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8 Ways The Maker Movement Turns Ideas Into Businesses

Startup Professionals Musings

In case you haven’t noticed it, the rapid evolution of do-it-yourself (DIY) facilities for developers, including 3-D printers, SketchUp and makerspaces such as TechShop , have scaled down the cost of prototypes and hardware design by an order of magnitude. Quick low-cost design and fabrication alternatives are extremely valuable.

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How To Predict The Future

Feld Thoughts

Open source and crowdsourcing principles are well understood: When you get enough talented people working on a problem, especially in an open way, progress comes quickly. I wrote an article for the IEEE Spectrum called The Future of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence is Open. Then AI will really take off. (If

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Lessons Learned: The lean startup

Startup Lessons Learned

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. One that is powered by three drivers, each of which is a part of a major trend: The use of platforms enabled by open source and free software. What are the characteristics of a lean startup?

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Lessons Learned: What does a startup CTO actually do?

Startup Lessons Learned

If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not? Platform selection and technical design - if your business strategy is to create a low-burn, highly iterative lean startup, youd better be using foundational tools that make that easy rather than hard.

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Embrace technical debt

Startup Lessons Learned

Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. We can choose to continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the principal by refactoring the quick and dirty design into the better design.

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Lessons Learned: Just-In-Time Scalability

Startup Lessons Learned

Waves of technology platforms The lean startup Customer Development Engineering Greasemonkey compiler Great open source scalability tools from Danga Ideas. Lean Startup Wiki - including a complete list of local meetups and meetup organizers. Seth Godin: How often should you publish? April 23, 2010 in San Francisco.

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Lessons Learned: The three drivers of growth for your business.

Startup Lessons Learned

For Neopets, its simply a side-effect of their game-like product design. Waves of technology platforms The lean startup Customer Development Engineering Greasemonkey compiler Great open source scalability tools from Danga Ideas. Lean Startup Wiki - including a complete list of local meetups and meetup organizers.