Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Wikipedia Features Z Corp. 3D Prints for 10th Anniversary

Today’s guest blog comes from Elizabeth Gullam, director of marketing, Ideate Inc., a Z Corp. channel partner in the northwest USA.

Happy Birthday, Wikipedia!


The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit celebrated its tenth anniversary last month - what a milestone!

Whether fact-checking something at work or helping with kids' homework, many of us use Wikipedia as a go-to reference. And think about it...Wikipedia is written collaboratively by largely anonymous Internet volunteers who contribute without pay. Anyone with Internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles. How powerful is that, having a community share knowledge?

Not long ago, our friends over at the design build studio Because We Can worked with Wikimedia to remodel their offices. Jeffrey McGrew and his creative cohorts did an amazing job. When it came time to put together the components of the Wikipedia 10 design concept, Jeffrey was asked to provide small 3D printed models. Needing to print 3D models that could be used, photographed, touched and passed around, Jeffrey contacted us to make his Blender model come to life.

Using the Z Corporation ZPrinter 650 in our San Francisco office, Ideate printed 14 of the 3D Wikipedia globes that appear in the Wikipedia 10 campaign, as shown in the photo above, in less than a day. The ZPrinter 650 works great for multicolor physical prototypes of real world objects, design elements or scale model buildings. We were glad to have a small part in helping Wikipedia look good on their birthday!

Next time you look up a word on Wikipedia, tip your hat to the community of users who are working diligently to build a powerful, multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia.

http://www.zcorp.com

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