The Lean Hardware Startup: From Prototype To Production. Editor’s note: Cyril Ebersweiler is the founder of the pioneering hardware startup accelerator HAXLR8R (which is now looking for applicants) and Partner at SOSVentures. Benjamin Joffe is an expert on startup ecosystems, angel investor and Advisor at HAXLR8R. Both invest in companies around the world and spent over a decade in China and Japan. This is Part 1 of a series. If the printing press was about “anyone can read,” the web about “anyone can write,” the hardware ecosystem changed enough to say today “anyone can build.” Yet, despite successes like Square, Jawbone, and Fitbit, hardware startups continue to look daunting to entrepreneurs and investors alike.
The first challenge for hardware entrepreneurs is to get from your first prototype with 3D-printed parts, duct tape and cardboard to production-ready. Steve Blank, a key inspiration in the Lean Startup movement, famously said “No business plan survives contact with the customer.” Design with the right components. 1. The Hardware Startup Landscape - The Hardware Startup. If you’re reading this book, it’s likely because you’ve decided to start, or are thinking about starting, a hardware company. Congratulations! Launching a hardware startup is an exciting and challenging undertaking. As the saying goes, “Hardware is hard.” You have to navigate the complexities of prototyping and manufacturing, the daunting optimization problems of pricing and logistics, and the challenges of branding and marketing. And you’ll be doing it all on a pretty tight budget. But today—right now! --is probably the best time in history to be starting your company. Before we get into the specifics of getting your business off the ground, let’s set the stage by discussing some important influences that have brought the ecosystem to where it is today.
Today’s hardware entrepreneurs stand on the shoulders of early makers. Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, which first appeared in 1968, was one of the foundational resources of what became the Maker movement. Small-Batch Manufacturing. Делать hardware стартапы становится проще / Блог компании Navigator campus. Фаблаб Политех | Фаблаб Политех, Санкт-Петербург, Россия. Buildit Hardware Accelerator | F6S. Buildit. Хакатон APPS4ALL в Москве / Блог компании Samsung. Equipment at Fab Lab Manchester - Fab Lab Manchester - Welcome to the Fab Lab Manchester website. Digital manufacturing technology At the heart of Fab Lab is digital manufacturing technology, combining 2D and 3D design with the latest fabrication technology.
Embracing a broad spectrum of methods ranging from CNC machining to 3D printing, it can produce a single unique product from a digital design in a matter of minutes - and at a very low cost in comparison to traditional tooling methods. Fab Lab Manchester also hosts a number of other technologies and equipment which provide broad manufacturing capability, including precision laser cutters and moulding and milling equipment through to electronic components and circuit boards. Our equipment is available for individual and commercial use and includes: Booking equipment Commercial users can book Fab Lab equipment Tuesday - Thursday. Different groups can use the facilities at the same time or the Lab can be booked exclusively, depending on your requirements. On Fridays and Saturdays, Fab Lab provides free open access for all. The Power of Making | Fab Labs UK.
I used to have a separate website: The Power of Making. I got confused about what would be there, and what here, so heaven knows readers must have been confused. Today the web host for PoM want me to renew: seems like a good time to move everything over! Hi, I’m James Hardiman, and I’m passionate about how Making helps us to re-discover who we really are. I “borrowed” the name for the original PoM website from the Power of Making exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England. I went to the V&A to see the Industrial Revolution 2.0 exhibit, a part of the 2011 London Design festival. But I spotted the book of the exhibition, bought it, and had a “road to Damascus” experience, right there!
For some time I had been playing with various simple technologies that helped me to make stuff: Arduino, 3D printers, “Cartesian Robots” and so on. The simple recommendation in the book is that it has value if it can move someone to go “wow!” And here’s another: Aiming (much) higher than Hackspaces and FabLabs… | Funding Startups (& other impossibilities) Exclusive: Hardware hack space Lemnos Labs gets new startups and new partner. Lemnos Labs, the San Francisco hardware incubator, is setting itself up for a busy spring. The hack space has a named Eric Klein (pictured) as a partner and brought startups Sproutling and Pantry in house. This brings the number of Lemnos startups to 11 and the number of partners to three. The news also showcases how the evolution of the internet of things is moving beyond deep tech and connected gadgets into everyday life.
The two startups deal with issues near and dear to my own heart: parenting and food. The kiosks work by having workers swipe their credit card to unlock the door. On the parenting side, Sproutling offers a sensor system for babies that wraps around an infant’s ankle and monitors its vital signs. Both startups have received an undisclosed amount of funding from Lemnos as well as space in the facility. It’s also the reason that Klein, a former Nokia and Apple product executive, has decided to join as a partner as opposed to building his own hardware startup. Hackerspace a Breeding Ground for Start-Ups, Entrepreneurs. Sacramento’s fledgling Hacker Lab spurring innovation beyond Silicon Valley. One-hundred miles east of Silicon Valley in a former tattoo parlor, members of the second-largest hackerspace in California are hoping to make a different kind of mark by advancing technology innovation in the state capital, a region known for government, clean tech and sustainable tech, but not high tech.
