I have never yelped “BBQ” as much as I have these past few days. I spent last week at SXSW with colleagues Mansee Muzumdar, Dan Grigoras and Shapeways CEO Pete Weijmarshausen. Our mission? To spread the word about the future of 3D printing (and, yes, enjoy great music, free beer and puppies—thank you, Mophie!). Our main event was Pete and Shane Wall, CTO at HP, addressing “The Next Industrial Revolution: Hype or Reality?” on the future of additive printing. This is a discussion that’s come up quite a bit over the last few months, and we came to SXSW to debunk it.
Pete and Shane discussed the future of 3D printing and the ground breaking innovations that are currently being worked on at HP.
Meanwhile, Dan, our Director of Supply Chain, rocked a 3D printing workshop with Stanford University…literally. The workshop kicked off with the pair blasting “Fergilicious” and tossing out 3D printed giveaways to the crowd. This proved to be epic enough to capture the attention of Good Morning America. Participants walked away with a new understanding of how to get started with 3D prototyping.
I, on the other hand, ventured away from speaking about 3D printing and spoke about the benefits of embedding social consciousness into your brand. On my panel were three amazing women founders and community builders, Marisa de Belloy, Tahyira Cordner and Jonna Pira. We covered the prioritization of community and the necessity of building products that have positive global impact.
Our panel discussion was in partnership with TechStyleNYC, an events company started by fashion socialite Janine Just. We exhibited with a number of other brands such as Cool Effect, Bar Works and Kali.
All of these brands have one thing in common: using technology to give way to making fashionable & sustainable ubiquitous with one another.
Naturally, I helped host a few of our own meetups around Austin and made new friends while sharing cool 3D printed giveaways.
Not to mentioned, I blinged myself out with the latest 3D Printed fashion from our designers LikeSyrup, LucasPlus and UniverseBecoming. I also 3D Printed a Flava-Flav style necklace to wear during the event, so that our community members could #SpotTheSpark and come find me to enjoy drinks and overall awesomeness.
We also stopped by the DJI Drone Interactive Lounge, which allowed us the opportunity to fly a drone (in a netted area, of course) and wave our arms around to control a simulated drone flight on their holographic screen.
We managed to check out a few panels, and were able to stop by and see Abbi and Ilana of Broad City as they spoke about the evolution of their show into what has become today, and how that impacted their lives. (You can check that out here, for more info 🙂 )
Overall, there was so much to take in while at SXSW, and a typical day had me averaging over 21,000 steps, yelping “BBQ” or “Breakfast Tacos” at least 8x a day…and at the end of it all, I felt like this:
Til next year, SXSW!