they have become more affordable

opening the door for smaller businesses to begin benefit iti from the technology. for instance some models are now available for under $1,500 and prices continue to go down. small businesses and entrepreneurs are using 3-d printers in a variety of ways. it has the ability to save time and cost, make highly accurate parts that assist in product production that are sold directly to end users. 3-d printing has become a critical kpoecomponent of many businesses. while a number of entrepreneurs and innovators are using it to print models that they intend to manufacture with traditional methods, others are using it to create products from start to finish. sometimes that can be done there in the garage. the 3-d printers continue to become more affordable and advanced, a a number of small

businesses that began as household manufacturers is likely to skyrocket. while some capitalize on new technologies, others are cautious about this technology. as congress and other regulatory bodies consider policies applicable to other technological advances, it's important to not be hasty and don't restrict the ability of small businesses, entrepreneurs and other innovators to grow our economy. we're frpt to have with us a group of makers and users of the technology that include in their development of products. i like forward to hearing from your insights on how small businesses are using this technology to grow and obviously create jobs, which is what this committee is all about. so we'll move right on into our witnesses. our first witness is the founder and ceo of for -- prior to

founding the company, he was product manager at premier systems, which is an information technology resaler and consulting organization. he was named entrepreneur magazine's 2013 sbrentrepreneur the year. welcome to the committee and look forward to hearing your testimony. >> chairman graves, ranking member, and members of the committee, i'm patrick o'neil. i invent ed the clip-on lens fo the iphone. i'm grateful for the opportunity to speak with you on the use of 3-d printing and how it's helped a small business to go from kitchen start up to selling in every apple store worldwide. i have spent my career in the technology industry. i hold over 30 patents and 3-d printing has enabled us to produce at a rapid pace. it's kept jobs in america.

in creating this it product, i wanted to give the ability to people the aublt to use the iphone to capture photos. the design was inspired by the philosophies of steve jobs, simple designs. since the start we employed this simple design philosophy.qkyló % at the beginning when the design studio was in my kitchen, we used a 3-d printing company. i would ask myself, would steve jobs think this product was good enough? the answer would be no and we would keep refining until we felt the result would meet the standards. after a year of development, we launched the product through the platform in may of 2011. they received funding within four weeks and achieved almost five times our funding goal. since our start three years ago, we moved three times the larger offices and now employ more than

50 people in california including seven full-time designers. today it's considered the leader in mobile photography products. they are sold in 90 countries. it's attracted a legion of passionate users. i was also fortunate enough to be named entrepreneur of the year by entrepreneur entrepreneur of the year. i was able to innovate quickly. design in 3-d printing are still the core of our development. in just six months we enhanced tools thanks to 3-d print ppg we have invested more than $50,000 in 3-d printing. we also have models of rumored devices. so lenses can be designed kwekly each time apple releases new version. we sketch an idea in the morning, model it in the afternoon. fast turn around is key for

companies in this space. we will have dated an iphone version within days. i can't i math ip doing this without our own 3-d printer. this is the process of developing our own products. this is brain storming concept communication. we print models on the 3-d printer. next evaluate prototype for and aesthetics. changes are made if needed and reprinted. if prototype is approved, we move forward to mass production. mobile device market changes so quickly. to stay competitive we use the print printer everyday for new ideas. we can now develop products in a week or two without 3-d printing and as apple launches products there are market opportunities p. this could result in millions of dollars of sales and perhaps even failure. small and midsize companies leak ours need the ability to compete

on the world stage. especially in rapidly changing industries like consumer technology. as 3-d printing evolves, we like to use it for bridge manufacturing and use marketing faster. we continue to think differently and are not afraid to try new things. we only build products if we can innovate. 3-d allows risks because it shrinks opportunity cost. if they are unsuccessful we can quickly move on to try something else. our successes come from our passion and ability to take risks and blaze trails. as congress considers policies, it is important tone surae entrepreneurs are using technology in innovative ways. i'm honored to be here today. thank you to this committee. >> thank you. our next witness is executive vice president of public affairs

for at global leading manufacturer of 3-d printers. mr. cobb served in government relations and global marketing and serves as the company's spokesperson. he is also the manager of the 3-d printing business of stratises. welcome to the committee. >> thank you. chairman, ranking member, and committee members. thank you for the opportunity to tell you about 3-d printing and how our company is helping small businesses grow and thrive in this economy. stratis says a member of the national association of manufacturers and i'm honored to testify on behalf of the organization. as the nation's largest manufacturing and trade association the name represent 12,000 small and large

manufacturers in every industrial sector in every state. i'm proud to say that 3-d printing and stratises are part of this innovative american industry. you may be asking, what is 3-d printing and why i do care about it? simply put, 3-d printing turns prints into tangible objects within a matter of hours. it shakes materials, including plastics no other objects. i brought some later for questions.

>> today 3-d printers are not only used for prototypes, they are used for low manufacturing, but also for interior components of aircrafts. 3-d printing is also found in the classroom. in fact, since 2002, nearly one quarter of stratises business has been in education. by helping students learn design,er with helping build a strong hiring coal for businesses in america. that brings up a point. 3-d will not replace traditional manufacturing process. it'll serve as another tool in a tool box for manufacturers to deliver products to market in efficient and customized ways. stratis was started in 1988 and

has been growing ever since. in 2005 we started a separate business unit called red eye which is a service that can produce 3-d printed parts for those who don't own a 3-d printer. we also acquired solid scape of merrimack, new hampshire, which helps jewelry designers and dental markets adopt 3-d solutions. last year we merged with brooklyn based maker bot, a 3-d printing company whose user friendly products are designed for prosumers and entrepreneurs with basic technical skills. the growth of our business has helped others as well. when magician chris miles was performing at events with his band, he used a popular credit card reader to process payments when he sold his cds. the credit card reader plugged into his laptop but he found that the reader tended to swivel or spin when it was used instead of remaining stable. that made it sometimes difficult to use.

