Roger Chen on hardware and robotics startups

The O’Reilly Hardware Podcast: Hardware from the venture capitalist’s point of view.

Subscribe to the O’Reilly Hardware Podcast for insight and analysis about the Internet of Things and the worlds of hardware, software, and manufacturing.

350px-8358087911_31b466f062_k

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

Read more…

Charles Fracchia on a new breed of biologists

The O’Reilly Hardware Podcast: The merging worlds of software, hardware, and biology.

Subscribe to the O’Reilly Hardware Podcast for insight and analysis about the Internet of Things and the worlds of hardware, software, and manufacturing.

350px-Rhoda_Erdmann_Wellcome_L0073542

In this new episode of the Hardware Podcast—which features our first discussion focusing specifically on synthetic biology—David Cranor and I talk with Charles Fracchia, an IBM Fellow at the MIT Media Lab and founder of the synthetic biology company BioBright.

Discussion points:

  • The blurring of the lines between biology, software development, hardware engineering, and electrical engineering
  • BioBright’s efforts to create hardware and software tools to reinvent the way biology is done in a lab
  • The most prominent market forces in biology today (especially healthcare)
  • How experiments conducted using Arduino or Raspberry Pi devices are impacting synthetic biology
  • Pembient’s synthetic rhino horns

Read more…

Joe Biron on IoT platforms

The O’Reilly Hardware Podcast: Building systems to get the most from connected devices.

Subscribe to the O’Reilly Hardware Podcast for insight and analysis about the Internet of Things and the worlds of hardware, software, and manufacturing.

CROP-7514480594_de8383f5c5_o

This episode of the Hardware Podcast features my second discussion with Joe Biron, VP of IoT technology at ThingWorx, a PTC business that offers a platform for rapid deployment of Internet of Things applications.

Discussion points:

  • How IoT platforms provide the functionality that enables advanced capabilities for IoT products
  • The common architecture of properties, services, and events
  • How to future-proof an embedded application
  • Platforms for industrial versus consumer devices
  • The potential for products that can update their own behavior
  • Embracing—or avoiding—smartphone creep, in which functions once performed by specialized hardware are taken over by a phone

Read more…

Mengmeng Chen on demystifying manufacturing

The O’Reilly Hardware Podcast: Making manufacturing accessible.

Subscribe to the O’Reilly Hardware Podcast for insight and analysis about the Internet of Things and the worlds of hardware, software, and manufacturing.

350px-Magnetic-core_memory,_at_angle

In this episode of the Hardware Podcast, we talk with Mengmeng Chen, head of U.S. operations at Seeed Studio.

Discussion points:

  • Chen’s work on—and thoughts about—the Pop-up Factory, a production line that manufactured connected devices on the floor of the Solid 2015 conference
  • Ways to start manufacturing in Shenzhen without a gigantic first order
  • Seeed Studio’s “Open Parts Library,” a standard library of approximately 1,200 parts that can be assembled quickly and inexpensively
  • Differences between the component supply chains in the U.S. and China
  • Seeed’s Wio Link Kickstarter campaign

Read more…

Robert Brunner on designing and building great products

The O’Reilly Hardware Podcast: The critical role of design in creating iconic products and brands.

Subscribe to the O’Reilly Hardware Podcast for insight and analysis about the Internet of Things and the worlds of hardware, software, and manufacturing.

350px-Glass_ochem_dof2

Our expectations for industrial design have risen immeasurably in the last decade. Think of any piece of consumer electronics from 2005—a BlackBerry, for instance—and you’ll think of something that was encased in plastic painted silver to imitate metal, with a too-light heft and a rattle when shaken.

Now, nearly every successful piece of consumer hardware is the result of careful design and exquisite manufacturing. Apple deserves a great deal of credit for that shift by resetting the baseline with the iPhone in 2007, but new tools and processes have played an important role as well. Digital design has become easy and sophisticated, and contract manufacturers can do spectacular things with glass, aluminum, and semiconductors that were nearly impossible just a few years ago.

Our guest on this week’s episode of the O’Reilly Hardware Podcast is Robert Brunner, a founder of this new era of design. Brunner was director of industrial design at Apple from 1989 to 1996, overseeing the design of the PowerBook. He was the chief designer of Beats by Dr. Dre, the design-driven line of headphones that Apple acquired for $3 billion last year. And he’s the founder of Ammunition, which has worked with startups and large companies on a wide range of innovative consumer products.

Read more…

Ari Gesher and Kipp Bradford on security and the Internet of Things

The O’Reilly Hardware Podcast: Evolving expectations for privacy.

Subscribe to the O’Reilly Hardware Podcast for insight and analysis about the Internet of Things and the worlds of hardware, software, and manufacturing.

350px-CCTV_Alexandre_Dulaunoy

In this episode of our newly renamed Hardware Podcast, I talk with Ari Gesher, engineering ambassador at Palantir Technologies, and Kipp Bradford, research scientist at the MIT Media Lab.

Gesher is the co-author of The Architecture of Privacy: On Engineering Technologies that Can Deliver Trustworthy Safeguards. Bradford is co-author of Distributed Network Data: From Hardware to Data to Visualization, and he’s spoken twice at Solid.

Discussion points:

  • The difference between security and privacy
  • Ari’s notion of what it means to be “polite” in a world where everything is recorded
  • The need and rationale for standards and protocols for IoT devices

Read more…