The Maker Pro Newsletter #2

February 28, 2013

"The Global Flows of 'Copycat' or Shanzhai Technology"

From the editors of MAKE magazine, The Maker Pro Newsletter is about the impact of makers on business and technology. Our coverage will include hardware startups, new products, incubators, and innovators, along with technology and market trends. Please send news you know to makerpro@makermedia.com.

Sketchfab: YouTube for 3D Content

Alban Denoyel, co-founder of Sketchfab, tells us that interactive 3D content is ready to become pervasive on the web, viewable in any web browser. (Remember VRML?) A French company, Sketchfab wants to be the YouTube for creators of 3D content, a site where you upload any interactive 3D content and make it accessible to others, even embedding it in a blog. Denoyel came by MAKE's office and we recorded this short interview.

Video produced and edited by Nat Heckathorn-Wilson of MAKE.

News

Organizing Makers in China

The maker movement is expanding quickly in China, says Eric Pan of Seeed Studio, who is organizing Maker Faire Shenzhen (Chinese), happening on April 7. The publication Makers by Chris Anderson in Chinese caused Pan to be "bombarded" by media for several months. "We are honored to be part of the revolution, and contribute to the community growth in China," he says. At this year's Maker Faire Shenzhen, Pan expects about 100 makers, but the event will have much more traffic and influence than last year. If you're there, check out "Hacked Matter: A Workshop on Shanzhai & Maker Culture," which takes places April 6-8 in Shanghai and Shenzhen, "hubs of China's growing hackerspace and maker scene as well as critical sites in the global flows of 'copycat' or shanzhai technology."

Eric Pan also tells us that Shanghai has opened four of its proposed 100 creative house projects. News coverage from China, which Google Translate makes a mess of, offers a few photos to review. Pan's translation: "Creative house of Yanghang district receives its first batch of guests — students from Yanghang Middle School Technology Hobby Group. They use carpenter tools to make their works of wood; 2 hours is definitely not enough for them. The creative house project of Shanghai is under '12th 5-year plan of China government,' to lead crowd-based technology innovation and demonstration."

Back in the USA

Brad Feld, managing director of Foundry Group, is doing his own version of a creative house in Kansas City, Kan., that he calls FiberHouse. Feld's blog describes him buying a house in KC, which comes with high-speed internet via Google Fiber, and offering it to entrepreneurs rent-free for a year. Along with KC Startup Village, Feld hopes that Kansas City can become a startup community, which is the subject of his new book. Makes us wonder what a similar space might produce if it was filled with pro makers.

Speaking of new homes, MAKE met recently with SketchUp's John Baucus and Mark Harrison, and both said how much they like their new home at Trimble. Who is Trimble? An one-time HP spinout built around GPS technology that is involved in surveying. Do you remember the large Caterpillar earth mover at Maker Faire New York? Trimble technology can make them autonomous. (We don't have a word for land-based drones, do we?) Last year, Trimble acquired Boulder, Colo.-based SketchUp from Google, where it struggled to fit in. Baucus reports that growth of SketchUp continues, and that downloads in China exceed those in America.

Hardware Accelerator Bolt Launches

It's a dream project that product designer Ben Einstein has been passionately pursuing for nearly a year: a hardware incubator that combines investment with world-class expertise in engineering, product design, and manufacturing support. Now Bolt is a reality, leaving behind a vapor trail of napkin sketches.

Based in Boston, the program has just announced its first round of funding ($3.5 million), and application deadlines for its inaugural 2013 class (you have until April 11).

The 6-month program will combine seed capital (up to $50K), access to a prototyping facility, office space, and an expert staff of product designers and engineers. But most valuable, perhaps, is the input Bolters will receive from the network that Einstein has attracted to the project. His co-founding partners are Scott N. Miller, who led large-scale manufacturing for iRobot and has advised over a hundred hardware startup companies (including MakerBot and Pebble), and Axel Bichara, a former venture capital investor with Boston's Atlas Venture. Logitech, Autodesk, and Grishin Robotics are strategic investors in Bolt; angels include Semyon Dukach, Mick Mountz, Eran Egozy, Brad Feld, and Bruce Sachs. A constellation of service providers, such as Protomold and Arrow Electronics will provide discounted parts, services, and expertise to all Bolt companies during the program. (Bolt's credit scroll rivals The Hobbit's.) More info, and an application, can be found at bolt.io.