borrowing from his children's lego pieces, chris built an accessory that kept the card stable. with the successful design, chris wanted to bring his new innovation to market. it would have been costly and inefficient using traditional production methods, so instead he invested in a consumer level 3-d printer which is literally become a factory in his desk enabled him to produce his invention from home for a couple thousand dollars and sell thousands of them. we take pride in stories like this. to us they demonstrate we are not just a business of producing 3-d printing machines. we are also helping empower entrepreneurs by bringing manufacturing into their homes and workspaces. our presence here today show that is the interest in 3-d printing is strong and the future is infinite. our industry is experiencing rapid growth. it is giving domestic manufacturing a new competitive edge in this global economy. the best thing washington can do is to encourage further growth

in investment. as president obama noted in his recent speech touting 3-d printing hubs, if you want to attract more good manufacturing jobs, you need to be on the cutting edge. our company could not agree more. i'd like to thank the committee for holding this hearing and i'd be happy to answer any questions you might have. >> thank you, mr. cobb. our next witness is peter weijmarshausen founder and ceo of shapeaways, the world's leading 3-d printing marketplace and community. prior to shapeaways, peter was the chief technology officer at sanjen which he and his team developed satellite broadcast modems. he's director of engineering at ermiska where he's responsible for delivering a business broadband service via satellite. he was born and raised in the netherland and moved to new york in 2010. thanks for being here.

>> good afternoon, mr. chairman and members of the committee. i'm peter weijmarshausen. i'm ceo and founder of shapeways. i'm honored to be here today to discuss how 3-d printing is fueling small business growth enabling anyone to create a business with fiscal products at low capital cost. as a kid in the netherlands, i loved playing with computers resulting in a passion for open source software. driven by this and my entrepreneurial spirit, i spent much of my career at startup software companies. in 2006 i learned about the technology called 3-d printing which prints physical objects based on 3-d computer designs. i immediately thought of the blender community. a large group of enthusiasts. they were using 3-d software but never imagined it would be possible to hold their own i asked some of them for their designs to print. when i showed the products to them, they were blown away. they agreed it would be great to

have an online service and i knew there could be a business opportunity. how big was yet to be seen. i started working in shapeaways in march 2007 within the lifestyle incubator of phillips electronics. at the time 3-d printing was used mostly for prototyping for large companies. and was very expensive. in 2008, we launched shapeaways.com for anyone to make and get products they wanted. we started printing products, not prototypes. we moved our headquarters to new new york is perfect for shapeaways, high talent tech savy talent and creative epicenter so we have the ability to talk to so many of our customers. at that point we had fewer than 20 employees. today over 140. in new york, seattle and in our factories in long island city. these factories are transforming old industrial helps with factories of the future. with new and innovative

processes and machinery. shapeaways is now the world's leading marketplace and community to make, buy and sell custom 3d printed products and looking at design opportunities for entrepreneurs. shapeaways is a success story in terms of small business growing out of endless possibilities of 3d printing but the opportunities created for 3d printing for entrepreneurs are immeasurable. when i think about what we can achieve, i relate now the internet has allowed software engineers to become entrepreneurs. bringing new software to market was difficult. you had to know what users wanted, build the software, test it, and then produce a lot of cd roms or floppy disks, bring it to retail and hope people would buy it. today, using the internet any software engineer can become an entrepreneur. the internet has removed the barriers, launching a website has become easy and google, amazon or facebook became successful quickly. similar to how 33 d removes

barriers.-3 d removes barriers. d removes barriers.d removes barriers. update their designs quickly no need for marketing research in advance build products with payments and distribute their products directly on-line with no retail investment. they can evolve their products since they don't have to keep any inventory. and there is no question that entrepreneurs are taking notice. from 2012 to 2013 product uploads increased to 100,000 a month and the number of new people has leveled. 3d printing transforms how we think about launching products and enables the entrepreneurs in ways we never could imagine in the past. let me share with you how shapeaways works. anyone can upload a 3d design. many free and open source software programs available to use 3d modeling to anyone -- literally anyone can do it. after the design is unloaded the user selects the material to print and make it available.

shapeaways over 40 materials and finishes including precious metal, bronze, ceramic, plastic and sand stone. designs are reviewed by engineers, then unloaded to our printers and then printed. after which they are cleaned by the engineers sorted and put in the boxes sent to anyone. 3d printing as described above is at the core of shapeaways. people have used it to create endless products for their business, model trains, jewelry, home decor such as lamps, dish ware, cups, plates, et cetera. i've brought a few samples you can see over here. let me share one of the examples of a successful business in shapeaways. goththam smith is an example. four friends working in new york city wanted to create something more tangible and lasting than a website or app. starting with designing cuff links and be into other jewelry they used 3d molding applications to develop unique ideas. shapeaways gives them the ability to turn those into prototypes and then finally products. without relying on costly metal casting machinery they sell

their products on shapeaways.com directly or through other channels and their business wouldn't exist without shapeaways or 3-d printing. the ability to easily create one-of-a-kind customizable products, extremely costly and labor intensive process, 3-d printing and shapeaways make it seamless. one company levering the technology is nervous systems. designs a process creating custom simulations, such as the growth of coral. their process generates jewelry and light fixtures. all of these are one-of-a-kind and 3-d printed by shapeaways, sold on our sites and in new york. one example of a successful business that is rapidly growing and employing more people as demand grows. i would like to conclude even the president of the united states has acknowledged this great opportunity shapeaways is working ob is -- shapeaways is working with the white house to partner on the first ever white house maker fair. dedicated to showcasing and celebrating the maker movement. the goal is to support the

culture of making and use it as a call to action for stakeholders and shapeaways has committed to help the white house use this moment in time to facilitate entrepreneurship and in the state of the union president obama spoke about the facility in ohio saying one warehouse is a state-of-the-art lab where new workers are mastering 3d printing and which has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything. it's true. 3-d printing does have the potential to revolutionize the way we make everything. i'm passionate about helping others see that and i hope i have effectively demonstrated to you the positive impact i can have on small business creating many jobs in the process. moving forward it will be critical the accessibility to 3-d printing remains uninhibited. thank you for your time today and allowing me me the honor to speak about 3-d printing, the technology i'm sure will change the world. >> thank you, peter. >> our next witness today is jan baum, the director of 3-d maryland which has been charged with bringing the 3-d printing and rapid technology agenda to the greater baltimore region.

