Making Toys Vs. Developing Software - Agile Hong Kong
Toys vs. Software - Agile Hong Kong (by cloneofsnake)I almost missed Tuesday night’s Agile Hong Kong event - Toys vs. Software, Fight! Had to check the address and the map at a public terminal in MTR at the last minute!
Jonathan Buford, Managing and Technical Director at Advanced Design Labs, was there to talk about his experience in the toys development process… and how it’s similar / different from software development. He showed us a few of his past designs, one of which I’ve seen on TV commercials in the US. He also has a product that has just finished development and is being manufactured for the coming Chirstmas season. It was pretty interesting to learn about the specifics in creating new toys. In fact, it was so interesting that we kept asking questions about making toys and Jonathan had to ditched the entire 2nd half of his speech on software development! :) This shouldn’t be surprising, as most of the people attending Agile’s events should have IT backgrounds and understand software development processes and project management. So we all had a good grasp on Jonathan’s explanation on the “critical path” in product development.
What really interested me was about the risks - R&D can completely go down the tube if no one is buying the idea. So, to minimize risk, they develop lots and create prototypes quickly. He mentioned Rapid Prototyping machines, saying that eventually users will be able to design and make the prototypes themselves. This is related to crowdsourcing and Cuusoo.com, so I asked him what was his take on “crowdsourcing toys design”. Jonathan thinks that we are heading toward the direction of “user generated products”, there are just 2 factors holding us back - 1) the design tools that Jonathan uses is quite advanced and the general public just don’t have the kind of access to these tools. He mentioned that Google SketchUp is pretty good, and may be some day soon, people can use that to design & make models. 2) is the manufacturing part - how do normal people connect to manufacturers? Obviously, he doesn’t know about Cuusoo.com, it has the entire 2nd part covered! I have heard about SketchUp when it was first bought by Google, I guess it is time for me to pay a visit and see if we can integrate its tools for crowdsourcing design.
Comments
cloneofsnake — 2009-02-01 15:34:48
hmm… I can imagine this happening in Hong Kong, tiny shops open up in every shopping arcade, a Rapid-Prototype machine makes individualized casings for standardized hardware - like netbooks or may be cell phones…
The problem here is economy of scale… how well can this model work for the mass market… or even just the local market. I think this will give rise to many profitable small businesses in city like Hong Kong, Tokyo or New York… but it can’t become a behemoth of a business like Nokia or Toyota. Not that it need to though… that’s the whole point of individualized items. :)
Jonathan Buford — 2009-01-31 22:52:24
Hi, thanks for coming to the talk, I’m glad that you found it interesting. Looking over cuusooo.com, I think this is still just a step in the direction that I was talking about. Of course there are outlets like this that allow for something that mimics the mass production that is currently popular, but where I think things will go is something much more personal. One-off items that are made just for that user. I think that it will be a merging of making the design tools more simple with rapid prototyping costs coming down. Currently, a rapid prototype model cost is still too high and the machines are still not accessible enough that they would fit this, but it is heading in that direction with projects like http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome
Just like the current generation of netbooks having a fairly common hardware spec, I think the electronics will become more integrated and modularized, so that it is just a matter of picking the modules and designing a case around it.
Startup Lighting Talks (by 黛) Comrades at Hong Kong’s Drupal group reminded me about BarCamp Hong Kong 2008, it was my first time and I got a really good impression of it. It’s probably fair to say I won’t be the only one who wishes we can have BarCamps more often. I loved it! Check out all the photos at flickr and a general write up about it on LaiHiu’s blog and another insightful one at Ca Phun Ung’s yelotofu. Personally, it felt great to be able to immerse once again in an open, knowledge-sharing environment. We have lots of these events in the US, and they are great for networking. I was able to meet with a few great people and also organized more regular offline meetings after BarCamp. I listened to iPhone apps development (& finding it more and more amazing how Apple can become so popular and “cool” while maintaining their unfriendly, “closed door” stance.) An Open Education open-mic with John Britton (half of it), then jumped over to Microsoft’s OSS session. The lead developer of one of the best online Rich Text Editor - FCKeditor. A Drupal theming session where John Britton informed us about the Knight Drupal Initiative, and we organized what will hopefully become regular offline meetings for HK Drupalers. Finally, there’s the Start-up Lightning talks where I presented my “Environmentally Conscious Restaurant / Food directory” idea. Hopefully, I can connect with a few kindred souls in the 200+ attendants to help spread the site. (Probably gonna use this “currystar” domain.) Finally, met a young entrepreneur, Alvin, who’s still in studying at Stanford… he was working hard networking and spoke with me about having connections to VC in the US. It’s good to know someone who’s so young and passionate! Saw a couple of Yahoo HK developers, I asked one of them how he felt about Yahoo in HK, and he said it’s too “revenue oriented”. I think this is a typical problem with companies that have grown big and also for small HK companies. As a general observation, I think companies (and people) who are “revenue oriented” are often too short-sighted. Because of that, nothing truly revolutionary will come out of them. At the other end of the spectrum, we have visionaries who dream of producing something that will change the way everybody do things, they might create that revolutionary product, everybody loves them, but then they don’t know how to make money out of it. (The classic Slashdot joke: “Create genius product -> Everybody loves it -> ??? -> PROFIT!!) LOL. Rarely do we see phenomenon like Google ~ where a revolutionary idea also crosses over well into a revenue generating model. Generally speaking though, I am supportive of the latter crowd. Take Google for example, they have tons of talented developers but very little managers (they found that managers were killing innovations, so they fired a majority of them in 2001!), everyone is encouraged to spent some of their work hours to work on their own projects! I think most of their products are not making them any money ~ Gmail, Apps, Docs, Reader… etc, but with so many people converging on their platform, something good must come out of it. (Sort of reminds me of how Yahoo was before the bust.) Now, as an ex-Yahoo, (and more importantly, a shareholder!) I really hope Yahoo can produce something “good for the people” rather than “something that helps the bottom line.” I think in the long run, this will help Yahoo gets back on track. For example, Yahoo Hong Kong is the most visited website in Hong Kong, there are so much more they can do to help the locals, so why aren’t they standing at the forefront of it, but rather they are copying local success like OpenRice.com? At BarCamp, one of the guys is creating a mass transit info site - passionately named it whereismybusrightnowdude.com.hk :P As a returning expat, I am like a foreigner who doesn’t know how to get around HK except for the MTR! Other major cities like Tokyo and London already have something like that, people CANNOT live without these services! Why haven’t Yahoo! HK done something similar?
0609 03 Kohei Nishiyama - Future of Lifestyle with Design, originally uploaded by cloneofsnake.
First of all, who thought it was a good idea to host an event at 10am on a Saturday morning? Seriously! Who wakes up earlier than 10 on the weekends? I had to set my alarm to wake up early on June 9th. Managed to leave the house way early, but when you need to go somewhere on time, leave it to MTA to fuck it up for you!! There were constructions near Queensboro Plaza on my N,W line, I had to ride the train backwards to Astoria Blvd, and then the outbound train was stuck right before we got to Queensboro Plaza because they were using one platform for both directions! So I ended up being late! Mr. Nishiyama was the first one to present, so I missed some of his speech.