Hacker Lab founders Gina Lujan and Eric Ullrich are driven by the belief that every community should have access to a space to learn about and advance technology. (Co-founder Charles Blas not pictured.) “We are changing the world by providing community resources for education, innovation and creation,” said Eric Ullrich, a co-founder of Hacker Lab in Sacramento. “It’s all very exciting. This whole thing is like catching a big, old tsunami and saying, ‘Wow, this is huge,’ and you need to stay on. Hacker Lab is an incubator of sorts for technology startups that occupies a 10,480-square-foot campus near downtown. Game accelerator | Game funding and incubator – GameFounders.com. Startup Canada Communities » Hackerspace. If you are the type of person who loves to get your hands on power tools, or revels at the thought of making new gizmos and innovative thingamabobs, find out where your local Hacker Space, Maker Space or Fabrication (Fab) Lab is. Often they will be connected to coworking establishments, are possibly connected to local colleges, and are geared towards community building.
From Victoria Makerspace and Lethbridge Hackspace in western Canada to ProtoShed St. John’s, SimCoLab in Barrie (see 3D Printer photo at left) and Queen’s Hacks in Kingston towards the west, Canada is experiencing a mashup of art, technology, invention and creativity. For a comprehensive list of Maker spaces across Canada and further details, see the HackerSpace Wiki.
These communities come in as many shapes and sizes as the members themselves. Toronto is the home of Maker Kids, a space dedicated to youth innovators and creative types. Episode 2: Accelerator or Hackerspace? | Robot Launch Pad | ACCELERATE YOUR ROBOT STARTUP. Is Robot Launchpad an accelerator or a hackerspace? Both. Right now we’re testing the viability of opening a robot hackerspace. Theoretically, this makes a lot of sense. I believe that the hackerspace and maker movement are fueling a resurgence of growth in hardware startups. “The real revolution here is not in the creation of the technology, but the democratization of the technology. This is a logical extension of Anderson’s 2004 book, The Long Tail, which applied Mandelbrot’s statistical long tail distributions to the worlds of web commerce and manufacturing. Although cooperatives and microfinance are far from new concepts, the last decade has seen many online experiments in crowdsourcing finance, with initial success stories like Marillion, ArtistShare, Sellaband, Electric Eel Shock, fundavlog and Jason Kottke, occurring primarily in music and the arts.
Creative tinkering has always been popular, as TV shows “How it’s Made” (2001) and “Mythbusters” (2002) demonstrate. Beth Kolko: “Hackademia – Leveraging the conflict between expertise and innovation to create disruptive technologies” Posted by Ethan on Jan 25th, 2012 in Berkman | 1 comment Beth Kolko is the sort of academic who follows her muse from one fascinating topic to another. Colin Maclay traces some of her past work from a doctorate in English through research on use of technology in the developing world, through her current research on human-centered design and engineering at the University of Washington.
For the past couple of years, Beth has been focused on research for a book on hackers and makers. This is a project that comes from her daily life, where she’s spent the last six years participating in hacking and making events in the Seattle area – she’s now considering the implications of hacking for academia and larger questions of how the DIY movement could impact civic engagement and educational reform. There are three major areas her talk – titled “Hackademia” – focuses on. She’s interested in how hackers, makers and students, especially undergrad students, can work as innovators. Why Hackademia? Theory. Theory about hackerspaces comes from various disciplinary traditions and cuts across methodological and theoretical traditions.
The following is therefore a loose and evolving set of links that reflect the diversity of interest in hackerspaces loosely organized from micro (individual) to macro concerns. Areas[edit] Learning theory - how can the activities in hackerspaces be seen as learning? Rafi Santo's hacker literacies video article Critical making Matt Ratto's critical making lab at the University of Toronto lab article Garnet Hertz' critical making book (art) Carl DiSalvo's work on adversarial design (design approach) Beth Kolko runs a program called "hackademia" Jentery Sayers tinker-centric pedagogies Critical theory and cultures of hackerspaces - what are are the intersections between hackerspaces and shared culture (F/OSS, hacker culture, etc.)?
How do they relate to larger political and economic issues? Online Articles[edit] Mailing-List[edit] Videos[edit] See Also[edit] Hackerspace Software. Running a hackerspace is a lot of work, and a lot of spaces have rolled their own software to automate some of that work. Most of that code is not maintainable enough to be reused by other spaces. To make things better, folks from the Metalab started their own hackerspace operating system and opensourced it. Other hackerspaces like Netzladen are already testing the software for their own use, and further development. Hackerspace OS Page on GitHub. Wish-List[edit] Software Wish List Other tools[edit] Financial Software[edit] These are the various financial software solutions that are being utilized by hackerspaces: Accounting[edit] AROS Arch_Reactor FreshBooks ATX Hackerspace CRASH Space Noisebridge GNUCash Google Docs Spreadsheet HacDC JVerein /dev/tal Kashoo ATX Hackerspace Noisebridge KMyMoney syn2cat Matekasse MoneyLog Laboratório Hacker de Campinas OpenOffice Spreadsheet Hive76 QuickBooks Xero Co-Lab(x) Makerspace Payment Processing[edit] Social tools[edit]
Hackerspace Hardware. HackerspaceWiki. Startup Directory | Robot Launch Pad | ACCELERATE YOUR ROBOT STARTUP. Accelerators & Incubators (global) | Robot Launch Pad | ACCELERATE YOUR ROBOT STARTUP. Hackerspaces as Startup Incubators. Hackerspaces as Startup Incubators.