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In this new episode of the Hardware Podcast, David Cranor and I talk with Roger Chen, formerly a principal at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, O’Reilly Media’s sister VC firm.
Discussion points:
- Chen’s perspective as an investor on companies that are creating 3D robotics, drones, and satellites
- The Maker movement’s impact on the hardware startups
- Etsy’s influence on the new hardware movement
- Trends in robotics, and the outlook for robotics startups
This week’s click spirals:
- The future of knowledge work, and Peter Drucker’s prescient writings on this issue
- 3M “Z-axis tape,” which conducts only in the direction of the tape’s thickness, not along its length or width
- The hand-drawn maps in A Railroad Atlas of the United States in 1946. Combined with Google Maps satellite view, these provide a fascinating history lesson on the pattern of economic development in the U.S. during the first half of the 20th century.
Image by Ed Schipul on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.