HAXLR8R is a venture fund which focuses on entrepreneurs building hardware devices. It offers seed funding ($25,000), office space as well as mentorship along with the other opportunies for 2-4 person startups to take an idea to a product.
HAXLR8R selects startups to work with twice a year and has a dual location (San Francisco and Shenzhen). Its first batch ran from March to June 2012 and has been widely received as the start of a new hardware revolution.
The Genesis
While it seems this ‘makes much more sense’ these days, the idea came up a little while ago…
Founded by Cyril Ebersweiler, Sean O’Sullivan and Eric Pan, the roots of the program started way back when China.axlr8r was born in 2009. For a reason we still ignore as of today, the summer program for startups based in China incubated not one, but two startups working on hardware startups (including two foreign entrepreneurs coming from abroad).
With a backpack full of lessons learned, Cyril had the chance to meet with the founders of LEAP (David and Michael) and subsequently invested in the company. The experience coming out of this relationship was a final training ground for HAXLR8R, and a final proof of concept at Techcrunch Disrupt with Nextgoals (part of China.axlr8r batch II) convinced us there was a problem to be solved, for entrepreneurs and the sake of innovation.
If you are curious about China.axlr check things out on their website.
HAXLR8R is brought to you by Cyril Ebersweiler and Zach Smith.
Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness. They’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!
Will from FriedCircuits.us has been working on a new daisy-chainable LED Matrix Link prototype which makes use of a Maxim MAX7219 (which he will feature in his upcoming May wedding — fascinating!), so he has been investigating cheap sources for the IC suggested by friends and colleagues. His conclusion? Buyer beware when buying under market value on eBay. Learn more how to spot the fakes from his MobileWill blog:
I have been receiving feedback that I can use eBay suppliers to lower my price on the MAX7219. I had previously considered that option, but after some research I have found that a lot of people are receiving counterfeits on eBay. While some counterfeits may work, their reliability is questionable and that would make my product unreliable. I do not believe that it is “good business” to support businesses and companies which pirate technology and sell it as if it were legitimate. I sincerely hope everyone understands why I am skeptical about using an unknown supplier for parts. Here is a good forum post about coming across the fake variety: http://www.picaxeforum.co.uk/showthread.php?22481-Real-or-fake The more units I can sell initially will increase my per-part discount, which will allow me to lower my selling price.
For example if you look at the picture above, the line across the top is inline with pin 2. f you do a search on eBay or even Google image search you can see that they line up with pin 3. Also mine has a notch and the eBay ones all have a dimple. Not to mention there is no way someone can go to Maxim and get a price much lower then their lowest price they have.
Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness. They’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!
Internet domain names turned 28 this past Friday. This convention that puts a human-friendly face to the Internet has played a tremendous role in how all of us who do business on the Internet present ourselves and find each other. Check out this article about this anniversary over at Mashable:
The entire Internet forgot it was grandpa’s birthday. Symbolics.com — the first domain name ever registered — turned 28 today, and just about no one had anything nice to say.
The site was first registered on March 15, 1985—the same year Bill Watterson published his first Calvin and Hobbes strip, Mike Tyson debuted as a pro boxer, and Mark Zuckerberg was born to pair of lonely Cray-2 supercomputers. In Internet years, Symbolics is ancient, a veritable methuselah.
Symbolics (the company) built computer systems in Cambridge, Mass., making workstations that ran on a software language called Lisp. In fact, Symbolics was making computer workstations before the term “workstation” even existed.
The personal computing boom pretty much left Symbolics in the dust, though the company is still chugging along, making highly specialized programming environments. It’s now operating under a new domain, however—symbolics-dk.com. How unhistorical.
A so-called “a virtual real estate investment firm,” XF.com Investments, snapped up the domain in 2009 for an undisclosed sum. The company’s head, Aron Meystadt, has sinced turned Symbolics.com into an Internet museum, of sorts, that includes a brief history of the domain—but also his personal blog.
He wrote in a post today celebrating its birthday: “I know you’re here because you read, somewhere, that today is the anniversary of the first registered domain name. I am using this unique URL for my personal blog about domain names, e-Business and startup ideas. If you choose to stick around, that would be fine with me.”