New Hardware Incubator at City College

Haytham Elhawary is the genial organizer of the NY Hardware Startup Meetup, which has been meeting monthly and tracking about 175 participants. A Ph.D. engineer and roboticist, Elhawary has experience at Philips Electronics and Harvard working with robotics in surgery. The NY Hardware Startup Meetup started last June and MAKE covered its February meeting. Last fall, Elhawary said he was thinking of starting an incubator or accelerator for hardware startups. He pitched the idea to City College of New York, which had funding to set up a center for entrepreneurship. Now Elhawary is the executive director of the Zahn Center for Entrepreneurship, which will serve as an incubator, co-working space, and prototyping lab (initially 1,500sf) for startups creating physical products. Elhawary has already begun installing equipment, which includes a range of 3D printers from MakerBot to Stratasys. The center plans to help hardware startups "address the unique challenges associated to prototype development, product design, and manufacturing."

And if robotic creators at Zahn, or anywhere else, want to stress-test their bots, they can now design their own robo Most Extreme Elimination Challenge at a new facility at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, north of Boston. The New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation (NERVE) Center has ramps, hurdles, splash pools, stairs, step fields, and other test courses designed to make robots sweat. Half-day rentals start at around $2,000; a few hundred dollars less if you join as a member.

Openings: a TechShop in Pittsburgh, a 3D Printer Store in Denver

A new TechShop in Pittsburgh is set to open officially on March 9, according to a story in the Pittsburgh Business Times, which has some preview photos of the new space. The new facility occupies a 16,000sf building in Bakery Square and will be the seventh TechShop to open since the first one opened in 2007 in Menlo Park, Calif. In May 2012, TechShop announced a partnership with DARPA and the Dept. of Veterans Affairs that would underwrite the opening of TechShops in Pittsburgh and the Washington, D.C. area.

It was standing room only at an open house at the new 3D Printing Store in Denver, according to 3D Printer. Principal Debra Wilcox, a lawyer with a backround in green aeronautics and biofuels, was attracted by the sustainable possibilities of 3D printing. There are no membership fees: anyone can walk in and use one of the three printers on the premises. 3D modelers are also available. Classes and workshops are planned.

Pinoccio's Eric Jennings

Pinoccio is a new wireless controller that closed its Indiegogo campain in February, doubling its $60K campaign goal. Co-founder Eric Jennings was interviewed by Eric Weddington, ATMEL's marketing manager. Jennings and co-founder Sally Carson were inspired by a Bruce Sterling book on the "Internet of Things," as well as hands-on experience in the Arduino community, to see an opportunity for a platform that makes it easier to build connected devices. In the interview, Jennings remarks about developing a product and bringing it to market: "If you've been in the hardware world for any length of time at all, you learn that things like manufacturing repeatability, volume purchasing, regulatory certification, and reseller relationships are essential to building a long-term, sustainable business. Building one in your workshop is one thing. Building 10,000 of them in an efficient, repeatable manner is something altogether different."

Manufacturing

What We Talk About When We Talk About Chinese Manufacturers

If you are constantly re-evaluating your manufacturing options (and who isn't), the list of Apple's Top 200 suppliers, released last month, is an interesting cut on the state of the art. And if you tend to conflate "offshore manufacturing" and "China," you should take a look at the map created by ChinaFile. Of the 748 locations mapped, 660 are in Asia, yes, but only 331 in mainland China. The U.S., by the way, is represented by 81 locations; Europe: 41. Playing with the map will also give you a sense of geographic specialties. The U.S., for example, is a primary location for producing glass for Apple's products.

Need Help Outsourcing to Scale Production?

The chasm is huge between producing product yourself and producing product via a contract manufacturer. Just because we're maker pros doesn't mean we know how to find, contract, and manage a partner relationship. Here are a few places to turn for assistance: PCH, Dragon Innovation, and AQS to partner for outsourcing, or Bolt, Lemnos Labs, and HAXLR8R to enter an accelerator program community.

Remaking Detroit

Makers are having an impact in "America's biggest fixer-upper," according to Fast Company. Featured in the two-part series: Heath Carr of watch and bicycle manufacturer Shinola, Philip Cooley, co-founder of the entrepreneurial warehouse Ponyride, and Jeff Sturges of makerspace OmniCorpDetroit.

Marketing/Fundraising/Business Skills

A Crowdsourcing Compendium

Sourcing funds through Indiegogo, Kickstarter, RocketHub and others can be a daunting challenge. There's how-to information scattered all over the web, but normally you have to find and organize it yourself. Well, no more. You can now benefit from the leg work Scott Steinberg has already done in his free book, "The Crowdfunding Bible". The book is filled with tips and strategies to help you plan, execute, and succeed in your funding campaign.

