Jon F.: What are some of the ways that you’re seeing emerging tech disrupt the product design lifecycle?

Jon M.: I think the most disruptive element of the product design life cycle is crowd funding, at this point. Just being able to prove that this market exists, before you spend all the resources getting your manufacturing line up and running. We’re seeing like a huge, huge huge drop in the barrier to entry, from crowd funding, because it’s just becoming the status quo, it’s like, “If I have an idea I can build it quickly and then I can get it out there” and things like Kickstarter do a really good job of helping you market it first and getting people to look at it.

Instead of having the traditional way, do some R&D to what people want, do some prototyping show up your pieces, figure out what parts you want go get quotes right for all those parts from people from China, find someone who can build it in China. Instead of all these infrastructure that you build a couple of million of them, hopefully you have some contracts with large retailers that will be willing to feature your product and then you put it out there and see how it goes. That’s just so much risk and so much investment. Nowadays there are so many really, really, good prototyping technology like Tessel, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Picoboard, that it takes very little resources to get up and running and to buy different sensors and peripherals from Sparkfun and Adafruit.

If you want to build a prototype, your first degree of approximation, and get feedback from friends and once that’s good enough you should obviously spend some time figuring out about how much it’s going to cost you before you bring it to market through Kickstarter, but that time to market is drastically reduced. I’ve seen three different websites that are offering to make finding fabricators and suppliers easier more like Yelp for manufacturing. What comes to mind is tindie.com/biz I think and they’re sort of leading this effort. There are a couple of others I forget the name of and the fact that that whole area of product development is becoming less opaque is really critical because now as we’re building Tessel we came from a web development background and we just want it to be able to make hardware, at the same sort of iteration speed that we make software.

Obviously it’s not going to be entirely possible because there’s shipping physical goods involved in that, but we can, there’s a lot of room for improvement. What we found was that we could get pretty far just using off-the-shelf parts, but then as soon as you jump into the world of custom boards and building these things yourselves, it’s totally opaque because a lot of people want to keep that information secret because it’s a competitive advantage to know where you can buy the cheapest boards from, where you can find the cheapest factories.

Even factories in the Far East will treat Westerners different from people from China, so the whole process of how do I find a brokerage, how to get me a better price, all of this has been left opaque by the monoliths who already do part of manufacturing. We’re seeing, as this hardware renaissance approaches, we’re seeing a lot of people wanting to shine some light in those spaces and making them a lot more accessible.

There’s still a long way to go to make it easy for people to know how to say “Okay, I started prototyping this on a Tessel or whatever, now I need to make ten thousand of them. How do I make sure that this is cost-effective and the best design?” It’s a long way to go but there’s definitely some improvements being made, and then that type of a machine we’ve also been doing some a little bit of research into as a man who knows offer really well, how can I use software to highlight what sort of the optimization paths are for when I'm done with hardware? If I’ve written a program that’s 3 Megabytes in size, and I’m using a de