It’s like some dude parked his recliner right on the steps of Plymouth Rock and asked people to listen to his business ideas while they took in a little bit of sightseeing. We need an Internet historical association, or something. Just look at what’s happened to Friendster.
Anyway, look. If you own one of the 250,000,000 websites in the world, take a moment to wish Symbolics a happy birthday today. Be kind to your elders.
Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness. They’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!
Here’s a chance to see the inside of the Solidoodle factory and learn about their plans to take their business global. From TechHive:
This is the sort of manufacturing future that Sam Cervantes imagines for the entire world. But before you’re inner luddite starts shouting “down with the machine,” these devices aren’t necessarily replacing humans: The rest of the space is filled with workers that assemble these Solidoodle 3D printers.
Aside from a machined frame and a couple of 3D-printed parts, practically every piece of the printer is put together by human hands—from the extruding head to the controller board on the back. All these machines are made to order by hand right here in Brooklyn—that’s’ something you can’t say about a lot of factories located anywhere in America.
Raffaele Stuparitz, the shop’s Consumer Manager and self-proclaimed “renaissance man,” told me that the store started up in September 2011 with just four workers. Since then, the factory has grown to a workforce of 60 employees with over 4000 printers shipped out.
On Thursday, Solidoodle held a press conference to announce its ambitious plans to spread globally. The company announced that its first international 3D printing factory will open this summer in Moscow. Meanwhile, a partnership with the Brazilian company Linotech 3D will mark Solidoodle’s first official distributor outside of the US. There are also plans to expand to other markets including Canada, South Korea, Japan, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus.
On the domestic front, Solidoodle has partnered with Ensemble to launch a Manhattan-based 3D Pavilion located in Bryant Park. The space, located at 1150 6thAvenue, 6th floor, will be used as a co-working space to help entrepreneurs start their businesses….
Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness. They’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!
This week brings promising news in the fight against patent trolls. We have written before about how a broken patent system has led to an explosion of lawsuits by patent trolls (companies that assert patents as a business model instead of creating products). In the hands of trolls, patents become a tax on innovation.
Rep. Peter DeFazio, along with Rep. Jason Chaffetz, has re-introduced the SHIELD Act (the backronym stands for Saving High-Tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes) in the House of Representatives. The SHIELD Act (H.R. 845, pdf) is designed to help the innocent victims of patent trolls.
Patent trolls use the sky-high cost of litigation as a weapon. It costs millions to defend a patent lawsuit. So while a few targets—including Newegg and Twitter—have fought back and won, even large companies are understandably reluctant to spend a fortune and waste employee time fighting a lawsuit. And smaller companies, like start-ups, might not have the resources to defend a patent suit at all. So even if the troll’s claims are weak, it can pressure its victims into settlement.
The SHIELD Act will help fix this problem. Under the Act, if the patent troll loses in court (because the patent is found to be invalid or there is no infringement), then it pays the other side’s costs and legal fees. We think this proposal—which is also one of the reforms proposed at our Defend Innovation project—is a great first step.
Momentum is building for patent reform. President Obama recently acknowledged that we need new laws to deal with patent trolls. This is the perfect time to tell Congress that it needs to act.
Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness. They’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!
Yes, we are talking Star Wars, and yes these are actual real-world crowdfunding efforts currently underway, though both are tens of millions short of being funded at present. But the existence of these projects brings up an interesting question. Crowdfunding has been successfully implemented in the past many times to support the production of products that are by nature satirical and whimsical, or as in the case of The Oatmeal/Funny Junk fight as a parody stunt to raise awareness of what an artist felt was poor behavior on the part of a content hosting business on the Internet. But what happens when these platforms are used to crowdfund the production of real world versions of imaginary machines, and are successfully funded when the idea is really popular even when the project itself is evil-mad-scientist-grade bonkers?
Well, these projects won’t be funded — that’s part of the joke — but it does cause one to wonder what would happen if every Star Wars true believer (and everyone who thinks it might be funny to support the funding of a science fiction solution to a real world problem) pitched in. While there are no end to stories of crowdfunding efforts whose producers cannot deliver the proposed project, what if a crowd of really smart folks from the Adafruit community got together and…well…followed through?