miss baum is a full professor at tallson university and founder of the university's object lab, a comprehensive state-of-the-art rapid technologies and digital fabrication lab. in 2012 she co-hosted the first rapid tech and additive manufacturing conference in the baltimore region and 2013 named an innovator of the year by the maryland daily record. miss baum, thanks for being here. >> chairman graves, ranking member velazquez and committee members honored to have the opportunity to speak with you about technologies about how we carry out our work across industries from product development and manufacturing to skull surgery and bioengineering, 3-d printing gives us new capabilities that alter how we compete in a global marketplace. i would like to start with a real world example. so i'm the executive director of 3-d maryland a statewide leadership initiative to advance the engagement of 3-d printing and additive manufacturing as an innovative economic driver for maryland and america.

3-d maryland is located in the maryland center of entrepreneurship in howard county, maryland. within two weeks of a new client joining the maryland center, he sought me out and he said i hear you're the 3-d printing person and i said i am. he told me about his product he was innovating and wanted to prototype and sent $2500 to china and hadn't heard anything and could i help. i said well when do you need your prototype. i said send me the 2-d drawings and i will see what i can do. i had the 3-d digital files made and two days later he knocked on my door to check the progress. he put his head in my door and i pointed to the build platform across my office. he looked at the -- his prototype on the platform, looked at me, the printer at me, speechless. and i said that's your prototype and he looked at the printer and back at me and said this is like magic. it's not magic but it is a tool that helps us do our work better, more efficiently,

locally, and many times most times faster with optimized solutions across industries whatever work it is we're carrying out. 3-d printing and additive manufacturing is a disruptive 21st century technology changing who, how, when, why and the what of what we make and how we solve problems. if we can imagine it and we have the skill to design it the 3-d printers will print it. there's tons of examples on the table here today. it's disrupting economies of scale, current business models and democratizing production across industries. innovation and entrepreneurial opportunities are at the heart. there are barriers to engagement. access to knowledge, both trusted knowledge sources and understanding what the technology can and can't do. overcoming industrial thinking is a huge one. we have made things for a very long time and we're very good at it. cost of entry, the allocation of resources whether capital or

human is a challenge for small businesses and entrepreneurs and the position of the technology. are we there yet is a question we all receive regularly. 3-d -- the leadership of howard county in maryland, county executive ken allman, howard county economic development authority ceo larry twiel and the director of the maryland center of entrepreneurship are a strong leadership team for howard county and they easily saw the vision and the opportunity that these technologies brought and how it fit in with and supported small business and the entrepreneurial ecosystem. 3-d maryland is an initiative addressing barriers to entry and advancing the business advantages for business, industry and entrepreneurs, our target audiences. raising awareness and facilitating engagement in implementation. it is identifying and addressing opportunities to strengthen and advance the rapid tech ecosystem in maryland.

and we're building a loosely coupled system of collaborative relationships and partnerships across sectors to innovate and accelerate the region and the country's economic competitiveness. i respectfully recommend that this committee encourage and support initiatives such as 3d maryland that have a focus on multisector, cross disciplinary precompetitive collaboration building on the strengths and core competencies to advantage practices, foster innovation and grow regional ecosystems taking advantage of public funding sources. supporting initiatives like 3d maryland builds on the momentum created by recent initiatives such as the national manufacturing national additive manufacturing institute. addressing and creating an adaptive work force that all points on the spectrum is critical to our engagement of these technologies. i would recommend working at the grassroots level, locally with users, with proven track records from both industry and education. so we can institute some changes

in k through 16, vocational training and apprenticeship programs, et cetera. wider adoption is inevitable. we need to ensure that the work force is prepared to increase engagement. studies have shown that students who are educated in additive manufacturing processes are among the first to bring the advanced hands-on technologies to their employers something i have told my students since i established that lab. you are work force leaders. continuing to support research funding and programs that facilitate technology transfer, 3-d printing and additive manufacturing are just getting started. i thank you very much for your attention and your consideration of these technologies. >> thank you very much. we will recess just until after this series of votes. great. and then we'll come back and start with questions. committee is in recess. >> thank you, mr. chairman. and i thank all of the panelists for a very impressive testimony. it's interesting stuff. i know on the way over to votes a while ago, i was talking to

mr. bentivolio who has some experience in your field and it's fascinating to talk about the possibilities and what all you're doing. so as a small business guy it's very rewarding to see the entrepreneurial aspect of this and folks are really doing some good stuff. one of the concerns that i have is, you know, getting start-ups like what you do and because it's a rather new product and process from the standpoint of not widely used i guess, are the regulatory problems we need to be aware of here in congress that we need to put a stop to or ways we could enhance your ability to do your job better? just go down the line. whoever has some comments or concerns about -- everybody has concerns about washington these days, trust me, and rightly so. mr. o'neill, do you want to start? any problems with us? >> i do not yet have any problems with you. >> not yet. >> the keyword yet, right. obviously the health care law is something that concerns a lot of small business people and you're at that 50 if i recall. >> yes, we are.

