Release 2.0
6
Jimmy Guterman, from The Hardware Revolution, page 1
“Open source changed the business of software irrevocably, in ways ranging
from how we produce and license software to how we maintain and distribute
it. Although it’s still early on, we’re seeing strengthening signals that the same
thing may happen as hardware opens up to open source. In this issue of
Release 2.0
, we consider the state of the open source hardware products and
business models that are emerging.”
New tools and technologies are about to change what hardware products and services businesses can offer.
By Jimmy Guterman
04:
Open for Business
It happened to software. There are early signals that open source will disrupt hardware, too.
By Jeanette Borzo
07:
How Open Source Hardware Changes the Game
Afraid your plans will get stolen? But that’s the whole idea! By Jimmy Guterman
14:
The Secrets Big Companies Should Know About
Open Source Hardware
Learn crucial lessons from the early entrants. By Jeanette Borzo
16:
The Number:
A World of Social Networks
The world is a lot bigger and more diverse than MySpace and Facebook would have you believe.
By Jimmy Guterman
18:
The Canon:
How to Lie with Statistics and
Within the Context of No Context
We celebrate two slender volumes that can change the way you look at business decisions.
By Jimmy Guterman
20:
Calendar
http://r2.oreilly.com
This newsletter covers the world of information technology and the Internet — and the business and societal issues they raise.
executive editor
The Hardware Revolution
It’s the future of manufacturing—and early signs of it are here now.
Jimmy Guterman is editor of Release 2.0 and editorial director of O’Reilly’s Radar group. You can reach him at jimmy@oreilly.com.
You want to talk about open? Try this:
It’s the original 1981 IBM Personal Computer, running Microsoft’s MS-DOS (aka IBM PC-DOS, as fellow old-timers will no doubt remind me). I understand that Microsoft’s astonishing success was built on proprietary software, but it was also built on something else: providing a platform that others could build on with minimal pain. Anyone who wanted to develop a program for MS-DOS or its successor Windows didn’t have to ask permission or pay a royalty for the privilege. Similarly, on the hardware side, developers and manufacturers didn’t need to ask IBM (or Compaq, or Toshiba, etc.) if it was OK to develop a mouse, graphics board, modem, etc. While the platforms certainly met the definition of proprietary, there was still plenty of room for independent developers to innovate and profit. –>
And that’s only for developers who went through official channels. The hacker mentality was adopted by early users of personal computers, who found, for example, that desoldering and rewiring two chips on a Kaypro’s motherboard could double the clock speed. Indeed, it was easy to take apart these machines. All you needed to get access to the motherboard was a screwdriver. Try doing that to your iPhone. You’ll void your warranty and maybe electrocute yourself.
I’m a sucker for new gadgets—especially ones that let you mess around with their insides—so I was delighted when the first production units of the Chumby, a small open source hardware computer, were available and I was given an “opportunity” to buy one. It’s a return to that early-PC mentality.
It’s still way too early to see whether the little device will be a commercial success. Like so many hardware platforms before it, the Chumby can be only as successful as the applications people write for and use on it. At press time the device wasn’t even officially “out” yet, so we don’t know yet whether it will attract developers interested in taking it apart and doing clever and/or useful things with it. But this tiny Linux-based computer is different from the great majority of hardware platforms before it—and nearly all today’s competing hardware platforms—in that the device itself was specifically conceived to be as open, as customizable, as hackable, as possible. What does a Chumby do? Well, that’s up to you. And that’s the promise of open source hardware.
I’d better put this disclosure up high: The Chumby device was first seen at O’Reilly’s Foo Camp, and Chumby Industries is funded by O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, of which the company that publishes this newsletter is a partner. And although I don’t know for sure, it’s possible that I was considered an “insider,” eligible to buy an early model, because I had an oreilly.com email address. Consider any references to Chumby with that in mind— but I did pay the $179.95 for the device out of my own pocket.
The first production “latte” Chumby.
As a trusted colleague suggested recently, putting the words “open,” “source,” and “hardware” next to one another in a sentence is a sure way to cure insomnia among businesspeople. Most executives have long given up on even trying to adjust the clock on their own VCRs (Hello, TiVo!). To them, the prospect of a device like Chumby that can be altered at whim is mere hobbyist nonsense. Right now, they might have an argument. But a fundamental article of faith at O’Reilly Media, one justified over and over, is that it’s hackers, innovators, and alpha geeks—in a word, hobbyists—who provide the most reliable early warning signals as to where technology and the business of technology are going. As we explore in this issue of Release 2.0, it’s the promise of open source hardware that’s entrancing many of those emerging leaders.
It wasn’t that long ago that open source software was derided as the work of hobbyists. Yet open source changed the business of software irrevocably. Now open source software is the mainstream, the backbone of enterprise sys-tems at countless businesses large and small. Let’s not forget that many of the most important and leading-edge websites, such as Amazon and Google, have used open source software as the foundation for their proprietary advances. And open is going in new places, even if in many of those places “open” will mean, at least at first, “ever-so-slightly-less-closed.” Verizon says it will open its network to outside (i.e., non-Verizon-sold) devices late next year, and early in 2008 Apple is scheduled to deliver a developers’ kit for its previously locked-down-at-all-costs iPhone. It’s unclear how truly open the Verizon network and Apple device will be, and both announcements are clearly defensive maneuvers, but they’re maneuvers in the right direction. In this issue of Release 2.0, we look at the state of open source hardware and—more important—where it’s taking us and what companies can do about it.
