More "Make Tanks" Than I Realized

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Jun 29
2005

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More "Make Tanks" Than I Realized

A while back, in conversation with Danny Hillis, I suggested that Applied Minds might be called a "Make Tank", in a riff on the more traditional "Think Tank." A make tank is a lab that figures out how to design and build hardware that solves interesting new problems. Squid-Labs, which has partnered with O'Reilly's Make on a number of projects, is another. But here at the Where 2.0 conference, I learned of yet another: Moto Labs. You might think of Inventables as another type of Make tank. And as Nat pointed out to me, there are academic Make tanks, like Neil Gershenfeld's lab at MIT, or Tom Igoe's at NYU.

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Comments: 3

Phil Atio [06.30.05 06:31 AM]

I like the expression "make tank". But when I read the title "make tanks" I thought of military tanks that go boom. There's an interesting question: will "make tanks" be used for good or for evil?

pt [06.30.05 03:21 PM]

I've been thinking of trying to start something along these lines recently. The next story here (sorry for referring to the future) talks about how this is a great time to be an entrepreneur, but I'm thinking this is also a great time to be an inventor.

The problem: How to get people to pay me to invent things for them? This is something I've been thinking about lately. Say something along the lines of "create a fully self-contained coral reef that is powered entirely by solar and wind power" - that would be an awesome project and certainly possible. Anything involving genetic/evolutionary/biomimetic algorithms would be fun as well. As would anything related to FPGA computing. I have experience in all these areas.

If anyone has any projects along these lines that they want to get done, please don't hesitate to drop me an email, I'm available for your inventing needs.