2011 - The year of the maker

[Bob Waldron]

2011, the year of the Maker Movement  http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/08/big-diy/all/1  “…let’s look at the first week of August in 2011: Design software giant Autodesk, creators of AutoCAD, Maya, Sketchbook and 123D, purchased Instructables, a popular online community for DIYers…MakerFaire Detroit, sponsored by Ford, Pepsi and Microsoft as well as Etsy, Boing Boing and O’Reilly, gently wound down after officially closing July 31…Microsoft presented a handful of proof-of-concept projects for its .NET Gadgeteer, a competitor to Arduino…GE launched a Facebook campaign targeting DIY makers to share designs for model aircraft and an airport, using 3D printers…MakerBot got some more competition in the field of inexpensive, easy-to-build-and-use home 3D printers: Ponoko featured the UP! printer on their blog (which comes helpfully pre-assembled), while MAKE featured Ultimaker, which touts its speed…Whether they’re at established mainstream companies or hungry startups, people all over the world have figured out that DIY can be good business…It reminds me a little of 20-25 years ago, when first personal computing with Macintosh, Microsoft and Lotus…broke through from the margins into the mainstream… the Maker Movement’s growth and mainstream visibility have been building for a long time. MAKE magazine was launched in 2005; the first MakerFaire in California in 2006 drew 20,000 attendees and doubled the next year…Torrone…observed that the new “hero cult” around popular DIYers had changed the public perception of the industry…Self-organized maker faires are common now. Makers do not require MAKE to come to their town; they’ll do it on their own” — or companies like GE or Red Bull will sponsor them…“Americans are building things again,” reads a General Electric report. “From Makerbot to GE’s Ecomagination Challenge, an open source competition to find the best ideas in cleantech, opportunities abound today for anyone with the motivation and imagination to get their hands dirty and create things that can solve some of our biggest challenges…”