Also in this issue, we feature our usual departments. “The Number” evaluates how the international social networking market looks much different from the U.S. one, “The Canon” suggests two slender, provocative volumes that can change the way you see your business and your world, and “Calendar” high-lights some of the technology and business events on our radar over the next few months. The Radar team will be at plenty of them, even those we’re not organizing, and we hope to see you there. And, as always, we’re interested in what you want to see in Release 2.0. Please write us with your ideas, kudos, and brickbats at jimmy@oreilly.com. nn
Another high-profile open device we on the O’Reilly Radar team have been watching closely is the one developed by One Laptop Per Child (http://laptop.org). Expect to see a review—of both the computer and its busi-ness—on the Radar blog, http://radar.oreilly. com, shortly.
If this issue inspires you to consider pur- chasing some open source hardware, visit the Make: gift guide at http://blog.makezine. com/archive/2007/12/open_source_ hardware_gift.html. Believe us: There’s nothing like an LED Mini Menorah.
Like so many new business ideas, this one arrived unexpectedly.
Four years ago, a software developer wanted a quick and easy way to track problems. So he turned to an open source program, Bugzilla, that let a com-munity of enthusiasts and staff track and repair any flaws in the Neuros MP3 player—without having to worry about licenses for commercial bug-tracking software. Many have turned to open source this way, as a quick and dirty way of resolving a specific problem without the overhead and cost associated with proprietary systems. But instead of turning a company toward open source software, this time it led to open source hardware. At the end of 2003, Joe Born spun Neuros Technology out of its parent company Digital Innovations.
“I remember seeing [what was happening with Bugzilla] and saying ‘What’s going on?’” says Born, Neuros’s founder and CEO. “It was kind of shocking.” Shock grew to enthusiasm, though, as Born realized that he got all those bug fixes without having to hire new developers, buy bug-reporting software, or even conduct market research. Members of the community not only let Neuros know they wanted a music player that would sync with plenty of different computers, but they also helped to build it. By the time the player hit the market, its features extended beyond what the company would or could have done on its own. The Neuros was no iPhone when it came to commercial success, but it would have been nowhere without those additional features. Neuros didn’t set out to be an open source hardware company, but it suddenly found itself expanding its open source software experience into its hardware. In less than a year, the firm had also posted the player’s hardware schematics online.
Neuros’ story is interesting—but not unique. In the technology industry’s backrooms, large and small companies based around the globe are having similar experiences as they transfer open source software principles and approaches to the emerging trend of open source hardware. A hardware device is open source if all the elements necessary to modify or completely recreate it from scratch—schematics, diagrams, measurements and the like— are openly available to all interested parties.
Open source hardware offers many potential advantages—and they’re not limited to technology. Open source hardware can facilitate good public relations and a quicker and less-expensive alternative to focus groups. Encouraging cus-tomers to design and modify one’s products can also help build customer loyalty while expanding market reach when customers or partners modify a product to suit a sector that the company hadn’t previously courted. Device enthusiasts often far outnumber a company’s development team, meaning that developing
Open for Business
Open source hardware may change how we think
about hardware—and how we sell it.
by Jeanette Borzo Jeanette Borzo has been reporting on business
hardware using an open source framework can create better products more quickly. And, finally, the move toward open source hardware may be simply unavoidable—an unstoppable trend companies wanting to remain competi-tive will have to consider. Increasingly, buying a hardware product that isn’t open source will be like buying a new car with the hood welded shut, says Chris Bergeron, founder of Dashwerks. Even if owners never look under the hood, they still want to be sure they can if they need to, he says.
And yet, isn’t the thought of exposing everything needed to build a product completely counterintuitive to long-held notions of trade secrets—and the corporate profits that they have yielded year after year? Certainly, there is no denying that the challenges of open source hardware are at least as numerous as the benefits. Companies that adopt open source hardware have to learn how to give up some control, tackle the tricky issues of warranties, patents, and the other legal ramifications of open systems; not get sidetracked from a block-buster product by enthusiasts’ minute (and unending) product demands; and deal with the vulnerable position of corporate transparency that open source hardware demands. Neuros and others were delighted that Bugzilla was “free,” but that’s “free” as in “free speech” and not “free” as in “free ride.”
Still, groups stretching from international projects to startups to Fortune 100
companies are finding that the promise of open source hardware can outweigh such challenges. And in addition to companies that have wholeheartedly adopted open source hardware principals, even more companies that sell proprietary products—such as TiVo, Linksys (now part of Cisco), and Nokia—are borrowing some elements of the trend. “As companies find they can build products faster with open source, natural evolution dictates” that they will turn to open source hardware, says Peter Semmelhack, chief executive officer and founder of New York-based open source hardware startup Bug Labs.
