A Chat With Maxim Lobovsky, Co-Founder Of Formlabs

Formlabs CEO Sees Boston as a Hardware Hub

I had the unique opportunity to sit down with Maxim Lobovsky, co-founder of Formlabs, when we had our meet up in Boston. While the audio was a little rough – it’s hard to handle big, happy crowds – I think his insight on 3D printing is important and it was a great chance to sit down with Lobovsky while he was head-down in his business.

Max has been working in a fascinating space and his company is just getting started. The Form 1 is their first project and I was sufficiently excited to call the printer the true future of 3D printing.

Max and I chatted about Boston, 3D printed guns, and the cool stuff he’s made over the past few years. It was a great opportunity to talk to an amazing Boston-based entrepreneur in a very cool setting.

Vine Co-Founder Colin Kroll Steps Down From Day-To-Day Role

This afternoon Vine co-founder Colin Kroll announced in a tweet, fittingly, that he has stepped back from “day-to-day” duty at the service, and that he will remain an adviser to the product.

This marks the second departure of a founder from Vine. Dom Hofmann departed the company in January.

Twitter purchased Vine in late 2012 for a reported $30 million. The nearly conjoined departure could indicate that they had wrapped up a vesting period or contract mandating their staying at the social firm.

Vine, after its Twitter acquisition, managed to spike to the top of the iOS store. It now ranks comfortably in the top 50 in the U.S. market, a more than decent position. It’s worth considering how much more Twitter would have been willing to pay for Vine had it sold six months later when it was the most popular app in the U.S.

TechCrunch reached out to Twitter for comment on the departure but it only said it had nothing to add to Kroll’s announcement.

Twitter’s purchase of Vine has similarities to Facebook’s purchase of Instagram — two large, graying social services picking up more nimble, mobile-focused services with strong youth buy-in. Instagram and Vine have both performed strongly since their purchase. Instagram, for example, recently passed the 200 million monthly active count.

IMAGE BY FLICKR USER Shardayyy UNDER CC BY 2.0 LICENSE (IMAGE HAS BEEN CROPPED)