Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Welcome by Dale Dougherty”.
Good afternoon, everybody and and really happy to have you to the second hardware innovation workshop during the week leading up to maker faire uh. It’S we. Last year we started at xerox park, and this year we came to the beautiful college of san mateo, which i’m hearing from a lot of people. I didn’t even know this existed here. It’S a beautiful campus. This is a nice theater and we’ve already got started this morning with a master class in manufacturing, led by bunny, wang and others uh it was. We had about 80 people, maybe 90, wanting to kind of get the uh into the details of how do you manufacture, whether in china or here so um? Today, uh this first half of of the workshop uh is sort of balanced with a set of case studies that we’re going to go into shortly after our keynote, and we want to hear from makers themselves uh about their story of how they started and developed and Persisted to create a product and bring it to market the – i i think a lot of times when you hear about these things, it seems like they happen overnight, but in fact it was a lot of diligent work over many years, sometimes starting in school, leading and Wandering uh down many different paths, so i think we want to learn from them.
Then we have uh some uh pitches uh. We call pitches with prototypes, where some new products just open the door to new ideas coming in here, and they have five minutes to pitch their idea. You have ballots and can vote on them and we’re going to take the winner and and really feature them at maker faire and give them a booth and some stage time there. So it’s your decision, uh, who you like best and who you think is, is most interesting, and then we have a vc panel led by eric klein and he’s going to uh interview about five or six feet.
One of the things that we that i had in mind when we started this program last last year was to to help sort of educate the business community about making and manufacturing and get get them comfortable. A lot has happened in a single year. There is a lot more interest and a lot more activity, whether not only just judging by kickstarter indiegogo, but also in terms of real investments, and so they’ll be talking about how they see this and what they’re looking for, what their, what, how they make decisions. And then we will be leading then to the innovation showcase outside, where we have about 20 21. Smaller groups that are are doing things and and we can interact like a mini maker faire out there. So um. I want to thank particularly my two co-chairs um. They would stand um, travis, good and renee deresta from oatv. I really appreciate their help and shaping the program and identifying new speakers, so i i want to kick off with a presentation which is actually a reprise of something i i saw, and i really liked it. I wanted to ask rob faludi to do this presentation called liking.
The guests and rob is a o’reilly author of building wireless sensor networks he’s an itp teacher at nyu and he is chief innovation officer at digi, but there there’s there’s something in his talk about. I think that reflects uh it can. This is talk about disney really, but it reflects sort of a view of the market that i think makers have and want to sort of adopt more and that’s really appreciating your customers and really interacting with them and valuing them. Uh not only as a source of your business but as the really the the the sense that you’re serving them so without further ado, rob falooti .