Here’s a fun write up from Huffington Post that draws together a bit of the story behind these projects:
The original ‘open source’ Death Star Kickstarter was itself started in response to the White House’s denial of a 35,000-strong petition to build the unimaginably powerful space station on the grounds that it did not support blowing up planets.
“In November 2012 the people asked for a death star. The government said NO! In light of continuing threats we should build it ourselves,” the Death Star project’s leaders said.
Gnut.co.uk are asking for £20 million, as the down payment on an eventual bill of around £542 quadrillion.
They add that their design would include enough chicken wire to stop any attempt to destroy it in the manner achieved by Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars movies.
But their protestations of building the weapon for the common good were not accepted by all, leading to the creation of the open-source Rebel Alliance and their project to build an X-Wing.
They said:
On Feb 5, 2013, www.gnut.co.uk, whom we believe to be a subversive tactics unit of the evil Galactic Empire, launched a Kickstarter campaign to crowdsource a Death Star. At first, we laughed.
When we stopped laughing (because it kind of hurt, how hard we were laughing) we realized that it was an ingenious plot by the Empire to use the power of the people against us!
We can’t let this new Death Star go unchallenged, so we’re raising funds to form a new Rebel Alliance and construct a fleet of proton torpedo armed X-Wing fighters to take down this new Death Star.
So far they have raised just over £100,000 – and add that one of their future updates will include “iPhone and Siri integration”.
Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness. They’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!
We’re very excited to host the Official SXSW Hardware Startup Meetup at SXSW Create!
Note: SXSW Create is open to the public, No Badge Required!
There are dozens of great hardware talks and panels on the SXSW agenda meaning a lot of folks interested in hardware will be in Austin, including members and organizers of Hardware Startup groups from around the world.
Lets get together with these designers, hackers, makers and engineers to make new connections and learn about what’s going on in the greater Hardware Startup community.
Agenda:
12:30 = Welcome & Intro to HW Startup meetups
12:40 – 1 = HW startup meetup organizers give updates on their groups, members
Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness. They’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!
For a couple of years now, a crowd-funding efforts for music, movies, video games and comics have taken advantage of the arrival of affordable desktop 3D printers and print services to create unique premium perks related to their projects-in-development that in the past would have cost thousands of dollars with minimum order runs in the tens of thousands.
A new trend has started to appear where projects — even those skewing much more to bits than atoms — will embed 3D model files themselves in their project pitches. What’s more, in some cases those with a 3D printer can download and produce the models themselves, reducing production costs for giveaways to pennies. This trajectory suggests that in the future projects of all sorts will document their elements with embeddable and downloadable 3D models, an interesting challenge for the rise of “Mouseless” tablets and phones as a dominant mode of browsing on the Internet.
We wanted to create a game which featured a mixture of several genres in ways we hadn’t seen before, specially in mobile phones and tablets. The game had to be fun, hectic, strategic, and have great replayability. We have seen our good share of games. We wanted to see a game that combined player accuracy, strategy, and tower defense elements, and mix all that in a fun sci-fi space setting.
Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness. They’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!
Interesting project packs an entire makers workshop into a shipping container — as the post describes, it “works as a tinkerer’s paradise, but it’s also meant to cost-effectively produce meaningful quantities of real products.” From Instructables. Thanks to Luke Iseman for the tip!
I’ve built 2 off-grid, digital, open-source factories out of 20′ shipping containers, and I want to help others build their own.
Each factory cost ~$30,000 in total, including power generation and tooling. This means that for around the price of a nicer new car, you can make many aspects of a car: sub-millimeter-precision cuts through 3/4″ metal, welding steel up to 1″ thick / aluminum up to 3/8″, a wide variety of metalworking / woodworking tools, and a lot more.
Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness. They’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!
A couple of weeks ago, a handful of MakerBot staff members had the pleasure of visiting the Industry City Distillery in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, to learn not only how they produce and distribute their “small batch” vodka, but also how they are using the experience of designing a custom distillation process from the ground up to re-imagine what it means to create a scalable distillation pipeline. (Click the photo above or here to see the complete slideshow of the trip.)
