Startups

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July 9-10, 2013 San Francisco, CA Tickets On Sale Now Everyone’s favorite 3D printing company is now in the hands of a much larger 3D printing company. 3D printer maker Stratasys announced today that it’s acquired Brooklyn-based MakerBot for an undisclosed sum. The move is a smart one for Stratasys, which specializes in large-scale industrial 3D printing, not the consumer space that MakerBot has come to represent. The company says that its acquisition is “expected to drive faster adoption of desktop 3D printing.” Developing. Filed under: Business .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat { width:278px; margin:0px 0px 10px 20px; padding:10px; float:right; border:1px solid #e4e4e4; font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; color:#000; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .logo-date-wrap { width:100%; display:block; float:left; margin-bottom:8px; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat img { float:left; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .date-location { float:right; font-size:12px; line-height:14px; text-align:center; padding-left:7px; padding-top:5px; padding-bottom:3px; border-left:1px solid #e6e6e6; color:#585a5b; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .cta { display:block; clear:both; width:100%; border-radius:5px; border:1px solid #1864b1; color:#fff; text-shadow: 0px -1px 0px rgba(0,0,0,0.3); text-align:center; text-decoration:none; font-weight:600; font-size:18px; line-height:17px; padding:4px 0px 6px 0px; background: #1f80e4; background: -moz-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%, #1862ae 100%); background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,#1f80e4), color-stop(100%,#1862ae)); background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); background: -o-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); background: -ms-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); background: linear-gradient(to bottom,  #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient( startColorstr='#1f80e4', endColorstr='#1862ae',GradientType=0 ); }

Today Stratasys announced that it has acquired MakerBot, as we reported, in a stock deal worth $403 million based on the current share value of Stratasys. The combination of the companies brings together a leader in 3D industrial printing and manufacturing, with the emerging leader in desktop 3D printing, which the companies said in a press release should help drive “faster adoption of 3D printing” across all categories. MakerBot will continue to operate as a separate company from Stratasys as part of the deal, which is reportedly stock-for-stock transaction. It’ll be a subsidiary of MakerBot, but will serve the consumer and desktop market segment while Stratasys continues to focus on its existing industry placement. MakerBot was founded in 2009, and has since sold over 22,000 3D printers, with its most recent model making up 11,000 of those sales coming from the Replicator 2, which it launched back in September 2012. That means traction is on the upswing in a big way, something which no doubt helped pave the way for the deal. As for Stratasys, its name might be less familiar for regular TechCrunch readers, though it may ring a bell from when we accurately reported that acquisition talks between the two companies were ongoing earlier this month. But in terms of the history of 3D printing it’s operating in much more established space. It facilitates the printing of prototypes, concepts, components, parts and more on an industrial scale and for commercial applications. The publicly traded company merged with Object Ltd in 2012 to form one large entity, and is headquartered in both Minneapolis and Rehovot, Israel. Stratasys has demonstrated it’s going to be aggressive about owning the 3D printing space, and the MakerBot buy is the consumer-focused piece in that puzzle. For MakerBot, it gives the startup access to Stratasys’ wealth of industry experience, as well as probably better access to new tech coming down the pipeline, a greater pool of engineering talent and more resources to put behind marketing and distribution. MakerBot has been pretty consistent in terms of updating its hardware and software since the startup got off the ground four years ago, and released updated firmware and design software just last week to improve the quality of its printed products. The company has some competition from other, newer startups like Form Labs, whose Form 1 3D printer John recently tested out, but MakerBot already had a head start on the younger company, and Stratasys should be able to juice its growth even further.

