Heads up: This post is 14 years old. My thinking may have evolved since then — read it with that in mind.
My name is Nicholas Wang. I was born in Hong Kong and went through its dreadful education system until I was 15, when I moved to Washington State in the US of A. I attended high school in a small town called Issaquah, and then went on to study at the University of Washington. For 8 years, I worked at 2 of the largest internet companies in the world, MSN.com and Yahoo.com, until 2007 when I successfully outsourced my own position to India and I was laid off. This marked the end of my corporate life, working as a “gear” in the grinding machine.
While living and working in New York, I grew more and more discontent with the inequality placed upon us “commoners” by the super rich, top 1% of our society. I wanted to challenge the incumbents and help shift the power back into the hands of the people. When I was laid off in 2007, I decided I will no longer work for corporate America and began to create a web community that will allow people to collaboratively share information about evil businesses. By chance, I met the founder of CUUSOO, Mr. Kohei Nishiyama. He started CUUSOO.com back in 1997 to let people collaborate and submit their own product designs, and if enough people want to buy that product, then factories can make it for the people! It was a revolutionary idea! And I thought if I could help bring this system out of Japan, it has the potential to change the world! Flipping the “mass-manufactured in China” business model around and giving the power back to the independent designers and makers! I moved to Japan to led the creation of the awesome “LEGO models by everyone” site, so now if 10,000 people like your model, LEGO will make it into a real, official product!
While working at CUUSOO in Japan, I created an open source project called “Open Hippel”. My idea was that if we could provide the CUUSOO system free of charge for anyone to use, then people can use it for their own communities. Users can submit issues and ideas, the top ones will get voted up so that resources can be distributed more intelligently. Then, if one of those ideas is a product, it can be sourced back to CUUSOO to be manufactured. I contacted one of my friends in Hong Kong who is a products engineer, we started Makible.com with the idea that it’ll receive product designs sourced from CUUSOO. In 2011, Makible was launched as a startup business and I moved (back) to Hong Kong to join full time as co-founder.
Here’s a talk a gave at Pecha Kucha Tokyo about “Changing the World with User Innovations”:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTqlA3I86lQ?wmode=transparent]
We also used our own system to crowdfund the “MakiBox” 3D printer project (which gathered USD $150,000+ in funds!). Our idea with the 3D printer is that currently, all the 3D printers out there are hobbyists projects that are too expensive and too intimidating for the average consumer. There hasn’t been any groundbreaking objected made with a 3D printer because only hardcore engineers are using it. What we need is to make a 3D printer for the masses. Something that is cheap like a Nintendo or Playstation, and well designed so it doesn’t look like a scary pile of metal bars bolted together! By doing these, I believe we can get our 3D printer into the hands of the gamers, the kids, the dads, the average Joe who has lots of ideas! I believe we can jump start innovations once I put this tool in their hands!
I’ve also been helping my friends at Peer-2-Peer University early on, participating and leading courses, improving its overal community’s user experience.
As you can see, I’m passionate about the “collaborative economy”, enabling users to innovate and solve problems together. I’m now starting this weekend playgroup that emphasize on “child initiated, parents framed” learning, because I think this is one of the most important thing (if not THE most important thing) we can do to change the future! You can read more about my ways of learning in the Reggio Emilia Approach page.