Afrigadget

The TechShop is Living, Breathing Open Source

March 30th, 2010 | Author: Noel Hwande

Last week I spent some time in the San Francisco Bay Area talking to some tech insiders about Qiqima, and basically just trying to soak in that Silicon Valley energy. One of my stops was at the Tech Shop in Menlo Park, I have to say I was completely blown away.

In short, the TechShop is workshop that provides membership access to tools and equipment, instruction, and a creative community of like-minded people so they can build the things you have always wanted to make. Or, as I describe it, the TechShop is a place where adults can set their imaginations free and play with all those power tools and industrial lasers you were never allowed to touch as a child. I have never seen anything like it. In a sense, it is the same principle as open source code that is made available to all for the betterment of society.

The TechShop was recently featured in the February issue of Wired magazine, in which Chris Anderson wrote, ”When TechShop founder Jim Newton went looking for an executive to run it, he quickly decided on Mark Hatch, a former Kinko’s executive. The analogy is apt: In the same way that Kinko’s democratized printing and, in the process, created a national chain of service bureaus, TechShop wants to democratize manufacturing.”

Image courtesy of www.techshop.ws

So what does this mean for Africa? Lowering the barriers to entering the manufacturing business by making tools easily accessible means that we can now potentially compete on the imagination and creativity. As Mark commented while we toured the premises, human creativity is the single largest untapped resource in the world. I hope that such opportunities to manifest creativity will be extended to Africa and other emerging markets around the world. Of course, I made sure to plug Afrigadget as a site to discover the inventiveness, resoursefulness and entreprenuership of the African spirit.

If you are ever in the Bay Area, I strongly encourage you to stop by the TechShop and check it out for yourself. They also have locations in in Durham, North Carolina, and Beaverton, Oregon, and will be opening more centers around the country.

Hi Peter,

I hope you and your family are enjoying your last few days in the Bay Area. I am now safely back in St. Louis. Thanks for taking the time to meet with me. I felt that, though brief, it was very enlightening and I really gained from your insights. I’m sure they will prove to be very valuable to me in these next stages of my product development. For one thing I know that I need to build a much stronger case for the existence of my offering. I also need to be more innovative in making it more difficult to replicate and more distinguishable from other microblogs. By the way, what is your view of building mobile web apps with HTML5? Will it gain greater acceptance, quickly? Is it worth investing in at this early stage outside of iphone dev?

Thanks also for the WWW document you sent. It is highly informative. My budget, as it is now, is not big enough to secure your development services, nor do I have a strong enough revenue model to justify the investment yet. But I hope I can continue to shoot some ideas your way as I progress.

Regards,

Noel