In today’s competitive market, “it is very hard to keep up with the mass of humanity that is innovating,” Neuros’ Born says. “If you’re not allowing experi-mentation on your hardware, you’re not going to keep up.”
A spirit of sharing and collaborating
So what exactly is open source hardware? While its definition is still evolving, it naturally builds on the principles of open source software in which users can access and change a software program and then redistribute the modified code. “The spirit of open source hardware is one of sharing and collaborating,” says Semmelhack.
Just as software programmers post their code online, those in the open source hardware movement post parts lists, mechanical diagrams, circuit dia-grams that explain electronic circuitry, and layout diadia-grams that show where parts get placed. The device’s software is also included, such as the source code for a device’s microprocessor or an application programming interface (API) that reveals how other applications can interact with the device. “What we mean by open source hardware is that we want people to get a product and be able to do whatever they want—solder new devices on to it or whatever,” adds Semmelhack.
Open source hardware is a riff off of open source software, but it can be a lot more challenging than its software counterpart. Posting software online and getting immediate input from a community can be much more straightforward, for example, than posting designs for logic boards that people must build and test before providing feedback. “Open source hardware is not immediately usable like open source software,” says David Yen, executive vice president of microelec-tronics at Sun Microsystems. Plus, if semiconductors are involved, results may not always be reproducible even if the chip specs are 100 percent open, he says, because the results can be “foundry dependent.”
It’s also important to note that, as Larry Wall said, in a different context, of his Perl programming language, “There is more than one way to do it.” Open source hardware does not have to be an all-or-nothing proposition. Many companies are adopting just some elements of the standard definition—and still claiming benefits. “While it’s not technically ‘open source’ in the same sense that term is used in software, since 2005 all of iRobot’s current Roomba products ship with what we call the Roomba Open Interface,” says John Billington, a product man-ager iRobot, the maker of the Roomba vacuum robot. “The Roomba Open Interface is an electronic and software interface that allows users to control Roomba’s motors, and control and monitor Roomba’s sensors. It lets you create your own behaviors with Roomba and encourages people to modify Roomba and create their own robots using Roomba as a base.”
The seeds of open source hardware
As with so many cutting-edge trends, the roots of open source hardware go far back. While open source hardware has only lately gathered enough momentum to be identified as a trend, many see its roots stretching back decades. Many products—among them Apple Computer’s Apple II computers—used to ship The Elements of Open Source Hardware
According to Make:(http://blog.makezine. com/archive/2007/04/open_source_ hardware_what.html), the essential elements of open source hardware are:
n Hardware (mechanical diagrams) n Schematics and circuit diagrams n Parts list
n Layout diagrams n Core/firmware n Software/API
If it doesn’t have all that, it’s not true open source hardware.
Hack Your Vac
The hardware schematics for Roomba’s robots may not be online, but the company’s open interface to its hardware has let users modify the vacuum robots. For some entertaining and thought-provoking examples of what some hobbyists have done with these robots, see
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-How Open Source Changes Manufacturing
by Jimmy Guterman
A colleague in the appliance business notes that trade shows are particularly
scary for the company he represents. Half a decade ago, he says, rival
manufac-turers would take photographs of about-to-be-unveiled new products as they
were set up on the exhibition floor the day before the show. By the final day of
the conference, he recalls, demonstration units of copycat products by the rival
manufacturers would be on display.
In response, the group running the show prevented rivals from seeing other
companies’ offerings until the show opened to the public. Yet, thanks to faster
sampling and replication methods, copycat units are still on the show floor by
the last day.
This is what old-school appliance makers fear: That their newest designs,
developed in secret, will be swiped the moment they’re available for all to see.
But that’s precisely the problem circumvented by open source hardware makers:
It recognizes that, in today’s world of speedly replication, hardware has become a
commodity. (Design isn’t, though, which is a big reason why you own an iPhone
rather than similar-shaped, less expensive, and far more clumsy devices.) Indeed,
the whole idea of a product like Chumby (which is looking at advertising and
elsewhere as potential business models) is to get cloned. Rather than a sign of
failure, being cloned would be evidence of the Chumby’s success (and would
likely lead to a faster path to the next generation of Chumby). The business
model for Chumby isn’t in selling the devices, but in selling the services that the
device will enable. The more manufacturers the better.
When you look at the clones of appliances and traditional electronics, it’s clear
that the features of the cloned items are, for the most, either the same or less than
what was in the original. Nothing is extended, and extensibility is a key element
of so many open source projects: someone thought something important was missing, so he or she added it. Many hardware designers are shocked (either
posi-tively or negaposi-tively) when they discover how a device intended to be used for one
purpose turns out to have many unexpected uses. Tim O’Reilly suggests we think
of open source hardware “as a set of reusable building blocks,” so the most
success-ful projects turn out to be the ones that are most extensible. Extensibility is also what
leads to community, without which open source undertakings tend to be doomed.
