A fascinating book about the movement of people making things in their own backyards and then transferring the idea into mass production through 3rd party subcontract manufacturing houses.
When you go open source, you’re giving away something in hopes of getting back more in return. Is it guaranteed? No. You also need to build a community, ensure that the initial product is needed, documented, and distinct enough for people to want to join in its development. And even then, managing an open-source community can be a full-time job in itself. But when it works, it can be magical: an R&D model that’s faster, better, and cheaper than those of some of the biggest companies in the world.Read more at location 1654
Bill Joy, one of the cofounders of Sun Microsystems, revealed a flaw in Coase’s model. “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else,” he observed, stating what has now come to be known as “Joy’s Law.” His implication: for the sake of minimizing transaction costs, we don’t work with the best people. Instead, we work with whomever our company was able to hire. Even for the best companies, that’s a woefully inefficient process.Read more at location 2141
As I write this, the hot product at the moment at Quirky is the “Pivot Power” flexible power strip. It’s like a regular power strip, but each outlet can pivot so that bulky power adapters don’t block neighboring outlets. Designed by Jake Zein, a software programmer from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, it’s classic Quirky: clever, clearly solving a problem, stylishly designed, and slightly inessential. It’s the kind of thing you’d see in the store and think, “Yeah, I hate it when I can’t fit power adapters in all the power strip outlets,” admire its design, and maybe buy one. You don’t need it, but once you’ve seen it you might want it.Read more at location 2698
As at Kickstarter, there are countdown clocks and competitions everywhere—the whole thing feels like a game. You don’t need to have any ideas of your own to participate and feel as though you’re helping create things, or at least improve them. And it suits everyone from words people (names and taglines) to visual thinkers (design). Top influencers participate in dozens of projects and can earn thousands of dollars. It can be addictive, they report.Read more at location 2716
Unlike Kickstarter and Quirky, Etsy doesn’t try to help Makers fund or create their products. Instead, it’s simply a way to sell them, with a strong social component that comes from its focus on handmade goods and the crafting and arts communities that make them. Like eBay, Etsy offers simple ways for sellers to create their own listings and handles the payment processing. It charges twenty cents for each listing for four months, and 3.5 percent of the sale.Read more at location 2744
MFG.com would now remain independent, with Bezos as its main investor. Today it is the world’s largest custom manufacturing marketplace. It has more than 200,000 members in fifty countries and has brokered more than $115 billion in deals so far, with an average of $3–4 billion a month today. The deals that scroll by on any given day are typically pretty prosaic stuff—injection-molded plastic enclosures, machined metal rods, fasteners, specialty cables—but they give Free an unmatched window on the world of manufacturing today.Read more at location 3114
For a lens into the new world of open-access factories in China, just search Alibaba (in English), find some companies producing more or less what you’re looking to make, and then use instant messaging to ask them if they can manufacture what you want. Alibaba’s IM can translate between Chinese and English in real time, so each person can communicate using their native language. Typically, responses come in minutes: we can’t make that; we can make that and here’s how to order it; we already make something quite like that and here’s what it costs.Read more at location 3176
Perhaps the best known of these are Ponoko and Shapeways. Ponoko (on whose advisory board I sit as an unpaid volunteer) started in New Zealand as a laser-cutting service, but is now global and offers laser cutting, 3-D printing, and CNC cutting.Read more at location 3223
Similar services exist for electronics (printed circuit boards), fabrics, and even ceramics. Meanwhile, the grandfather of them all is the Lego company, whose Lego Digital Designer CAD program for kids lets them do exactly the same thing with Lego bricks, creating a design onscreen, then uploading it to the service to be turned into a custom kit that is shipped back to them, looking just like an official Lego kit. Then, if others buy it, the designer will get a cut of the revenues.Read more at location 3238
And that’s just chemistry. What happens when the tools get powerful enough to extend to biology and genetics? Today we can amplify and identify DNA at the kitchen table. Tomorrow we will be able to sequence it, too. But after that comes synthesizing it, modifying it, and the rest of genetic engineering. The day when only a small number of professional labs can do this, checking and screening every request that comes in, will soon end. At that point, people will start hacking life. We’ve been doing that for thousands of years with cross-breeding and agricultural genetics, but that was always within the bounds of nature. But in the lab, there are fewer such bounds. And the DIYbio Movement aims to create countless new labs. Why should trained scientists have all the fun?Read more at location 3349
No comments:
Post a Comment