Taking a walking tour through the whole operation lead by the ICD core team was a real pleasure, with a special highlight of learning how they have perfected a continuous fermentation process to create a high grade alcohol at the beginning of the distillation process using a technique used to produce insulin for the medical industry. Larger breweries and distilleries had dismissed the continuous fermentation process as too difficult and expensive, but ICD will be using their research to help them build out additional production lines as they continue to scale up their business to meet the demand.
Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness. They’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!
Here’s an interesting profile of a Shenzen maker from the low-cost pick-and-place scene, shared by Hoektronics.com:
I’ve been living in Shenzhen for almost 2 years now, and I’m continually amazed by this city. The people here are creative, it has the best resources for building things you can find anywhere in the world, an amazing climate, and friendly people everywhere. This is the story of one particular Maker I’ve met in Shenzhen, Mr. Chen.
In my ongoing obsession with digital fabrication and small volume manufacturing, I stumbled upon the Chinese SMT Pick and Place scene. It started with the TM-240A that I found on Taobao and through that I discovered www.diysmt. om and oursmt.com. It turns out there are a bunch of people building and using low-cost pick and place machines for actual production of real products. I had to find out more.
I used my super-crappy chinese skills and posted in the diysmt forum to see if anyone was local to Shenzhen and could show me their machine. I got a couple responses, and Mr. Chen agreed to meet me and show me his operation. Always down for an adventure, I agreed and got his address. My assistant/translator and I hopped in a taxi and away we went….
Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness. They’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!
Here’s some news from Charles from the Democratic People’s Republic of Chibikart project — a compelling discussion of his process incorporating motor sensor elements into his project, and the boards he will likely release as an official chibikart product soon — thinking that is already being picked up by other DIY motor-related projects such as TinyBike.
They’ve made some appearances here and there on my website and others already, but if you haven’t seen them yet, now is the time that I’ll make them public. For a while, I’ve been sproadically making Hall Effect sensor “adapter boards” that can be mounted to R/C outrunners for sensored commutation uses, needed for most ground / vehicular applications. It’s about to get way less sporadic.
Yep, that’s a big cake of them to the left. I’ve also added sizes to the collection. Now, 80mm (“melon”) motors and 50mm outrunners are supported, also. I’m still a bit peeved that Hobbyking had to make their new SK3 “63″ motors actually 59mm in diameter, necessitating a fourth board design. These boards were sent to my usual slow-and-easy PCB house, MyroPCB, and done up in black.
Why 50mm? My general belief is that 50mm outrunners are about the smallest you can really use for a vehicle before they start getting too fast (Kv rating too high) to easily gear down. I foresee the 50mm motors being useful more in scooters than anything else, where a low profile helps compared to the chubbier 63mm motors, unless your scooter is the size of a small bus.
But the other reason is that the Democratic People’s Republic of Chibikart (Hereafter known as just “chibikart” because why did I pick such a name?) uses them, and on a go-kart where pushing off with your leg is just ruining the point, sensors are pretty critical. I’ve been at a loss to explain how to add sensors to the motors because there is so much customization involved, so Chibikart was published without sensors, but with the sensor boards and attendant plastic ring things and automagically calibrating controllers, I think I’m getting pretty close to an “official solution”.
Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness. They’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!
Here’s a thoughtful post about businesses practices at both end of the assistive technology spectrum from Adafruit community member Chris Young, who has shared his work before on Adafruit’s Show and Tell:
There seems to be a great disparity in the cost of these devices. On one hand we have the open source DIY maker community designing gadgets and giving away schematics and software for free. On the other hand we have people commercializing these projects and building businesses around them.
I’m all for people getting paid for their inventions even if the invention is designed with altruistic motives such as helping the disabled, teaching underprivileged children, or leveraging technology in undeveloped countries. I appreciate that some of these devices are in such small demand that the overhead to produce and sell them is great because they are built by hand and sold in small quantities. On the other hand some amazing work is being done in the DIY maker community that shares its designs and software for free and allows people to adapt it and further innovate it to meet their needs. It tends to make one wonder if the standard business model is really the best way to get products in the hands of people who need them.