>> so that may be a concern to you, but from the standpoint of producing your products that's the kind of regulations i'm -- >> i figure if we just keep working hard, designing great products and making money everything else will figure it out. >> so far you guys are ahead of regulations you've outrun them and probably are okay until somebody figures out we need to stop these guys and regulate them. >> i don't want that to happen. our feet haven't hit the ground. we shipped our first order out of our house less than three years ago and, you know, now we keep moving, we've got 17,500 square foot facility and that's not big enough. we need a bigger one. i understand that there are some complications and i let other people in our business worry about those things probably why i don't seem concerned. i'm sure i should be, but -- >> hire people to worry for you, right? >> i really do because i don't like to worry. >> i understand. mr. cobb? >> thanks. yeah. go back to the beginning of stratasys which is really

started like i said in '88. we've shipped about 50% of our business overseas and we continue to do that at this point in time. it's been a big piece of our business. so, you know, if you look at areas that we're concerned about or could be concerned about, would be any export laws that would restrict the -- this technology from moving out from the u.s. i mean, if you look at the bulk of our business, we manufacture in new hampshire, we manufacture in new york, and we manufacture in minnesota. and so all these products are being exported. so anything that would harm that export -- >> at this point there is no problem with that area. that's not a barrier yet. >> there's been some discussion about that. since i had the opportunity to address the question. >> we want to be watchful for that. that's the purpose of the

hearing, to make sure we know those things ahead of time. >> yep. mr. wejmarshausen. i'm sorry. >> well, we are not really concerned about things that are currently in place, but there might be something that you could help with or think of. shapeaways has a large community of designers that make their own ideas come to life using our platform. they upload them to our site and have them printed and we ship it back to them. and the other element of shapeaways is that we enable people to open shops where they can start selling these products and i brought a few you can see in front of me. now if some of these products currently infringe copyrights which very rarely but it does happen, then the dmca gives a very nice process where the copyright holder can send us a notice, we take down the product from our website, and the story or the discussion then is between the copyright holder and

the person that is allegedly the infringer. that process kills very well. you have to realize we have 400,000 community members growing quickly. 100,000 new designs every month. these numbers are really large. and dmca helps with the copyright end of the spectrum. however there is no such process for patents. so if someone would infringe a patent there is no clear process that would enable, you know, the patent holder to notify us so we can take it down and then the discussion becomes between the copyright or the patent infringer and patent holder. in that case, platforms like shapeaways are a party to the discussion which, of course, is really hard for us because we get so many new designs that it's completely impossible for us to check, also given the fact that in most cases we only print things only once, it's completely impossible to check whether there are patent infrigments going on at the time. we're open to build compelling technology to help solve this,

but since the dmca works so well for copyrights i would, you know, suggest maybe think about having a similar type process for platforms like shapeaways and there is others coming up as well, in the united states and also abroad, to have such a process that can help these platforms stay scalable and flexible. >> do you have disclosure statements that you have to sign whenever you are sent a drawing of some kind by an individual or a company that says if you produce this object, that you are -- you are restricted from showing it to anybody else or anything like that? >> the idea about shapeaways since it's a community is openness. our terms and conditions do ask people, do you own the copyrights, the rights to use this product and upload it to shapeaways for one. do you have the rights to have it manufactured for yourself and do you have the rights if you want to sell it to others? and people have to state that they have those rights, of course.

however, you know, some people might not read that. >> very good. my time is up. otherwise i would i would let miss baum answer. >> thank you, mr. chairman. thank you for coming in. yes, we had an interesting discussion on the way to votes about the possibilities of 3-d printing. and i explained to my colleagues that i was a vocational education teacher as well as general ed and in the automotive design business almost 20 years and i'm very familiar with 3d printing and proud to say that many of my female students went on to case western to study biomechanical engineering because of cad and some of the things they got to make in my classroom using 3d printer at the time. we sent the design, they printed it for like $35, they sent it back in a nice package. instead of putting something on the refrigerator door, hey, mom and dad, look what i did in class, they got to put it on a table which was kind of interesting. but in that regards, i'm wondering, the possibilities, we're looking at some things

like, for instance, one of my questions is, if i took -- could scan something, can i, you know, digitize that and have it made, right? so, for instance, hip replacements, that kind of thing, could i use an x-ray data and convert it to digital and then have a custom made hip for a patient if i was a doctor? >> and there's some regulations that would have to come with that too, right? i mean it has to be sterile, made from specific material? we can do that with bone as well as if somebody crushed a bone, we could replace that using a 3-d printer and how long would that take, for instance? i'm not a doctor, is so i couldn't even name a bone in my wrist. >> both of those examples are in current practice today. so most of that, to my understanding, most of that work is being done abroad in germany and sweden. our cam is one of the oems in sweden producing hip replacements. while we can take the personalized data from a ct scan or mri scan and digitize that

and make -- build that into a three dimensional model right now what we're doing is creating the hip replacements in a small, medium, large, three or four sizes, because that does the job and does the job most effectively. and there are -- i'm going to not -- may not remember the name of the university that is doing the bone planting. i think it's in texas. growing bone structures. but biomedical engineering is huge, yeah. yeah. and i mean what i would say, i would share with you at johns hopkins university, there's a skull surgeon by the name of dr. dorshar and he uses 3-d printing to create 3-d prints to do preop planning and he -- so they know before the team ever goes into the operating room, exactly what the cuts are, what's removed, what -- where the staples are, everything done to simplify that process. i think that's fantastic. the doctor is working less hours in a stressful situation, the

patient under anesthesia less time and the operating costs are a huge contributor to health care costs and that's lower. this is disruptive technology. now that's upsetting -- that's going to upset the apple cart in many directions. so the business model for hospitals is now going to be disrupted. they may not be so happy about operating room costs -- operating room times being declined because they have to go back and rework the numbers again. health care, medical is one of the first industries to engage 3-d printing and additive manufacturing. >> great. so we can actually, for instance, if there was somebody that needed plastic surgery, a plastic surgeon could use the x-rays and know where his cuts are going to be, how he's going to repair this patient's face? >> absolutely. and they also use 3-d printing for surgical guides. so they put the 3-d print on the patient's body and know the tool, the cut, the angle. they take a lot of the -- it takes a lot of the guesswork out.

