The buzz about this year’s Maker Faire Bay Area is that a sweet, bee-themed art car called Apis Inlusio will be there. Lovingly built by a group of self-taught Burning Man veterans appropriately known as BeeCharge Camp, the Apis Inlusio combines the kind of whimsical inspiration and impressive ingenuity that epitomizes the spirit of Maker […]
JD.com, a notable rival to Chinese ecommerce behemoth Alibaba, launched a funding site last week called JD Equity Crowdfunding. JD’s first experiment in crowdfunding, Coufenzi is like Kickstarter in that it lets individuals fund products; JD Equity is instead aimed at entrepreneurs looking for early investors, with the goal of creating a “complete ecosystem for […]
Just weeks after releasing preliminary rules for drone regulation, the FAA is facing a lawsuit. The Electronic Privacy Information Center’s lawsuit asks the Washington, DC federal appeals court to declare the regulations unlawful due to the lack of privacy protections, and alleges that the proposal is not comprehensive enough to allow for the safe use […]
Facebook joined the ranks of large companies betting on the Internet of the Things by launching an SDK for the internet of things under the banner of Parse, a mobile development platform it acquired in 2013. “We believe that connecting more hardware devices with the cloud has the potential to change the world for the better,” wrote […]
Previous prototypes entered in the Pitch Your Prototype challenge have included an inexpensive medical device, educational kits and even an agricultural robot that plucks individual weeds out of the ground. A new entry, Bloomiere, takes the contest in another direction with a conceptual prototype that bridges elements of lighting design, city planning and art. The prototype, called Bloomiere, responds to […]
Modeling For Surgery Doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital printed an exact replica of a little girl’s skull based on multiple MRI scans. The replica enabled a practice run through the first of many complex surgeries to treat the toddler’s Tessier cleft. The actual surgery was a success. Futurist: Look To Spiders Autodesk’s technology futurist […]
Hardware is hard. But crowdfunding and rapid prototyping technologies are making it a little easier, say MakeUseOf alums Erez Zuckerman and Yaara Lancet, the duo behind the ErgoDox EZ keyboard. “The ErgoDox EZ simply wouldn’t have happened in 2005,” Zuckerman told Matthew Hughes in a worthwhile MakeUseOf profile. “The tools designed to prototype the kit simply didn’t exist. Neither did 3D […]
