Open Hardware Summit!

I am going to the Open Hardware Summmit tomorrow!
It has been held in New York City in the past, and always around the same time as Maker Faire NYC. The location and my addiction to Maker Faire made it really easy for me to attend the past 2 years.
This year, the Open Hardware Summit is at MIT, in Boston. Not such a huge deal, it’s a 4 hour drive, and I get to check out Artisan Asylum!

Also- this year I am a speaker at the summit! I will be presenting a (very) short talk about Market Analysis….and also as part of my talk, showing off my FISH TRAINING project.

Unfortunately, that project died in prototype land, but that’s what I’m going to talk about.

I have a long history of chasing dreams, and specifically, dreams that involve complicated, time consuming and expensive engineering. I look back on the past several years and realize I’ve designed many products for companies that got canceled or just plain sucked. The reason that any of these projects even got as far as me working on them was because the due diligence in the form of a simple market analysis was never done.

So that is what I am going to talk about- how to look objectively at a project and do a short formulaic analysis to see if there is any point in making it. And of course, there is ALWAYS a point to making something for the sake of making it, it is just when the point is to make money that it’s necessary to evaluate first.

Looking forward to seeing everyone!