and i would just also volunteer that in terms of what 3-d maryland one of our first activities was to create an expert user group to gather all the expert users in maryland around these technologies and cross pollinate them and the applied physics lab is actually collaborating with dr. dorshar to build robotics to make that surgery even better, to make it even smoother. we're printing cells. i'm not sure again like who the doctor is doing this, printing skin, but they're printing skin during surgery from the patient itself. when you print cells from a patient, you really limit the risk of rejection or the body rejecting whatever you're putting in or on it. >> okay. so now we have that. and it also reduces 3-d printing, prototype build time, correct? no longer are we doing the giant clay models. we can actually design parts, for instance, for a motorcycle?

i could design everything on that motorcycle using a 3-d printing, put it together, make sure it fits and reduce my build time and prototype costs to -- do you have any numbers? >> when i see the case studies roll through, john can probably speak to this even more clearly, but when i see the case studies roll through and go what am i going to present like a baseline i think many times it's at least a third or fifth of both the cost savings and time savings. and then the other thing, too, like you have those savings but when you put those parts together and not quite right you're not going back to square one. you're tweaking. >> how long would it take, real quickly, how long would it take for me, for instance, once i have that information digitized and i'm going to do the surgery, to have maybe a model that i can practice or look at? how long would that take to have that prototype or the 3-d print. >> really, those are hard questions because you don't know how much data, what the scale is, and scale is a factor. i would say so from thinking

about dr. dorshar's skulls and he uses sla technology, i think those skulls probably take three or four hours maybe. maybe six hours. and what i'm advocating from maryland, i think it's a model that we could all look at, is that we -- that maryland create a conshore shum based mod really we have state-of-the-art medical facilities so that dr. dorshar can see a patient from shock trauma and zip files right over to a local center and get them. we don't have to worry about fedex anymore. we'll start to really see improvements in the technology as well. >> i started in business, mr. chairman, when we took a body side molding on the car, sent it to the shop and waited three months to get a prototype model and now we can get it done in a matter of hours, right? thank you very much. i really appreciate you being here. i yield back, mr. chairman. >> thank you, mr. chairman. i'm sorry i missed the opening

part. i was caught up in another hearing. thank you all for coming. so i may well be asking questions you answered and if that's the case, i apologize. i'll go back. i have a little experience in 3-d. we've been using that for five or six years in one of my companies to make small-scale models of fairly complex machinery as part of our sales proposal. you know, if it's a $6 million proposal it's well worth delivering that and maybe others are going to catch up but early on we were the only one doing it and a wow factor there and then we got the order everyone in the customers company wanted another one. so it is great. it's great for a lot of things. we use it as a sales tool. my question comes to, as this takes off, are there any quality control issues on repeatability and all the things you do in iso and other quality things for repeatability, and, you know, cnc machines and whatever. i'm a machine shop guy.

are there quality control issues and once you get into production and out of prototyping, i'm not sure who to ask, if somebody wants to jump in. >> so since we're building a hundreds of thousands of products, over a month actually at shapeaways, we see these kind of problems pop up. we make, for instance, very popular iphone cases and, of course, for them to fit and to be clear, shapeaways doesn't provide prototyping only. we print final products. my iphone case i use myself is 3-d printed and many other people buy from shapeaways just to get a unique iphone case. they need to be exact fit. and since 3-d printing was used for a long time as a prototyping technology there is definitely need for the technology to improve from a quality perspective, from a price, and even from a speed perspective to meet the needs of today's consumers. from prototyping perspective you

always have somewhat of an option if the prototype doesn't come out right to do it again. if you have a consumer who has a birthday party where he needs to bring a present you have only one shot to get it out the door in time. the technology has come a long way and great we can make final products and enable so many people, but i think the technology is still to my opinion in its infancy and it will keep growing as the big consumer market ages. there will be large jumps in how the technology will mature. >> so, you know, as you're layering this, plastics, i understand, i'm sure powdered metals are probably being used some ceramics. >> yep. >> is that the place and what happens when you get into the need for some really high alloy steel, stainless steel, et cetera? is that way out or never? >> we are printing metals in several times. we print in silver, the same type quality you would find in a jewelry store, ceramics, in stainless steel, brass, bronze,

we're adding other precious metals soon. it's already possible. >> carbon steel too? >> not yet. >> okay. >> is that coming do you believe? >> yeah. >> okay. >> so as this takes off, what is the thought on the cost? you know, today you've got a lot of machines running unattended. labor cost is all but zero. set a machine up and they pop those out in a dark factory. is this similar or -- what would be the labor costs to make a part using 3-d versus automated equipment today in a factory that the machine just does it without man power? >> sure. >> i think you look at where 3-d printing is being utilized today and as mentioned before, it is being utilized in a manufacturing environment. aerospace company, automotive companies, a number of people are using 3-d printing today. so i think we were where it makes sense is, not the things

we're thinking about where, you know, you're making tens of millions of bottle caps or something like that, but where it makes sense at this point in time, is when you have a short production type of run or custom run or something where, you know, because of regulations or other reasons, the part is constantly changing and so when you look at the costs of a piece part, the piece part cost you're going to get utilizing 3d printing is going to be more than injection molding. however, you're not going to have to build that tool. so as a small business owner, couple cases that were mentioned here today, you're not going to have that up front cost. you're also probably not going to have to have that up front knowledge as well because you can design some test it with a prototype and then start printing that as, you know, as your real part. so it's a little bit different as far as high volume versus mid

