How cheap can you make a cellphone? Bunnie Huang recently bought one in Shenzhen for just $12. There wasn’t a carrier subsidy, it was contract-free, and unlocked. As Bunnie says, “…that about the price of a large cheese pizza, or a decent glass of wine.”
For three months I lived in Shenzhen, China, participating in a hardware startup accelerator HAXLR8R and trying to get my company Portable Scores off the ground. The goal was to learn about manufacturing in China, pick out some factories, source our components, and get everything ready for when we lined up funding. What I learned during those three months was not just how to do it, but that there are times when you just shouldn’t do it, and for a startup, it’s not just about money, it’s about managing risk. Our plan right now is “Assembled in USA.”
Nomiku co-founder Lisa Fetterman shares her hacks for negotiating the makers’ life in Shenzhen, China.
From his roost in Singapore, Bunnie Huang has just completed a four-part series on outsourcing to China. He wrote his tutorial for visiting MIT Media Lab graduate students, but as with so much of what Bunnie does, he’s making it available to the world.
This recent post at Hack a Day, about Utah-based Adaptive Computing’s 163 LED All Spark Cube, spurred an interesting comment thread about the current world record for voxel count in 3D displays using a spatial grid of LEDs. Of course, once you start talking world records, questions start coming up fast: Do monochrome systems count? What about arrangements that are not cubes? Should hobbyist builds be in a separate category from commercial products? Right now, the title holder seems to be…
We hear a lot of horror stories about factories in China so how do you avoid becoming one yourself? Certainly not by dwelling on failure. Failure happens when you’re manufacturing in China or anywhere— even if you have made the best plans. Here’s what to look for.
Zach “Hoeken” Smith is a co-founder of MakerBot, but he left the company 18 months ago and now calls Shenzhen, China home. In addition to pursuing his own projects he’s the program director for Haxlr8r , San Francisco-based hardware start-up incubator. As part of MAKE’s coverage of the “maker pro” space, I recently interviewed Zach about his work in China.
