Kickstarter: If at First you Don’t Succeed…
What happens if your Kickstarter campaign fails? Then break your product down, figure out what actually works, and try the whole thing again. That’s what Zach Supalla and the Spark team have done.
Maker Pro
Maker Pros are the innovators that are designing tomorrow’s products and businesses. Stay tuned for the latest news on manufacturing, startups, and industry trends.
Making Makerspaces: Acquiring Insurance
This is the first in a series of posts documenting how to start a makerspace of your own in your local community. This post is focused on the one question almost everyone asks when starting a space – how do you get insurance for your makerspace? We’ll start with a quick introduction to the series, and then jump into the meat of the question.
Brendan Dawes: Sharing Your Work
This week, I interviewed the designer and maker Brendan Dawes for my podcast, Looking Sideways. Brendan’s known for early interactive web projects like Psycho Studio, that allows users to remix Hitchcock’s famous shower scene themselves. He’s also known for his physical projects, such as the Moviepeg and Popa iPhone accessories, and devices that cross the digital/physical divide, such as the Happiness Machine, an internet-connected printer that prints random happy thoughts from people across the web. We talked about designing physical objects that embody hidden digital information.
Is it a Hackerspace, Makerspace, TechShop, or FabLab?
The past decade has seen the sudden, dramatic appearance of community spaces offering public, shared access to high-end manufacturing equipment. These spaces are interchangeably referred to as hackerspaces, makerspaces, TechShops, and FabLabs. This can lead the intended audience to become incredibly confused as to why there might be so many names for a single concept. I’d like to take some time to untangle the mess, explain the concepts behind each title, and talk about why I now make significant distinctions between all of these types of spaces.
Maker Pro: How Much Should I Charge?
Figuring out how much to charge for your product is the second most common question entrepreneurs ask themselves. The first is of course…”what should I build in the first place.” Assuming you’ve made it past the first question and there is a market for your product, you have to figure out how to price your product. I reached out to several entrepreneurs for real world examples you can use for your hardware startup.
Pirate Pancake Follows Captain Crepe
What’s an antidote to too much time spent online? Joe Sandor’s answer was making something with your hands and spending face-to-face time with friends. It was the social aspect of making and eating crepes that originally inspired the Captain Crepe Pan. That success lead this sculptor to his second adventure in limited-edition artist cook-castings: the Pirate Pancake Skillet.
Beyond 3D Printing: The 3 Horsemen of Small Manufacturing at Maker Faire
The bland-looking machines that lined the east wall of the Makerspace at Maker Faire did a good job of being entertaining throughout Maker Faire. They were constantly surrounded by kids watching them do all sorts of etching and inscribing tricks. But the three machines — from ShopBot, Epilog, and Tormach — were there for another […]