to low volume. i believe. >> thank you very much. my time has expired. i yield back. >> mr. bain. >> thank you, mr. chairman. i would like to thank the panel for their testimony today. you know with the rapid growth and accessibility of 3-d printing, there is room for great innovation as it's been stated. as many of you testified 3d printing creates opportunities for entrepreneurs. however, with companies like makerbot, do you feel eventually consumers will become their own manufacturers making their services and many small businesses that -- small business offer obsolete? >> you know, certainly makerbot and products like that really enable a lot of people to do work as far as design work and

then some production type of work that we were talking about. and i think for certain products, yeah, you could see where a product like makerbot would actually be used in a home environment. i think, though, that where some of the big opportunities for 3d printing comes in is really in the manufacturing process. it, as we talked about before, it allows current manufacturers to build things in a different manner, to customize things in a different way, so i think there's certainly some products that yeah, are absolutely geared toward that but if you look at the use of 3-d printing and all the different materials that are going on today, i think the bigger advances are going to come in the manufacturing area. and with that comes a whole area where, you know, students today

or people in the work place today are used to manufacturing and traditional methods. so training of people that are currently employed or training of students to design, utilizing 3d printing is one thing, but then to manufacture using 3d printing is vastly different. it's different than injection molding. but it can be used, in fact, and that's one of the big inhibitors i think in getting 3-d printing into small and medium sized companies is because characteristics of a 3-d printer are different than the characteristics of injection molding, for instance. >> on another note i serve on homeland security as well, and the potential of creating weapons through this 3-d printing, what is the

feasibility, the possibility, and, you know, someone coming along and creating a nondetectable firearm or something? >> well, we've been staunch supporters of the plastic gun legislation that got re-enacted i think at the end of last year as a matter of fact. so it's something that has been demonstrated at some point. but we've certainly been a supporter of the legislation that's taken place up to this point. looking at the restrictions on that opportunity. >> okay. but someone could -- could someone potentially, you know, not follow the guidelines and regulations for this type of product and create something that's not detectable and cause a problem? >> i'm -- i'm not an expert in

it but i think that you need some type of metal, either a bullet or the firing mechanism, to -- for the firearm, so again, i'm not an expert on that, but from what i know i think it would be difficult. >> okay. >> thank you. >> thank you, mr. chairman. it always makes me nervous when the technology like this is here in congress because it means we're paying attention to you and let's face it, when the bureaucracy pays attention to a technology we often try to regulate it or screw it up. and i say this in the contents of someone that believes one of the great successes of the internet was the fact that it grew and grew and grew before sort of the bureaucratic mechanisms truly understood it and were able to slow down the investments, the capital, the creativity.

so what is -- for whether it be 3-d printing or even the thing that maybe you and i haven't even found out to define yet which may be the large scale or the high speed production of such, what's the systemic threat to the industry? is it copyright? is it the source files having patent litigation or copyright litigation chasing? or is it those of us in government and bureaucracy? if i came to you and said over the next decade, this is one of the great disruptive technologies that's going to make us a more efficient society but we have to conquer these risks to that expansion, for each of you? start with mr. o'neill, what would you say, what are the systemic risks to the technology? >> well, i'm an entrepreneur so i'm not representing the manufacturers. we use the technology to create

innovation in our own business. so, you know, these kind of questions don't really apply to us, but i would sincerely hope no legislation comes in that would restrict our ability. >> what about the discussion that i -- i know we've all been run pg in and out so i haven't heard, copyright? >> copyright is a concern to us as a copyright holder and a holder -- as a holder of 30 patents i'm concerned that people will infringe our patents and our designs and they'll print them and we've had that happen. we had that happen with shapeaways. but we worked with them and they were able to deal with it. it's a concern. it seems like, you know, something that needs to be addressed but i don't -- i'm not sure it's a 3d printing specific concern because it's still -- ip is ip. people in china making counterfeit products all the time of us. they're not doing that with 3-d printing but traditional manufacturing. >> what's the systemic risk on

ip, i think there's been the discussion of saying if i change a bit of the source code does that relieve me of a copyright? >> well, i guess as a manufacturer, you know, the laws in this country, you have the patent protection from a manufacturer, what we do is we spend 10 to 12% of our overall revenue on trying to be more innovative, staying ahead of things that will fall out as far as a patent goes. i think looking at -- you talked about what can be inhibitor. one of the things, maybe a little off base here, but i think one of the things that will not help the industry as much as possible is people, young people, and traditional workers, not being educated in

this technology. and i think as a real opportunity at this point in time to have education at a high school level, at a grade school level, and then even workers that are displaced, because of manufacturing -- i think manufacturing is starting to come back into the u.s. and i think 3d printing is a portion of that and i think there's a real opportunity for the federal government to get more involved in training of new students and traditional work force. >> but to understand, we get involved, there's also certain risk profiles that come with that. >> i understand. >> what would be a systemic risk to your business? >> well, i already laid it out briefly, is that, you know, an issue you mentioned, we want to -- shapeaways is a platform of service so what we want to do is create as many products for people as they like and make it possible for them to create things that weren't possible before. in that way democratizing how

people think about products. everybody can make things instead of only big companies. but we are taking very serious the responsibility that we need to take that we can only make things that are original. and the good thing is, you know, shapeaways has made over 2.5 million products to date that the amount of products that we had to take down, the amount of products that we actually made using the printers, that were infringing in hindsight were extremely small like in counting on one hand or two hands. less than ten that we actually made. that's i think the good thing because people grasp that they can now make anything they want, it's not the first inclination. the technology is much more expandable than mass manufacturing so much easier to copy something popular with traditional manufacturing technologies as mentioned in china perhaps, then you can do on a 3-d printer. >> and forgive me, i'm up against time, academia has an interesting world where it sits there, where what's sort of in the public domain, what is -- so