Here are couple of examples… In previous installments of this blog I showed you how I showed off my IR remote control for my TV that was built with an Arduino microcontroller. My venue was Adafruit Industries weekly Show-and-Tell video chat via Google+ hangouts. This week’s hangout included a demonstration from a guy named Dino Tinitigan who had showed off some of his robotic projects in the past. But this time he showed a power wheelchair that can be controlled by tilting your head while wearing a helmet. Although he’s invested a lot of his own design work into it, it pretty much is built from off-the-shelf products the kind of which one could buy at Adafruit or other maker supply houses. He’s demonstrating that anyone with a little bit of maker ability and some time to spare can create incredibly useful technology. I don’t know if he is really creating this stuff as open-source hardware and software or if he intends to commercialize it but in either event he’s creating something and sharing it as a demonstration of what is capable and does not seem to be working out of a corporate model. Click here to see the Show-and-Tell video that demonstrates this.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is another device I stumbled onto today. It is called a Tecla device. Click here for details. It allows you to use pushbuttons or joystick or other adaptive devices to control touchscreen devices such as android and iOS phones and tablets. This is an amazing accomplishment even though it doesn’t allow 100% full access it does allow some use of such gadgets. It is Arduino-based so I understand the underlying technology. However it is only available as a commercial product and the cost is $289 Canadian. My initial reaction was Holy $#!+ That’s outrageous! On further review it probably is a reasonable price for a commercially built product with all of the capability it includes. It has a variety of interfaces that are designed to work with pushbuttons and input controls that meet an industry standard for adaptive devices. It includes the capability to use one’s wheelchair joystick as an input device. Given that it has to be designed to work with a wide variety of devices and it is a commercial enterprise I can understand the price. At the point when I can no longer use my iPod touch, I will probably be buying one of these at whatever price they want to charge for it. I’m sure the people behind it are decent people. They describe themselves as not just for profit. And I certainly have no trouble with doing well while doing good as it were. On the other hand… If I knew what I was doing I could build something similar for about $75 worth of parts.
There has to be a happy medium in here somewhere. Perhaps an open source design that demonstrates the basic functionality and would allow others to adapted as needed combined with a fully developed commercial product with all the bells and whistles for those who don’t have a friend who is a DIY maker aficionado to put it together for them.
Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness they’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!
Here’s a great round-up of interesting Edu-Tech Startups from this year — including … Joylabz / MaKey-MaKey! I wasn’t familiar with several of these, so I really appreciated her list.
It probably goes without saying, but I’ll type it out anyway: 2012 was an incredible year for education technology startups. Launches. Updates. Funding. Acquisitions. Adoption. Headlines. Disruptions. Drama. Politics. Buzz. Hype. Revolutions. And stuff.
…It’s my blog. My rules. My rubric — as much as there’s a rubric here. This isn’t some scientifically constructed list of the startups with the most registered users or most revenue or biggest Series A round or most popular iPad app or most Techcrunch headlines. I chose each of these for lots of different reasons (reasons I explain as I highlight them in turn): great technology, great product, great vision, great founders…
Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness they’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!
LEGO is a beloved brand among makers and many cite early experiences with LEGO construction sets as being the inspiration to drive future engineering interests. However, even though LEGO Mindstorms still plays a crucial role in teaching generations of young makers (and their adult mentors) how to solve a wide range of robotics challenges, the actual ground-level consumer LEGO kits have shifted from blocks and instructions suggesting a range of possible creations to paint-by-numbers movie replicas full of proprietary single use pieces that might never be used in a future invention. This article tackles a few of the questions parents and educators are starting to ask about the direction LEGO has taken: while they have turned around the business financially with their movie and game franchise projects, have they abandoned the spirit that made their product such a life-changing experience?
For generations of American children and their parents, Legos were the ultimate do-it-yourself plaything. Little plastic bricks, with scant instructions, just add imagination.
In a wired world, they would now seem the ultimate anachronism, the only click being the sound of blocks snapping together. This holiday season, though, Lego is again among the hottest brands, and not just for the blocks, but a raft of Lego-related video games, children’s books and a TV spinoff — many of which are hugely popular in their categories.
In leading this revival of Lego, and creating a multimedia juggernaut, executives have shown great imagination. But some parents and researchers worry that the company’s gain has come at a cost to its tiny consumers: diminishing the demand for their imagination, the very element that made the Lego brand famous in the first place.
