And we used the Arduino platform to change something which in this case was a bottom-up approach to the aerospace industry. My community, DIY Drones, was created to experiment with an alternative: cheap electronics and open source, following the Arduino movement, where people came from around the world to create something. Drones used to be the sole domain of aerospace companies and the military. You don’t need to have access to a distribution channel because you have the web and all the places like Etsy to reach people around the world.Ĭan you give an example of a group of makers that came together to start a movement? Then more recently, Kickstarter and Etsy and other markets that have basically solved the last piece of the puzzle, which is finance and distribution.You don’t have to raise funding, you can just take preorders, that’s what Kickstarter does. It’s everything from 3D printers, CNC machines, laser cutters and CAD software, to the cloud manufacturing services that exist from Shapeways to Alibaba. So that was the structural change in the last four or five years. And three, you can order production at any scale, so you can start with 100 and then go to thousands or millions. Two, you don’t need a lot of money to get a prototype out there. I may have an idea but I don’t know how to run a metal lathe, so that’s the end of that. First is that you don’t need special skills to create things now. Then you could take that same file and upload it all the way up to the factory to be mass produced.There are three big implications of this. Then you have the machine do the prototyping automatically so you didn’t need any skills. In other words, you could design something on the screen using free and easy software, which wasn’t available before but is getting busy so it’s now available to everybody-anything from SketchUp to Tinkercad to 123D. And then what’s happened is really two things one is that it became a lot easier to create prototypes on your desktop that started onscreen. The world is oriented around companies and manufacturing was expensive and consuming. For making physical goods, until four or five years ago, you really just didn’t have access to production. But that was strictly in the digital space for online businesses. The web has made it easier to be an entrepreneur.
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