you may have to navigate some more interesting discussion there. >> well, i guess what i would -- my response to the question is, may bridge academia, may not. i'm an advocate of the technology for business industry and entrepreneurs. and what i hear from my expert users one of the things that's going to hold the industry back is proprietariness of both the hardware and the materials. so i think the expert users that i see using the technology in the most advanced way, say to the oems i don't care about your warranty, i want under the hood and they will hire a third party contractor that provides the warranty so that they then can put in any material they want and they can tweak the parameters. if you -- if you don't do that, then you are paying about $25,000 per set of parameters to be under the hood. and so -- i know peter agrees with me. keeping the technology open just like your example your leading example of the internet you got

to keep it open. the u.s. is not a leader in this technology. i think the western world is leading it, but -- >> i know i'm way over time. real quick, the code, the underlying code, proprietary to each manufacturer or sort of a common script? >> proprietary? the parameters you run the machine on and the materials you put into the machine. >> yeah. if i were to hop on-line right now and want to start design and actually do some coding, i'm a decade old, out of date, sql programmer. >> i'm going to let john jump in on that one. >> well, i think if i understand your question correctly, the capability of sending a file -- >> how proprietary is the software for each manufacturer. >> the software to actually allow you to print a part? correct. >> i'll answer two ways. the software that allows you to

have access to the printer is common. it's called an stl file. that's common to all the different companies that are out there. then what's proprietary would be actually how the printer prints. each one of them uses a variety of different technologies and parameters so that would be proprietary if that answers your question. >> mr. chairman, thank you for your patience with me. thank you. >> could each of you -- you all brought a variety of things. starting with mr. o'neill can you tell us what you've got in front of you? or show it off. >> sure. well as i said before, when we -- we have to bring products to market quickly because the iphone refreshes every year and usually refreshes around september or october. so to get the products into the stores for the holiday season, we have to be very quick. so whenever there's rumors on the internet we'll take those rumors and take the specification actually print a copy of an iphone.

copy of an iphone. a 3-d one based on the rumors. then we'll print a product that would hold our lenses, a clip, that, you know, to see how it fits, see how well, it works and evaluate whether we're happy with that. we'll keep working on this through all the rumors. every time there's a new rumor we'll do a new one and hundreds of designs of the product to get it right. when apple does release the phone, then we've got this product that we can put on there and test our lenses on the new device, we can test the fit and how it is, and then if we're happy with everything we send it out to manufacturing and have tooling made so we can do injection molding and then we're in production and that whole process takes about six to eight weeks. >> mr. cobb? >> little bit picking up on what patrick was talking about. this particular part was a part that really gets the idea of taking a prototype into a realistic area. what we've done is utilized a printing process, somewhat similar to an ink jet printer, but it gives you really the

realism you get from a part and that's what a manufacturer or designer is looking for. in the particular process that we're using here, called poly jet, what it allows to do is mix materials. so you have something very durable, call it digital abs the white part but at the same time printing this flexible material as well. this was printed as one part. okay. then just recently, we introduced the capability of the multiple material and then we've added color to that. you can actually then print a very realistic in this case a prototype shoe but a realistic prototype shoe that to most people coming in here looking at this, you would probably think it was the real thing. and then getting towards the idea of real things, this particular part is a different

technology that we have called fdm. this particular technology takes real thermal plastic, so nylon, poly carbonates, abs that are being used today in manufacturing, typically in injection mold process, but in this particular case, this is in the abs part that we're seeing here, this was printed, again, about 18 different components here, this was all printed in one particular piece. okay. so from a prototyping standpoint it allows you to look at a lot of different things that are going on because it's not just an individual part, it's the assembly and this particular prototyping technology allows you to look at those assemblies, testing for form, fit and function. and then as you go a little further, you can also because it's real thermal plastics these are the types of materials being used in real life today for end use parts in aerospace, automotive, some consumer goods. >> well, i brought a variety of products. it's hard to choose if there's

so many people creatively active. so in my testimony i used an example of a design collector from new york called gotham smith and they make men's jewelry. these are cuff links that are made in sterling silver, designed by them and they're for sale on our platform and they sell it in a different way. so that's one example. another that is really cool is a game. just almost organic movement crowd funded, the space program, they made a little game and very passionate community behind it and few guys figured out can we take our assets from the game and turn them into real things. unloaded it to shapeaways and was working. so now this is people -- went on the internet and went viral and everybody wants to have them. two very different examples. i mentioned nervous system, they use algorithms, they don't design the products by hand, no cat software involved. they write computer code that

mimics nature and by doing that they can create unique items all the time. this is an example of a light shade with an led light inside. you can go on their website, on shapeaways, you can find these products and they are for sale. miss baum has brought another products. customizable necklace and this is also from nervous systems. so you can see it's a wide variety from jewelry to lighting fixtures to gadgets and game accessories and i can keep going for hours but i won't. >> miss baum. >> right now i'm wishing i had selected my samples a little differently and i had some skulls sitting up here and the face transplant model that dr. rodriguez did a year ago. the other thing that i wish i had brought is an example of 3-d printing with a -- with traditional metal plating over

top of it. one of the companies in maryland, they plate specifically on 3-d printed objects extending the life of the plastic prints. some of the work they could is highly classified but what's in the knowledge center at 3-d maryland is one tenth scale thruster they made for boeing and those objects are impressive. what i have in front of me are prototype soles from under armour, an anchor business for baltimore for sure. probably as much as i'm able to say. close friend with under armour and frequently behind the door with them. but so right now, their prototyping soles. this is a watch and this is off of mr. cobb's systems and the same idea of the gear shifter. very flexible material and rigid at the same time. end use product for northrop northrop grumman located in near land, an end-use part.