Even when actual bricks are involved, today’s construction sets are often tied to billion-dollar franchises like “Star Wars” and “Lord of the Rings” — and the story lines therein — and invite users to follow detailed directions, not construct their own creations from whole brick. It’s less open-ended, some parents and researchers say, and more like paint-by-numbers.
“When I was a kid, you got a big box of bricks and that was it,” said Tracy Bagatelle-Black, 45, a public relations consultant in Santa Clarita, Calif., north of Los Angeles. “What stinks about Lego sets now is that they’re not imaginative at all.”
Not that she can resist the hue and cry from her children. For Hanukkah, Molly, her 11-year-old daughter, got two Lego products, neither of them blocks; her son, Alex, 5, got even more, including a Lego Darth Vader Clock, a Lego board game, a Lego sticker book — at the top of his list — and a Lego “Ninjago” video game.
Oh, yes, and he also got some traditional Legos, sort of: a Lego Super Hero Captain America and Lego Marvel Super Heroes set, both of which come with detailed instructions.
For their part, officials at Lego — a privately held, Denmark-based company — say their efforts in books, television and video games are still creatively minded and aimed at driving kids “back to the playroom.”
Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness they’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!
Here’s how Fran makes all of the Frantone PCBs for her products!
Every printed circuit board that ever went into a Frantone product after 1999 was hand made by myself. That is a lot of circuit boards! There are so many tutorials about how to make “do it yourself” PCB’s, and any of them might be fine for prototyping a simple design or one off board, but imagine how hard it would be to mass manufacture dozens of different PCB designs to the tightest possible tolerances for an entire product line for a decade, all by hand? Well, so far as I am aware, I am the only one in the boutique effects world crazy enough to have tried it – and really done it. And this is how….
Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness they’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!
No matter what stage your business is in – just starting, recently launched, ready to scale – this year’s festival is designed for you. There is nothing more important to an entrepreneur than good information, sound advice, a supportive and generous community of peers, and great conversation. This year we focus on the nuts and bolts: what you need to know to make your business a success from people who have been where you are now.
The goal of the WE Festival remains the same. We hope to sow the seeds for a community of women entrepreneurs; to expose women who have not yet taken the entrepreneurial leap, the pre-entrepreneurs, to women who have.
Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness they’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!
The Accelerators. There’s a new blog at WSJ about startups/enterpreneurship. One of the writers is Joanne Wilson, a leader in New York angel investment and friend to Ayah Bdeir! There’s lots of great stuff there including screencasts, Q&A, etc.
For people who are starting a business, or just thinking about starting a business, The Accelerators is anchored by contributions from a diverse group of mentors– successful entrepreneurs, angel investors and venture capitalists, and technology and business experts. The mentors will address a different question each week.
Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness they’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!
The MakeIT NYC Meetup switched to a larger venue to accommodate the interest in their Secrets of Kickstarter panel — sign up while there are still slots!
Also, added for the benefit of those attending is a panel discussing New York’s Next Top Makers Competition. From their updated announcement:
MakeIt NYC is proud to present Kickstarter’s own Stephanie Pereira and an all-star panel of Kickstarter luminaries! If you’re considering doing a Kickstarter campaign, or even if you’re just curious to learn some inside ball, don’t miss this! Five successful projects tell you how they did it, and answer your questions, too.
Update: New York’s Next Top Makers Competition!
We added an extra half hour to the event, because we’re being joined by representatives from NYCEDC to talk about their New York’s Next Top Makers Competition. Yup, cash, prizes and bragging rights for doing what you do best.
The panel will be focused about how the panelists took their ideas and designs for real, physical things from the drawing board to delivering them as rewards at the conclusion of a successful campaign, and Stephanie will be sprinkling in her accumulated wisdom about Kickstarter. Topics include:
Making a successful Kickstarter Video,
Supporting your campaign with PR,
Kickstarter metrics and statistics,
Taking your idea through the prototype and fabrication stages,
Low-volume and short-run manufacturing tips,
Intellectual property and other legal issues,
Surprises along the way,
What the new changes to Kickstarter mean to them, and to you.
Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness they’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!
Printable catalog (PDF)
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