Autodesk acquires DIY Instructables community

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In its third acquisition this year, Autodesk, creator of the design, engineering and entertainment software, has acquired San Francisco Instructables, popular online community where people can upload, discuss, and collaborate on a wide range of do-it-yourself projects.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Instructables was founded by engineer, CEO Eric Wilhelm and in August 2005. You can read his story here.
Here's how Autodesk, which announced purchase of online photo editing service Pixlr and modeling software company Blue Ridge Numerics earlier this year, resins, this acquisition:

Millions of Autodesk customers worldwide are passionate about making things – whether in their professional life and personal life. Instructables will Autodesk customers thriving community of like-minded people, smart people with whom they can learn and share personal inspiration or hobby.
Instructables members benefit from Autodesk's scale and powerful design tools, will allow the community to grow and share their ideas with a wider audience.

If the DIY community, which makes the tick Instructables will be as enthusiastic about this acquisition remains to be seen. You can stay informed of the views of its members via the previous link and forum post announces the acquisition (which you can find here).
For what it's worth Autodesk intends to retain the Instructables brand and said that he would continue to operate Instructables.com while maintaining its authenticity. This is William's take on this issue:

All here at the headquarters of the Instructables is happy, because this would be awesome for the Instructables community.Instructables will still be the same site, you'll love: we'll keep the Instructables name and URL, is the whole team, our policy has not changed, you still hold the copyright to your designs, we will still run awesome competitions and robot isn't going anywhere.
However, we now will have the resources to achieve some improvements to the site I know, our authors and the community will love. Autodesk gives us the scale and support to grow and improve the Instructables, build some large applications, and our goal of creating a positive impact on the world. Each team will be Instructables Autodesk employees, but we will continue to wear our t-shirts robot with pride.

While the members of the MIT Media Lab Wilhelm and Saul Griffith founded Squid Labs, engineering and technology company specializing in design and consulting. Instructables started as an internal project of Squid Labs, and Wilhelm later spun it as an independent company.
Instructables subsequently raised funding from O'Reilly Alpha Technology Ventures and basic industries, among others, although I haven't been able to pin down as much.
Update: according to the profile last Xconomy, Instructables upgraded "just shy of 2 million.
This article also teaches us that Instructables currently boasts more than 2 million registered users and a collection of 55 000 how-to articles written by more than 20 000 participants.

View the original article here