Microsoft and Nokia have gotten pretty cosy over the past few years, and at the time of the announcement of the Finnish company’s decision to use Windows Phone OS to power its smartphones, many speculated it was the first overture for a coming acquisition. And that is apparently where things were headed, according to the Wall Street Journal, but the proposed deal has since fallen apart. The WSJ says talks were taking place as soon as this month, but that they’ve collapsed to the point where they aren’t likely to get revived again, meaning a Microkia or Nokrosoft isn’t likely to happen anytime soon. Talks up until that point had been very advanced, the report says, but eventually broke down because of financial difficulties faced by both MS and Nokia. Microsoft ended the courtship, per the report. Nokia has been struggling, and the Windows Phone plan hasn’t done much to shore up its continued losses. Nokia missed analyst expectations last quarter, and posted an operating loss, though a much lower one than it reported during the year ago period. Its device sales were down both sequentially and year over year, however. Developing…

July 9-10, 2013 San Francisco, CA Tickets On Sale Now It might surprise you to hear this, but there are still a lot of people out there using Internet Explorer — and they’re all being barraged by web advertisements. Trying to fix that are the developers of Adblock Plus, who are taking the first steps to porting a version of the popular extension to Microsoft’s web browser. While the Adblock Plus team years ago dismissed the idea of developing for Internet Explorer, it’s since realized just how important the browser is to its overall efforts. Chrome may have taken over, but Internet Explorer still controls a third of the browser market, according to recent numbers from StatCounter. As Adblock Plus lead developer Wladimir Palant notes, the browser can no longer be ignored. But as great as all of that sounds, it’s going to be a while before the average Internet Explorer user will be able to take advantage of Adblock Plus. Right now, the extension is just development build with a semi-function user interface and more than a few bugs — which means it’s going to need a whole lot of work. The situation is a bit worse with Windows 8 and RT, where Microsoft prevents its Metro interface from running third-party code. As Palant points out, this means Adblock Plus won’t work with Windows 8, at least not anytime soon. Photo: Flickr/Cheryl Brind Filed under: Business .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat { width:278px; margin:0px 0px 10px 20px; padding:10px; float:right; border:1px solid #e4e4e4; font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; color:#000; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .logo-date-wrap { width:100%; display:block; float:left; margin-bottom:8px; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat img { float:left; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .date-location { float:right; font-size:12px; line-height:14px; text-align:center; padding-left:7px; padding-top:5px; padding-bottom:3px; border-left:1px solid #e6e6e6; color:#585a5b; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .cta { display:block; clear:both; width:100%; border-radius:5px; border:1px solid #1864b1; color:#fff; text-shadow: 0px -1px 0px rgba(0,0,0,0.3); text-align:center; text-decoration:none; font-weight:600; font-size:18px; line-height:17px; padding:4px 0px 6px 0px; background: #1f80e4; background: -moz-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%, #1862ae 100%); background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,#1f80e4), color-stop(100%,#1862ae)); background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); background: -o-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); background: -ms-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); background: linear-gradient(to bottom,  #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient( startColorstr='#1f80e4', endColorstr='#1862ae',GradientType=0 ); }

Google today launched the first beta version of its Dart SDK and Editor. With this update, Google says, the SDK can now produce significantly smaller and faster JavaScript code and make it easier for Dart developers to deploy their code. The Dart Editor now features an analysis engine that’s 20 percent faster at parsing and analyzing code as you type it, making it a bit less likely that your code won’t run because of a typo. Dart, which developers can compile to JavaScript or run in a special version of Chrome that features a built-in Dart VM, hasn’t quite caught on with developers yet, but that doesn’t mean that Google isn’t putting quite a few resources behind the project. The Dart Editor now also features smarter code completion that is, for example, camel case aware, deletes unused optional parameters automatically after template editing is done and includes a number of other enhancements. The Dart VM, Google says, is now up to 40 percent faster at executing certain benchmarks and even the code that’s compiled to JavaScript is up to 20 percent faster. The Dart team also says that it has greatly improved WebGL performance in Dartium, Google’s special build of Chrome with the built-in Dart VM. It also looks like Google is working to bring its Polymer web components-based UI framework to Dart, though the team currently lists this as a “work in progress.” You can find the full release notes here. Other browser manufacturers haven’t shown much interest in working with Google to integrate Dart into their own browsers (Mozilla, for example, is betting on Rust, JavaScript and asm.js for performance improvements). Even Google hasn’t integrated Dart into Chrome yet, but as the language matures, it’s probably just a matter of time before the first Chrome builds with the Dart VM arrive.