prototyping and end use parts metal printed part that had post-production machining done on it and then i guess i would just tag on with peter about this little guy. this particular printer prints in full color and we talk about entrepreneurs and talk about the uses of the technology, if you take a 3-d photograph of yourself or maybe your daughter or your grandchildren and you want to have that replicated into a doll, your kids can have dolls that look like them if that's what you want to do. mickey labs is doing that in the uk. stanley black and decker located in maryland, uses this to color code the parts of their tools as a they put it through production. orange one division, green another division or code the parts. that's not an extra. that's inherent to the technology. the last sample i have that i'll talk about is this architectural model. we're all probably old enough to understand that architectural models before 3-d printing were made with knives and map board. today we can print the prototype of the building and there's a saying in the industry if a picture is worth a thousand words a prototype is worth a thousand pictures.

as our society gets more and more visual, our literacy declines a little bit, but become more visual that's more and more true. lastly in my testimony i included a really nice profile of a company in baltimore by the name of danco arlington, a traditional fountry, wonderful american story, 94-year-old family owned business, three or four generations and they started losing their pattern makers and they said, how are we going to solve this problem? they don't want to see this successful business change. and so they adopted 3-d printing in 2010. they have a number of stratasys machines. the highest end machine that stratasys makes and they say they win bids because they send a prototype of the object they are going to create for the defense industry with the bid and how they get successful bids. >> you all bring up an interesting point too. in terms of your different

mediums that you print with, you know, how does that translate into durability or strength or whatever the case may be? i'll let any one of you answer that wants to. >> i'm going to point the finger to mr. cobb because he's got the highest end materials. >> you know, the bulk of our business is in the thermal plastic area. i talked about the nylons and poly carbonates. and traditional manufacturing would be utilizing an injection molding process to bring those parts. we don't quite do that. we don't get -- we don't melt it and put pressure into it. we use the layer technology that we all talked about in the past. so the characteristics of that are different than the traditional injection molding. we are using real abs, real nylon, and real poly carbonate. a wide variety of manufacturers around the world. we just select one of those. so the difference is not in the material itself, but the difference is, in the way the

part is actually manufactured. and so what i was talking earlier, we talked about having the knowledge from a designer, the knowledge from a tool maker, and the knowledge from a manufacturer, to understand that a 3-d printed part is in our case a real thermal plastic but it's made differently than the traditional injection molding. been around for a long period of time, a handbook that talks about injection molding, the principles to make sure they build a durable part. there's no such thing for 3-d printing or additive manufacturing today and as the technology evolves, new materials evolve, and they're evolving every single day. having that knowledge to understand the differences between injection molded part in the case of a thermal plastic and a 3-d printed part will be important in producing more and more parts for end users because

they can be used utilizing 3-d printing they are being used today but it's a different design criteria, different manufacturing method and it's different. >> can you take -- say you don't have a drawing or you don't have a -- you're doing just in the restoration industry, out of curiosity, can you take an existing or wore out part and create data points and reproduce that? and how expensive is this for somebody to -- like if they employ or call somebody, they obviously don't want to buy the technology themselves, they just as soon have somebody do it for them? how expensive is it to create that part as a model to be able to fit up? >> you can use technologies that are getting more and more powerful today. we were at south by southwest

where we were [ inaudible ] you can take a part and if it's still in one piece you can scan it. you need to see all items of it. and those are getting very affordable. they turned pictures basically they take into a mold you can print and then you can print it in a wide variety of materials. to your point of questions around what does it cost, the scanners are available from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands if you want high end professional stuff. the printing itself, again depending on the material you want to use, items the size of an iphone case would cost you 20, $30, things ha are getting bigger are 50 to $100 in plastics.

if you talk about metal obss the size of this are around 100 to $200. but this is like real stainless steel. so you know, you can make things in silver, all kinds of materials, based on scans if you wanted to for repairing stuff and it's been done. >> you can build up in metal? >> sorry? >> you can build up in metal? >> yes. metals are possible like ceramics and plastics, yeah. >> fascinating. with that i want to thank you all for participating today and again, i apologize for the vote series that happened during the hearing. your testimony is obviously helped us to better understand how 3-d printing is spurring economic growth and creating a lot of opportunities, lot of opportunities out there for entrepreneurs around the nation. with that i would ask unanimous consent all members have five days to submit materials for the record. seeing none so ordered and without objection hearing is adjourned. on our next washington

journal, ron kessler discusses security breaches at the white house and what the security should be doing to secure the family. and elaine kamarck. phone calls, facebook comments and tweets. washington journal is live every morning at 7:00 a.m. eastern on c-span. wednesday, a hearing on retired u.s. marine sergeant andrew tomorrow rossy, arrested in tijuana mexico on march 31st and remains detained in a mexican prison. the house subcommittee on western hemisphere will hear from the sergeant's mother and retired marine and talk show host montel williams. wednesday, 10:00 a.m. eastern on

c-span. >> c-span's 2015 student cam competition is under way. this nationwide competition for midland high school student will award 150 prizes totaling $150,000. create a 5 to 7-minute documentary entitled the three branches and you. all need to have c-span programming, show alvaro uri uribeians of you 12k3w4r50i6r7b8g9sds grab a camera and get started today. next a look at the impact of regulations on the future of internet connected and self-driving cars. representatives from toyota, verizon talked at the i ininnovator's summit in las vegas. this is an hour.

>> good afternoon, everybody. i hope you're enjoying the very first day of cef, though it is officially the theirs day of cef. my name is john, i'll be the moderator of the panel. before we start the full discussion, we will have opening remarks. i want to pt duce the next speaker. he is being sort of riding shotgun for about four years now. and a couple weeks left. and it's been a very interesting four years and promises to be a revolution in what is going on in the automobile industry. i would like to please welcome david strickland. [ applause ] >> thank you so much. and wow, this is a superstar panel. i need to stay here longer to learn something here. >> as many of you are aware, i