"Make" entries
Auckland University Bioengineering Institute
I am an industry advisor to the Auckland University Bioengineering Institute and got a tour on Tuesday. It was inspirational! They sprawl over several floors of a tall concrete building in Auckland, expanding from their cramped one-floor presence. Everywhere you look there are people with soldering irons, laptops, and batteries working on devices that sit between hardware and biology. I've…
Why We're Failing in Math and Science
Norman Mailer's brilliant novel Why Are We in Vietnam? doesn't talk explicitly about the Vietnam war; it tells a story about American culture and the American psyche, thereby producing a devastating critique of the war with the title and last line alone. In a similar way, it may be easier to understand why America is falling behind at math and…
Radar Theme: Art and Technology
[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly] Art is emotion hacking, intended to provoke or illuminate rather than profit. Artists play on the boundaries of new materials, new modes of interaction, new technologies. Often what they build can inspire or inform useful and commercial hacking. Watchlist: Natalie…
Radar Theme: Materials Science
[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we’re currently tracking here at O’Reilly] New materials follow a curve: initially expensive and so used by R&D only, but many eventually become mass-produced and cheap and so enable mainstream applications. By tracking new materials with interesting possibilities, we can be ahead of the mass-manufacturing curve….
Radar Theme: Make
[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly] DIY culture is back, from rocket cars to simply tweaking things you already own to make them better. People want control over their devices again, whether access to the internal computer systems of their car or the ability to make…
The Last HOPE
The Last HOPE conference in NYC was a great mix of hardware hacking, open source, phone phreaking, lock picking, sleeping on the floor, and good old fashioned paranoia mongering.
Segway CTO Leaves for Apple as Product Design VP
Phil Torrone noticed today on the Segway Chat forums that "Doug Field, the chief technology officer at Segway who heads their entire engineering team (and has since Day 1), is leaving Segway to become a VP of product design at Apple." The announcement continues: Doug has been the driving force in making the Segway what it is today and will…
Exploring DIY E-Reader Platforms
Don't like any of the e-readers currently available? Here are some ideas on building your own.
O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures Startup Camp
The Thursday and Friday (July 10-11) before this year's Foo Camp in Sebastopol July 11-13, O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures will be hosting OATV Startup Camp. This startup boot camp will consist of sessions led by startup veterans and other experts in a roundtable discussion format on various topics important to founders. The sessions will be more of a conversation on each…
Gandhi on Ubicomp
Remember Gandhi's steps of a revolution? "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." For as long as I've known the term, ubiquitous computing has been largely ignored, written off as a scifi pipedream from the people who promised you AI and cars that would run on water. That's beginning to change,…