Chumby and more traditional hardware makers may be in different businesses,
but the same thing will happen to both of them: if the product is good and
success-ful, it will be cloned—and quickly. Several years ago, a member of the Radar team
heard from a handset exec that new phone designs were cloned within six weeks;
that’s got to be happening much faster now. So why not build a product that takes
advantage of what’s going to happen anyway? For the companies we cover in this
issue of Release 2.0, open source isn’t about merely tinkering with hardware. It’s about tinkering with business models, too.
“People want to modify their
hardware products because
they want to express
them-selves through the products.”
Some open source hardware kits may look and feel like a throwback to the DIY toys of youth, but Adafruit and others are showing that these parts can be combined to make products worth selling. It’s not just for hobbyists..
with hardware diagrams. As Born notes, “Even Sony products came with sche-matics through to the ‘80s.” As Jimmy Guterman notes in the previous article, even proprietary hardware products can include sundry elements of openness for developers and users.
Despite the current reliance on locked-down communications systems (like those owned and run by the incumbent mobile-phone carriers), the pendulum may be starting to swing in the other direction. “When I was a kid, you would buy a television and you would always receive the blueprints,” remembers Benoit Schillings, chief technology officer at the open source software company Trolltech in Oslo. “You can see things changing back now.”
Many forces have combined to accelerate that change, such as a rise of companies that making it easier for consumers to indulge their do-it-yourself instincts. New York’s Adafruit Industries, for example, sells kits and parts meant to make it easy even for beginners to build their own electronics, such as bike lights, music players and MIDI-controlled synthesizers.
O’Reilly’s Make: and Craft, and websites such as Instructables.com (disclosure: Instructables is funded by O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures), meanwhile, provide step-by-step instructions for creating things. The increasing availability of industrial equipment such as laser cutters also makes it simpler to replicate device parts, notes Eric J. Wilhelm, chief executive officer and founder at Instructables, adding, “This will help push along open source hardware.” Eventually, Wilhelm expects places such as Kinko’s to make laser cutters available to the general public, much like the way they sell time on high-end printers today. Wilhelm’s future may have arrived already. TechShop (http://techshop.ws)—a drop-in workshop that opened in Menlo Park last year with classes in how to weld, lathe, use a milling machine, or do machine embroidery—bills itself as “Kinko’s for geeks.”
Open source hardware dovetails nicely with the personalization and cus-tomization trends that are also sweeping business sectors today. “People want to modify their hardware products because they want to express themselves through the products,” says Wilhelm.
Making money now on a long-term trend
num-What can the Ardiuino do? num-Whatever a programmer can convince it to.
The Simputer harnesses open source hardware to deliver computing to the unserved masses, starting in India.
With systems like the RepRap, inexpensive 3D replication may move out of the lab.
ber of experimental and commercial projects seem to agree, both at companies large and small, in the U.S. and abroad.
“It’s like tidal pools…here and there around the globe,” says Tom Igoe, who teaches in the interactive telecommunications program at New York University and is one of five key players—spread across Europe, Asia and the U.S.—behind the Arduino (http://www.arduino.cc/), an open source electronics prototyping platform. Artists, designers, hobbyists and others have already bought 13,000 Arduino boards, using them, for example, to make devices that lets plants “call” their owner when they need water; that let people in wheelchairs control video cameras; and that let snowboarders record their motion.
Open source hardware projects are popping up around the globe. The Open Source Quattrocopter (http://www.opensourcequadrocopter.de/) and Paparazzi (http://www.recherche.enac.fr//paparazzi/wiki/index.php/Main_Page) projects are two separate undertakings that are winning participation from around Europe to create remote-controlled helicopters. Files and schematics for both projects are available freely online.
Many such open source hardware projects are inspired by a desire to make devices more affordable, either for people in developing countries or for hobby-ists everywhere. OpenEEG (http://sourceforge.net/projects/openeeg), for example, is trying to make EEG machines (which measure electrical activity in different parts of the brain) more widely available. Commercial EEG devices are generally too expensive to be tools or toys for hobbyists, according to OpenEEG. Simputer Trust (http://simputer.org/), a non-profit in Bangalore, is meanwhile building the Simputer, a low-cost handheld device intended to “benefit of the weaker sections of society.” It’s commercially available now only in India. And the One Laptop Per Child project (http://laptop.org) is only the most high-profile attempt to use the most open methods to attract the largest audience on the other side of the digital divide.
Similar motives have inspired one of the best-known open source hardware projects—the RepRap (http://reprap.org), the Replicating Rapid-prototyper. This three-dimensional printer creates 3D objects and device pieces and should soon be capable of reproducing itself, thanks to its ability to create the very parts—in plastic, ceramic, or metal—that make up the printer. Led by Adrian Bowyer, of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Bath, the work-in-progress is documented online and could have implications for the develop-ing world by significantly reducdevelop-ing the cost of device production. –>
The proposed Neuros open source phone, built on the OpenMoko platform
Read more about Dash’s appearance at the Web 2.0 Summit at http://radar.oreilly.com/ archives/2007/10/dash_web2summit_ openmoko.html. As Tim O’Reilly writes, “At bottom, the Dash is a PHONE, and that tells us something very interesting about the future of the phone, with more and more devices with phone functionality that don’t actually look or act like phones. It’s also a full Linux computer. Let your imagination be the guide.”
