Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Next Maker Movement”.
I’M aleister allen with mate magazine and we’re here talking to chris anderson at makercon. How are you chris good um, so you said during your talk today that technology was moving too fast for really people to move between maker and maker pro anymore. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Well yeah? So i got started in 2007 at the beginnings and we got started with arduino and you know bags of boards and you know two-layer it was. It was easier, then um. I think what we’re seeing is that um, just the uh, the shenzhen model of quite sophisticated consumer electronics. You know sophisticated design, uh manufacturing, etc. That’S that’s become the standard um these days and and those you know, the good news is that those chips are available to everybody, but the bad news is that that’s the level you have to you have to work, and you know when you look at like something Like a pebble, um right, you know it you, this level of industrial design and consumer electronics approach is kind of what you need to succeed on kickstarter as well, and you can’t just kind of you don’t get six years to figure this out. You kind of figured out in six months, which means that um, the organic process of moving from maker to kind of you know slight entrepreneurship. You know better entrepreneurship maker pro et cetera.
You know the the path that i followed. Um you just don’t have time to do that anymore. You got to go straight into proper funding. Proper hiring contract manufacturing, get it out there. So you you went through a number of factors. You saw back in 2007 that led you into 3dr that to actually to make these sort of things, what sort of factors do you see today that are the the things that are trending things that are really so back, then the big things were, you know, 3d. Printing and arduino and sensor you know some of the early mem sensors today we’re seeing system on ship, um innovation with things like um, you know, uh, you know linux, linux, boards for nine dollars with built-in wi-fi and bluetooth um we’re seeing um some very interesting work With materials um there’s something called altera, which is a 3d printer that uses conductive and non-conductive inks for pcb fabbing um. I think that in general, linux has become has become sort of now mainstream again in the embedded space.
It never worked on the desktop um, but you know once it once it took off on phones as the core of the ios and android we’re now starting to see it spread as a as you know, the dominant platform for the embedded space, and that means that Suddenly we have access to all that code and libraries and algorithms that have already been written for linux and the whole linux community are now part of the hardware um community, that simply because the chips are now so cheap and powerful that run that stuff, that we’re All debian hackers today and you describe that as the the peace dividend of the the phone wars of the smartphone wars, yeah yeah, the basically, when you look at moore’s law going on in mem, sensors and cameras and gps modules and wireless etc, nothing’s moving faster than What’S going on in your pocket, um with with phones because of the investment, the economies of scale, the apples and googles etc, and as a result, just the just that you know, the chips that are available to us essentially for for free are extraordinary, and you can’t Help but kind of follow that path, because that’s where the leverage is the greatest, so you said that today, you’re saying here even that today you don’t think you can move from a maker to make a pro really very easily. Do you see that ever happening again? Do you see us going into a place where you can do that again and if so, what sort of time scale do you think that’s going to happen over? Do you think it’s a 10-year away or a 20. well, by the way the maker movement was never designed to be industrial? You know revolution, it was designed to you know, to put powerful tools in the hands of regular people, and it succeeded brilliantly that and continues to do so. So the fact.
So if the maker movement reverts to more of a tinkerer hobbyist, you know night, you know nighttime and that you know vocation not avocation rather than vocation, not a tragedy. Um. There was just a brief moment where a lot of companies spun out of that and the question is what would it take for that to happen again um? That is a good question. Well, it may be that so so so we had 20 years of software innovation with the web and all that kind of stuff. And then there was this period of hardware innovation when harvard got hot and we call that the maker movement. Now the hardware looks like software again: it’s running linux, it’s running kind of operating systems that look like smartphones and maybe we’re going to be writing apps for this new generation of hardware. So maybe you know the maker pro will be.
Writing you know apps for your. For wearables or apps for smart watches of various sorts or drones, or things like that, and it will it’ll go through that you know hardware. Software pendulum swing will go back to software.
I mean you do see that a lot in the computing industry, the repeating of the cycles so yeah – i can see that could work. So you yourself hit the cycle right. You you’re now a real company, a big company, 100 million dollar funding round.
Where do you see a company like that fitting? In with the new trends? How do you see adopting the the trends that are coming out of the maker movement? Perhaps well we’re going to look as much like a chinese consumer electronics company as possible, so big factory in in shenzhen and just basically you know recognizing that the this leverage of the supply chain manufacturing there is just incomparable um. But we’re also going to look as much like google as possible, which is to say you know, an android like like operating system, so we think we have. You know on the hardware side, you know we’re all we’re turning chinese on the software side, we’re turning into a you know we’re using our maker roots of community and ecosystem, and you know, openness to our advantage and we think that’s.
You know the one way that we who kind of came out of the open source world can compete with very sophisticated aggressive chinese consumer electronics. Companies is by by doing partnering better by by using community to our advantage, because we think that fundamentally, the only way to beat a company is with a collective of companies, and platforms are just that. That’S awesome thanks for talking to us chris. Thank you.
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