A simplified approach is espoused by David Lang, who ran a successful campaign to fund his OpenROV. "To me, it's very simple: do you have 100 True Believers who will help launch you to the next level? If not, can you find them? Find them first. Everything else is easy."

Selling

Selling Physical Objects on the Web: Hard-Earned Advice

The product that United Pixelworkers is selling is T-shirts, but this frank post offers insights for anyone who plans to sell physical goods over the internet. You can skip the first section on T-shirt printing (unless that's your product), but don't miss their funny and illuminating takes on marketing, choosing a payment processor, shipping and fulfillment, and customer service.

Storefront Options Multiply

Having trouble attracting customers to your store? Why not send your store to them, via social media? That's the premise behind PopShops, a mini-commerce platform offered by Israel-based Getonic, which just landed $1.3 million in seed funding. The downside: the new entry joins a swarm of options that makers must sort out before they market their wares online. A recent discussion of storefronts on Engadget was heated and wide-ranging: no less than 28 storefront options were mentioned. And that debate didn't even consider real-world retail locations, which have their own outlying innovations, like Openhouse's"pop up" spaces.

Don't Forget to Be Trustworthy

As you're putting together that presentation for your new or proposed product, don't overlook the importance of trust. Recent research highlighted by the Growthology blog indicates that it's probably more important than you think.

And If All Else Fails... Try Printing Your Head as a Resume

Because you can.

Business Intelligence: 3D Printing

Test Your Assumptions Against These Reports from the Field.

Michal Zalewski offers a fresh perspective on the reality of home manufacturing on MAKE. He urges us to look beyond the next cool tool and keep our focus on the process.

The "3D printing & manufacturing revolution" was the topic at the recent DLD 2013 conference in Munich. On the panel were Peter Weijmarshausen of Shapeways , Ingo Ederer of Voxeljet , Erik de Bruijn of Ultimaker and Pablos Holman of Intellectual Ventures Lab . 3D Printer has the video.

MAKE editor Shawn Wallace, who follows the 3D printing beat for MAKE, highlights five trends in 3D printing.

Wired posted a warning that patent battles could be looming for the 3D printing industry. ReadWrite also sounded the patent alarm. And of course, the mainstream press continues to be fascinated by the potential that 3D printers allow anyone to manufacture guns.

People

It's a reason to cheer when a maker gets visibility at the national level. During a Google+ Hangout Limor Fried, aka Ladyada, was able to promote patent reform to the President. As a leading role model for women in engineering, Ladyada asked the President if his daughters are considering careers in science and engineering. Lastly, she proposed that each high schooler learn a computer programming language.

Paula Chang and Mike Cheung were first introduced to each other at Maker Faire Bay Area. Now they run Tinkering Monkey, a woodshop and online business based in their garage and loft in Oakland, Calif. Learn how it all works in this item on MAKE's blog.

MAKE interviews Steve Hoefer, who's behind the Indestructible LED Lanterns, the Secret-Knock Gumball Machine, and the Haptic Wrist Rangefinder. Hoefer is also active in the open source hardware and software communities.

Events

Maker Faire Season Begins

Start counting down to Maker Faire Bay Area (May 18-19) and World Maker Faire New York (Sept. 21-22). The Call for Makers is open for Maker Faire Bay Area. The Jerusalem Mini Maker Faire is March 18-19. Also, start making plans to participate in Maker Faire Rome, Oct. 3-6, 2013.

SXSW and Austin

Dale Dougherty of Maker Media will be speaking in sessions at SXSWedu on March 5 and 6. Next Tuesday, he will join Austin makers from @ATXMakerFaire, @AustinHackSpace, @dorkbotatx and others for a meet & greet @capitalfactory. The official SXSW Hardware Startup Meetup will be held March 9, and there will be more hardware-oriented sessions at this year's event.

Digital Fabrication Meeting at MIT March 7

Neil Gershenfeld of the Center for Bits and Atoms (Fab Lab), and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy are convening a summit on The Science of Digital Fabrication next Thursday, March 7, at MIT.

Google Science Fair

The online science competition is open to students ages 13-18 who have an idea that could change the world. Project submission deadline is April 30.

Design for Manufacturing Summit

Industrial designers, digital entrepreneurs, and manufacturers are getting together for one day — March 21 — in Brooklyn to explore the opportunities in the digital manufacturing revolution.

Maker Market List

If you know of a company, startup, product, supplier, or incubator, see if it's on the Maker Market List, a Hackpad document that can be edited by anyone.