It’s not just do-gooders and academics running open source projects. There are many new commercial open source hardware startups. Jimmy Guterman discussed Chumby in his preceding article and the company (http://chumby. com) expects to release its Wi-Fi enabled content delivery device this month. All of Chumby’s source code, schematics, board layouts, bill of materials, flat patterns, and 3D CAD databases of the device’s plastic pieces have been made available. Bug Labs has a small team working on a modular consumer-electronics platform that it describes as “Legos meets Web services and open APIs.” Consumers can use it, for example, to build a mobile-blogging device or a home-automation system. Neuros makes completely open audio and video devices such as the Neuros OSD, for digitally storing DVDs and videotapes while Taipei-based OpenMoko is working on an open source phone platform that developers can use to make the phones of their dreams. Smart businesses are taking this seriously: Dash (http://www.dash.net), a cutting-edge navigation system that’s also built on OpenMoko (it’s a great example of how some folks can use a phone OS to build something other than a phone), is funded by no less than Kleiner Perkins.
Sun Microsystems, which eventually let its Java programming language go open after years of incremental measures, is letting some of its hardware go free, too: OpenSPARC T2 is the open source version of the UltraSPARC T2 processor, which Sun announced in August. The T2 chip follows on the OpenSPARC T1, which Sun open sourced in March last year. “The OpenSPARC technology is licensed under GPL V2,” explains a Sun spokesman. “Once a company plans to distribute the code, they have to make their source code open and publish it. So there is no licensing fee [but] the companies contribute back to the community.”
Open products: better…and seen as better
Public perception tops the list of reasons why some companies say they are tak-ing an open source hardware approach to their products. “We view this strategy as very customer centric,” says iRobot’s Billington. “As it generates a lot of goodwill and publicity, we benefit from it.” Such intangibles can lead to measurable results: Once a community gets interested in a customizable product, some firms find they spend a lot less on product promotion, for example. “It’s like free marketing,” adds Mitch Altman, president and chief technology officer at Cornfield Electronics, the San Francisco maker of TV-B-Gone, a universal device for turning off televisions (even when they don’t belong to you). “So many people have hacked [the TV-B-Gone] to do such cool things—it has helped my sales.” (Also in the spirit of TV-B-Gone, but much less legal, is the open source mobile phone jammer, many versions of which exist in the field.)
Some claim that open source hardware can also help develop better products, tested by infinitely more developers than any single company will ever have available in-house. “We innovate faster and execute better with open source,” says Sun’s Yen. “The amount of talent outside of Sun is bigger than what we have inside of Sun. They provide feedback to us and we are all ears.”
Some such as Sun also see open source hardware as a way to enter new markets. Developers around the world are using Sun’s open source chip designs to take Sun products into markets where Sun, previously, was not a player—such as low-power-consumption chips and embedded devices. The Italian-British company Simply RISC, for example, has a product called S1 Core, which is a cut-down version of the OpenSPARC T1 processor for devices such as PDAs, set-top boxes and digital cameras—none of which were ever part of Sun’s core market. The Shanghai-based Polaris Microelectronics, meanwhile, is using OpenSPARC for high-performance, low-power microprocessors for tele-com equipment, thin clients, and handhelds. “These are all single core imple-mentations of our chip,” says Yen. “The chip will be cheaper and consume less power. [With open source hardware] you enable people to propagate your product.”
“If your goal is to create the world’s most innovative product,” summarizes Andrew “bunnie” Huang, co-founder and vice president of hardware at Chumby, “it helps you to open it.” –>
Executives have to stop
thinking that giving away
information is giving away
business.
The center of the open source hardware world: China
Because open source hardware in its current incarnation is quite new, it carries with it a host of unknowns—challenges that will have solutions eventually but today are not easily solved. “Hardware is a minefield of patent issues,” says Huang. “The legal aspects [of open source hardware] haven’t been tested yet.” And while many think that inexpensive manufacturing opportunities in China should make open source hardware quite appealing, some note that working with Chinese partners today often requires bulk that open source hardware companies may not have. “You can’t get their attention without hundreds of thousands of orders,” says Semmelhack.Liam Casey, the Shenzhen-based chief executive officer and founder of PCH International, counters “there are plenty of factories here—but you have to focus on building a relationship with a factory.” Regardless of the availability of manufacturing, China’s intellectual-property issues are well documented, but they’re not as important to non-proprietary manufacturers. With so much of a company’s product approach open and exposed, “The eternal fear is ‘Isn’t China going to steal it from me and run with it?’” says Arduino’s Igoe. But many of those already involved in open source hardware think such fears are misguided. If an open source hardware company is small, for example, protecting hardware designs with patents can be useless anyway, if the company doesn’t have the money to enforce those patents, Igoe says.
“Consumers buy brands,” adds Casey, whose supply-chain management firm caters to technology and electronics companies. “How can you compete with China? Build a brand. Focus on design, marketing and sales—and not on protecting some piece of hardware that people can copy anyway.”
