TinkerCAD reopens, purchased by AutoDesk | Hacker News Reader

TinkerCAD reopens, purchased by AutoDesk

blog.tinkercad.com

41 pointsiancarroll26 comments

Open articleView on HN

I'm Kai, one of the founders of Tinkercad. If anyone has questions I'm happy to answer here.

It seems like tinkercad.com is dead, I am wrong?

We did a quick deploy to fix one account class that hadn't been moved to the new free plan. The site is back up again.

Edit: The site was down for 3 min and 32 s.

Might still have problems with some accounts?

I'm a former paid user, cancelled when you announced and I started teaching myself competing software. I still get a "your account is suspended" instead of access under the free plan.

Can you please mail team@tinkercad.com with your login email and we will look into it. Sounds like a bug.

Is AutoCAD going to offer a way to print to TinkerCAD?

Are you talking about exporting model data or doing 3D printing from within AutoCAD?

A print to tinkercad button that would offer printing in-app.

I'm not privy to the AutoCAD roadmap but I would expect them to integrate with the consumer apps first.

What's happening to Airstone? Is the team now back working on Tinkercad instead?

This was a pure asset deal, no personnel moved to Autodesk. The team will continue working full time on Airstone.

Could you elaborate on the HPC elements of what you're doing? I'm somewhat unfamiliar with the simulation/modeling tooling ecosystem (beyond a fuzzy "mix of computational geometry, physics and numerical computing probably happens here" view point).

What are some good starting points for understanding the landscape of such tools?

Context: I'm a few months away from rolling out (from my company, Wellposed) some pretty interesting HPC grade numerical computing products/tools and it seems like the simulation/modelling ecosystem might be one segment that might find my Wellposed tools intriguing.

I think we might have something out of interest for Wellposed. Fire me an email at kai@airstonelabs.com and lets talk more.

I don't have any questions per se but I was genuinely sorry when I heard TinkerCAD was shutting down. Very glad to know you guys have revived the project.

Thanks! We are very happy with the outcome as well.

Congrats Kai + Team TinkerCAD

Any word on the price of the assets in terms of figures?

Deal terms were not disclosed. That said Airstone is planning to fund development using the acquired funds.

Congrats Kai and team.

Interested to know how this happened. Did you shopped Tinkercad before closing it down and Autocad approached only after shutdown?

The short answer is no, we only started selling the assets three weeks ago, a few months after announcing the shutdown.

The longer answer is that selling part of your business while continuing in a business that is in any way related is usually very challenging from a legal standpoint. The lawyers call it the "spaghetti effect", basically the IP tends to be really tangled. We had serendipitous developments a few weeks back in how Airstone is built which let us create a hermetic barrier between the Airstone and Tinkercad IP's. Before that happened we had no way of selling the IP without taking an unacceptable risk.

Kai, thanks for the straight answer, this is very educational. I hadn't thought about spaghetti effect ever before.

This is wonderful news! TinkerCAD fits perfectly as a bridge into AutoDesk's 123D family of modeling applications. I wouldn't be surprised to see TinkerCAD integrated with 123D Design in the future. It's also a great way to introduce younger audiences to the AutoDesk brand as a long-term bridge to 3D Max and Maya.

Wow....the sheer joy from the commenters is quite telling.

I don't think I have ever seen that sort of reaction for an acquisition of any web property before - except maybe YouTube going to Google and not MSFT.

What an unexpected outcome! Wow!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com