Afrimakers – the brainchild of ex-Google engineer Stefania Druga – is an initiative that strives to “inspire young African Makers and plant the seed of local change through social entrepreneurship, digital fabrication and regional collaboration.” As we’ve previously discussed on Bits & Pieces, the project is backed by HacKIDemia, which recently launched a crowdfunding campaign […]
David Li, co-founder of Shanghai’s first Maker Space (XinCheJian), recently told The Economist that the Maker Movement is helping to inspire the creation of legitimate and innovative products, as socially progressive Makers team up with more traditional manufacturers in China. According to the publication, Maker spaces such as XinCheJian are supported by monthly membership fees […]
Chris Rezendes, Founder and President of INEX Advisors, says the wildly popular DIY Maker Movement is most definitely not a fad. “In the Maker Movement, so many things are made real, so many ideas, so many plans, so many dreams. It is for this reason above all others that the Maker Movement will not be […]
Wharton economist Jeremy Rifkin characterizes the rapidly evolving DIY Maker Movement “as significant as the shift from agriculture to the early industrial era.” As Colin Strong of GfK Technology UK notes in a recent Research-Live article, the Maker Movement is essentially a grassroots call for a return of the means of production to the hands […]
Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Emily Parker confirms that the wildly popular DIY Maker Movement is gaining serious ground in China. As readers of Bits & Pieces know, Makers often gather at hackerspaces, or makerspaces, real-world locations where they can learn and work together. Unsurprisingly, there are over a dozen spaces dedicated to Makers […]
Approximately 70,000 people attended the 2013 World Maker Faire in NYC this past weekend, up from 50,000 in 2012. As The Verge’s Adrianne Jeffries notes, it is now all but “impossible” to deny that DIY is in. “Every part of the ‘Maker movement,’ a big-tent phenomenon that covers everything from homemade jewelry to homemade drones, […]
Recently, the folks at ItProPortal sat down with Brock Craft, author of “Arduino Projects for Dummies,” to talk about Atmel-powered Arduino boards. In addition to the DIY Maker Movement, the boards are wildly popular in the educational community, with science and computing teachers in secondary schools using the platform to teach kids the principles of programming and computational […]
Open source proponent Andrew “Bunnie” Huang recently discussed the Maker Movement with the China-based Programmer Magazine (CSDN.net). Humans, says Huang, feel differently toward “real” items as opposed to “virtual” things. “As wonderful as apps are, a human home consists of more than a smartphone, a food tray [and] a bed. We still surround ourselves with knick-knacks, photos […]
Do you worry that we’re becoming a culture of technology consumers, rather than a society of creators? Well, so does Larry Magid, a technology journalist who writes for the San Jose Mercury News. “I don’t expect everyone to be designing the next electric vehicle, killer tablet or even smartphone app or Web page, but I do […]
Upgrading or building a PC from scratch was certainly an adventure before the days of plug and play. Now I’m not saying you needed a soldering gun to upgrade your video card, although I did know plenty of people who would break one out at the drop of a hat (or screw), even if it wasn’t strictly […]
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