To be sure, the value of an open source hardware company may not be in its nuts and bolts but in its assembly-line smarts (building devices in the most efficient and inexpensive manner) or in the services that accompany its hard-ware products, notes Chumby’s Huang.
“You feel like you’re giving up
some of your value, but that’s
old-school thinking.”
tractor company could sell a tractor service—a vehicle service including fuel, upkeep, repairs, delivery, and pickup—to a mining company that would pre-fer to focus on mining instead of tractor upkeep. Fees for subscriptions and services have sustained companies such as Red Hat and MySQL for years. For the makers of open source hardware, a services approach can insulate against any potential sting of openly publishing hardware diagrams—if a company’s core moneymaker is services, product knockoffs will not damage the company’s core revenue. Indeed, such copycat products would fuel new business for those core services.
With open source hardware, “You feel you are giving up some of your value,” acknowledges Sun’s Yen. “But that is the old-school thinking. In this new era, we will be compensated by volume and adoption.” Because of its open source hard-ware approach, Sun does have to move faster, Yen admits, but adds, “It will drive us harder—but that is a good drive, to make sure we continue to deliver value to the market.”
Leverage your customer’s inner developer.
Anyone who has followed open source software knows it’s not only about volunteer developers. But enthusiasts may very well become some of your best product designers, so don’t underestimate their importance. As Eric Von Hippel, professor of management at the MIT Sloan School, wrote about the kitesurfing market in Democratizing Innovation, “the collective product-design and testing work of a user innovation community has clearly become superior in both quality and quantity relative to the levels of in-house development effort that manufacturers of kitesurfing equipment can justify.”
Discover your users. Then put them to work.
Developing a community need not be more complicated than finding folks who complain about your current products and getting them involved. “Find the users who want to change your stuff around and give them the tools to do that,” suggests Eric J. Wilhelm, chief executive officer and founder of Instructables.
Share the wealth.
If someone in your community develops an improvement that you want to roll into your commercial product, be sure that person gets a cut. “We should make sure they’re making money and we’re making money in order for it to work,” says Andrew “bunnie” Huang, co-founder and vice president of hardware at Chumby Industries.
Always work with a strong product concept.
With so many participants involved in your product’s development, it’s easy to get sidetracked down a blind feature alley. So have a tightly defined product concept before you turn to your community. “It’s important to have a strong and clear vision of what your product will be,” advises Joe Born, chief executive officer of Neuros. “Or you could wind up with a mish-mash.”
Sell services.
“Selling devices alone will not sustain the company,” says Michael Shiloh, a San Francisco-based evangelist in charge of developer relations for Taipei-based OpenMoko. Chumby’s Huang agrees, saying “If you want to get scale in open source hardware, an essential part is to have a service,” adding that someone else may be able to out-manufacture you or the parts you produce, but providing a service takes more skill than brute low-cost force, effectively limiting the damage the competition can do.
The Secrets Big Companies
Should Know About Open
Source Hardware
by Jeanette Borzo
Don’t confuse hardware specs with brand value.
Many companies worry that opening their hardware will dilute their brand and undermine brand loyalty. To counter this notion, Chumby’s Huang points to how many hackers have shared their modifications to their Apple iPods—but Apple still has a clear brand definition for its music players. “Opening your schematics does not mean opening up your brand,” Huang says.
Prepare to be open. Really open.
Reluctant open source hardware companies may try to release only certain information about their hardware—but this approach probably won’t work. “When you invite an open source community, every piece of code they don’t have access to is a real killer to the ability to grow your community,” says Neuros’ Born. “Avoid the temptation to hang on to your proprietary thinking. You need to be genuinely open.”
Think smarter in China.
If a manufacturer doesn’t want to work with you because your volume is too small, offer to pay upfront “so there’s no reason for them to be nervous,” suggests Mitch Altman, president and chief technology officer at Cornfield Electronics. Also, minimize the manufacturer’s reluctance to produce your custom products by making full use of any reference designs the manufacturer already has, recom-mends Benoit Schillings, chief technology officer at the open-source software company Trolltech. “Take their reference device,” he says.
Don’t just look east. Go there.
If you want a good manufacturing partner in China, get ready to travel. “China is the most entrepreneurial place on earth,” says Liam Casey, the Shenzhen-based chief executive officer and founder of PCH International, a supply-chain man-agement firm that caters to technology and electronics companies. “You have to develop a process to deal with that. You have to come to China. You can’t do it remotely.” And once you arrive, focus on your products details, such as design and technical details, rather than on setting up meetings with lawyers. nn
It’s not news that social networks are huge. But what seems to be news— particularly in North America—is that social networks are much more than MySpace and Facebook. The U.S. technology industry seems fascinated with the horse race between the News Corp.-owned MySpace and the now-Microsoft-backed Facebook and treats every rumor of funding, valuation, or incremental new feature as extremely important. Granted, overstatement is a big part of being a technology business pundit: Om Malik recently likened Verizon’s possibly opening its phone network to Mikhail Gorbachev opening up the Soviet Union. But the pronouncements of Mark Zuckerberg are being followed and parsed as if he were God or Steve Jobs.
