CUUSOO on Nick Wang

Who am I?

Fri, 11 May 2012 09:45:00 +0000

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.

Me Being Awesome at SXSW 2012, Storified!

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 01:57:00 +0000

I storified my time at SXSW… on Storify…

(If Posterous doesn’t embed the story here, click on the link to go see it on storify.com.)

LEGO Shinkai Released! Magazine and Blog coverages

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 15:20:00 +0000

Our baby the LEGO Shinkai 6500 Adventure set has finally opened publicly for sale yesterday, Feburary 17, 2011. A bunch of Japanese magazines coming out this month will have coverage on this event. I’ve scanned a few of them we received, check them out.

Also, our friends at the BrickJournal is featuring Shinkai on their front page right now:

and Engadget Japan also reported on the LEGO Shinkai.

The World's 1st User Generated LEGO Set to go on Sale in Japan!

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 01:59:00 +0000

Been wanting to share this but couldn’t until now! Early this week, the official announcement for the LEGO Shinkai 6500 Adventure Set finally went out from Cuusoo.com and from LEGO Japan.

We here at Cuusoo.com are all very proud of this achievement! In a sense, this is even more impressive than the best selling MUJI bean bag sofa, as that was designed by a professional designer. This LEGO Shinkai product wasn’t created by some LEGO professionals or even an AFOL (Adult Fans of LEGO) member, there’s actually a very interesting story behind this, the creator is actually more interested in deep sea life forms than the submarine itself! More info will be published by my friends at Brick Journal and XL magazine soon.

Sent out a few boxes to my friends in the US and South Africa. (Flickr picture here from Harper. Com’on guys! Post more pictures! :)

Meanwhile, tweets about this unique product is blowing up in Japan!

If you live overseas and wanna get your hands on this Japan exclusive, you’ll have to try your luck at ebay or Rinkya or other auctions / individuals reseller sites.

Finally, I’m working on a super cool project with LEGO in this crowdsourcing, user innovation field… if you wanna get the latest news, (or may be even a chance to sign up for an early beta) follow me on twitter.com/cloneofsnake

Developing Crowdsourcing Community with Drupal

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 12:34:34 +0000

In the recent months after I’ve moved to Hong Kong, I’ve been working with my former school mates from College to revamp their existing e-commerce pet apparel store and to launch a new business. For that purpose and in preparation for my new role in Tokyo, I’ve been devoting my time to 3 things, 1) learning to develop web sites with Drupal, 2) catching up with the latest SEO (Search Engine Optimization) topics and 3) brushing up on project management skills I learned and used at Yahoo. This post will be about part 1 - Drupal. I had learned of Drupal a few years ago, I was looking for an open source CMS to be used at work internally as an information sharing portal, and Drupal caught my attention because it received support from Google! I didn’t pick it at that time because it didn’t fulfill our functional requirements. However, I did tested it out and honestly, I found it “not very user-friendly”. It was obviously aimed more toward web developers than the regular Joe. What I realized was this: if you just want an easy to use web site to put up contents for yourself and your friends and family, then Drupal is not for you! (Use wordpress instead.) If you’re a business however, and you’re looking for quickly building a highly customizable, highly scalable web site, then use Drupal!

It’s obvious to me that being skilled in Drupal is actually a valuable asset on a personal level, and choosing to use Drupal is a major advantage for probably 80% of the businesses out there! However, I don’t know if it’s because of its weird name or something… it’s quite hard to convince people to pay attention to Drupal! When I try to garner interests in my friends, most of them would ask “What does Drupal do? Why is it good?” Hopefully, this “Implementing Drupal” video from Google Tech Talk can save me from repeating myself again! orz So, how am I going about learning Drupal? I’m not a web developer, although I am knowledgeable in PHP, Perl, Apache and Linux/Unix… I’m mainly a database guy. So, the whole web design AND development thing is quite a challenge for me. One of my bad habit is that I always like to do thing perfectly! I can see far into a “goal”, how a web site should look like and function… so, I want to do everything perfectly! The problem with this is of course, it’s not easy (if not close to impossible)! For example, with this wordpress blog, I learned to theme it with CSS until I feel that all the colors and layout is perfect! Luckily, that wasn’t too hard. With Drupal however, it’s a different story! I started with reading the Pro Drupal Development book by John VanDyk & Matt Westgate. After the first few chapters of learning how Drupal works internally, writing a few simple modules (or add-ons) to it, I realized this book isn’t what I need at that point in time! The best way to learn any web technologies is to get it up and running! I need to set something ASAP, start migrating some content to it from one of my existing web sites, and just run with it. However, this first step was still a necessity, as I needed to know, on a high level, how Drupal works. I always like to get a grasp on the nuance or “bigger picture” of whatever needs to be done. This way, I can make meaning out of it and delegate work to my team accordingly. So, next, I looked for theming tutorials. (I like my sites to look pretty!) I found excellent resources at Drupal’s theme guide, the Zen theme, and The Art Lab’s Drupal School podcasts. At this time, Drupal 6 was released, it has improved a little bit in terms of User Experience. I switched to it and looked up The Smashing Magazine for web design tips with Photoshop. I was able to create a pretty cool theme in a couple of days. And then… I realized… I can’t even post some contents in formats that I want! After doing some research, I realized that there are a few modules that are almost CRITICAL to any Drupal installs, (in fact, the power of Drupal lies with its vast library of modules!) Sadly, these moduels are not available for Drupal 6 yet!! So, I went back to my Drupal 5.7 sandbox. Installed CCK, Views and Imagefield… etc, and that’s where I am at right now… learning to create custom content types and views within Drupal. (This is part of the reason why just a vanilla Drupal install looks so boring… its basic content types - blog post, page, forum… they are all too basic and look exactly the same! BORING!!) It’s also at this time that I found this article about New York Observer (the newspaper) had migrated their web site to Drupal. The hired professionals to do this, and it is a prime example of how hard Drupal can ROCK if you know how!!!!