We admit we’re a part of this—at press time, the O’Reilly Radar team had begun work on the third edition of our Facebook Application Platform report— but a quick look at the difference between U.S. traffic of social network sites and international traffic suggests that the world of social networks doesn’t mirror how it looks from Silicon Valley:
(Please note that this and all data in this article is drawn from the work of Ben Lorica and Roger Magoulas of O’Reilly Radar’s research team. While the absolute rankings given by Alexa may not be 100-percent accurate, sites highly ranked by Alexa are significant in a particular country.)
Although MySpace keeps its #6 Quantcast ranking when Alexa tracks over-seas use, many of the differences are dramatic. Google’s Orkut is the #9 website
A World of Social Networks
Outside of the U.S., it’s not all MySpace and Facebook.
by Jimmy Guterman
The Number :
Each issue we look at one statistic in business and technology and explore what is happening behind that number.
For more on Open Social, visit http://code. google.com/apis/opensocial/.
As they do offline, different
cultures generate online
social networks that meet
different needs.
in the world, but only #5,145 in the U.S. Similarly, Hi5 is #10 worldwide, but 98 percent of its traffic is outside the U.S. and stateside it’s only the #465 site.
As they do offline, different cultures generate online social networks that meet different needs. MySpace is the #5 site in Croatia and #6 in Australia— but #48 in Brazil and #89 in Japan. Facebook is #1 in South Africa and Norway— but #35 in Germany. And, in the other direction, Orkut is #41 in the U.S. but #1 in Brazil and Paraguay. Friendster is #73 in the U.S. but the top-ranked site in the Philippines and Brunei.
Indeed, companies that aspire to world domination—as so many U.S. tech-nology companies do—need to look beyond MySpace and Facebook as they market, recruit, and learn in different strategic markets. The O’Reilly Radar research came to three broad conclusions regarding which social networks were most popular where:
n Friendster showed strength in Southeast Asia and some Gulf states.
n Hi5 was most popular in Latin America, parts of Europe, and the Middle East.
n Orkut gained the highest ranks in Brazil, South Asia, and some Gulf states.
Companies looking to use social networks to understand people and trends throughout the world do so via MySpace and Facebook alone at their own risk.
Why the big differences? Many of these social networks were created with small constituencies in mind (in Facebook’s case, students at one university) so the idiosyncrasies associated with such development may make more of a dif-ference as the audience grows tremendously. But plenty of popular software and services wind up being used in places its inventors never intended. It’s pos-sible that one of the reasons for so many differences in which sites are popular across nations and regions is that the current system forces each social network to create itself from scratch, walled-off from all other social networks. It’s not like email, in which every address that follows a standard form can share with any other address in that standard form. Right now the various containers can’t share much of anything, and that leads to the development of separate silos we see now in the social network space.
We started this year with a rave for Bill Moggridge’s instant classic Designing Interactions (see our review in issue 2.0.1), all 800 pages of it; we’re ending 2007 with a look at some time-proven classics that are much more slender. In short, our readers might actually have time to read them.
Small books, reference and otherwise, have served as useful, portable inspi-ration. Writers often are not far away from their copies of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style or Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Businesspeople and optimists of all stripes could do much worse than have Brenda Laurel’s 112-page Utopian Entrepreneur nearby. Engineers and designers have a pair of tiny, elegant IDEO hardcovers worth perusing for inspiration, among them Andrew Burroughs’s
Everyday Engineering: What Engineers See and Jane Fulton Suri’s Thoughtless Acts?: Observations on Intuitive Design. The trend has a downside, of course. There are series of books intended to appeal to self-identified “dummies” and “idiots,” and many elite business journals sell at-a-glance versions of their arti-cles to time-pressed readers. Someone somewhere may have tried to reduce
Good to Great or Getting Things Done to haiku. But compact volumes that make sense of complex issues are particularly valuable in the current era of overflow-ing inboxes, physical and virtual. We suggest two of them this month.
Like many, I was first made aware of Darrell Huff’s How to Lie with Statistics
long ago while in college trying to understand t-tests, ANOVAs, and the like. The book is more than half a century old now, but it doesn’t feel dated. At a time when chartjunk and data that appears to be based on analytics but is in fact based on a gut feeling seem to rule, Huff’s warnings and Irving Geis’s amusing line drawings ring truer than ever. (Geis’s drawings are dated—note the smoking doctor and baby—but still entertaining.) Huff doesn’t want to direct readers to lie with statistics; rather, he is offering some common-sense tools for knowing that the stastistics you’re using to make a decision may be lying to you. Like Edward Tufte’s spiritual ancestor, he alerts readers to the dangers of “The Gee-Whiz Graph” and how information visualizations can yield incorrect decisions, regardless of whether the misleading visualization was come to by nefarious or incompetent means. “Northing has been falsified—except for the impression it gives,” Huff notes of one graph: even the correct information can push you in the wrong direction if the context is off. “Suppose you wish to win an argument, shock a reader, move him into action, sell him something. For that, this chart lacks schmaltz.” How to Lie with Statistics is an enjoyable, worth-returning-to-regularly, equation-free primer and reminder of how best to see beyond the schmaltz, not make a bad decision because the data “clearly” pointed to it, and make sense of what you see.
Darrell Huff
W.W. Norton, 1954
Within the Context of No Context
George W.S. Trow
Little, Brown, 1981
by Jimmy Guterman
The Canon :
So much of what we have to read for business — an email, a report, an agenda — is extremely important right this moment, but will be less and less so as time passes. In fast-moving industries, that may be inevitable. But there are ideas that are meant to last for generations. In each installment of “The Canon,” we consider books, articles, websites, or whatever else we can find that offers ideas and approaches that will last and are essential to mastering today’s technology business — and tomorrow’s.
But what if simply making sense is no longer possible? In his 1980 essay “Within the Context of No Context,” originally published in The New Yorker and subsequently reissued as a short book, George W.S. Trow saw his world as one in which technology rendered culture and the large world as, simply, silly. And this was 27 years ago! Readers of a technology newsletter such as Release 2.0
might dismiss Trow as a Luddite, the Sven Bikerts of his generation, as he rips into the very idea of television, the dominant media of that moment, calling it “the force of no-history,” its popularity fueled by “the use of false love.” It’s not so different an argument of what today’s Web or social network naysayers are emitting. But what sets Trow apart from knee-jerk cynics of the moment (think Andrew Keen and his Cult of the Amateur)—and what makes Within the Context of No Context an essential read for business and technology readers at this late date—is how he seeks not merely to say “TV makes us dumber,” an inarguable but mundane statement, but figure out why. He evaluates the real-life existence that lurks behind buzzterms like “information overload” and what that overload does to us. He says this all with a sharp style. Trow balances the highbrow with slang, delivering aphorism after aphorism, each so compact and so all-encom-passing that they deserve books or at least essays of their own. Yet—let’s not forget this was written for the Wallace Shawn-era New Yorker—this is also a soulful, personal work in which Trow uses media invasion as a metaphor for all sorts of loss.
Consumer Electronics Show (Las Vegas, NV) http://www.cesweb.org/
The megatradeshow, in the megacity. Leave the subtlety at home.
Macworld (San Francisco, CA)
Steve Jobs will introduce a new something. We’re going to go out on a limb here and predict that he will suggest that the new something is good.
O’Reilly Money:Tech
(New York, NY) http://conferences.oreillynet.com/money2008/
Paul Kedrosky and the O’Reilly Radar team will show you how to hack Wall Street.
O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing (New York, NY)
http://conferences.oreilly.com/toc
Our second annual conference moves to the city that hosts much of what remains of Publishing 1.0. Come help them embrace the future.
TED (Monterey, CA) http://www.ted.com
Yes, the marquee event celebrating technology, entertainment, and design is long sold out. There will be a $3,000 simulcast room in Aspen, too. Have you signed up for the 2009 installment yet?
O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (San Diego, CA)
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/et2008/
How does technology help you perceive things that you never noticed before? Learn about everything from iPhone hacking to sex hacking.
Graphing Social Patterns (San Diego, CA) http://graphingsocial.com/
Explore the components of building and distributing applications for Facebook and other social networking platforms. Then stay for ETech (see above).
Accenture Global Convergence Forum (Miami, FL) http://accenture.com
Join other prominent leaders from the communications, technology, and media industries.
Calendar
A selection of significant public events over the next few months.January 7–10
January 14–18
February 6–7
February 11–13
February 27–March 1
March 3–6
March 3–4
April 7–9
Events Jimmy Guterman plans to attend.
Lack of a symbol is no indication of lack of merit. Please contact Jimmy (jimmy@guterman.com) to let us know about other events we should include.
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Web 2.0 Expo (San Francisco, CA)
For those of you who find the October Web 2.0 Summit too intimate, spend four days at Moscone West with tens of thousands of your closest and most likeminded friends.
The Nantucket Conference (Nantucket, MA)
http://www.nantucketconference.com/
A group of investors, entrepreneurs, technologists, and executives head to an exclusive island, go off the record, and imagine the future.
O’Reilly Where 2.0 (Burlingame, CA)
http://en.oreilly.com/where2008/public/content/home
If you’re interested in geo, this is the, er, place to go.
D (Carlsbad, CA) http://www.allthingsd.com
Last year Walt and Kara got Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to speak together. Who will they pair up next year?
Velocity (Burlingame, CA)
http://en.oreilly.com/velocity2008/public/content/home
O’Reilly debuts a new conference dedicated to Web performance and operations. Are you building at Internet scale?
Ubuntu Live (Portland, OR)
Find out the latest about the most popular Linux distribution. And while you’re in Portland…
O’Reilly Open Source Convention (Portland, OR)
Join more than 2,500 open source developers, experts, and gurus.
April 22–25
May 1–3
May 12–14
May 27–29
June 23–24
July 20–22
July 21–25
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