Who? If you've got a brilliant idea about to be bought by everyone
and fundamentally change the sustainability of the world, go ahead and
spend a bunch of time raising venture capital and patenting things
before you let anybody buy this. If you care about getting your
idea out there and built while maybe earning some beer money, you might
find Dirtnail interesting.
What? Dirtnail is a place to buy and sell the many
products in the middle, those things for which demand is more than one
but fewer than enough to quit your day job.
Where? Distributed:)
Why? Practical Answer:
Let's say I want a laser pointer strong enough to pop balloons from across the room. Traditionally, I have 2 options:
So, lots of money and little time or little money and lots of time.
Shouldn't there be a middle ground? If only there were some
way to facilitate buying one from somebody who's already built
one, I'd happily pay them $200 for their trouble...
I want Dirtnail.com to facilitate this.
There are many people much smarter than me making this argument far more eloquently:
"As an American, I think risk-averse behavior is destroying our nation.
As a human, I know we will need visionaries and risk-takers to overcome
the challenges we will face in the decades ahead."
-Peter Diamandis, founder of the X Prize Foundation
"If you're serious about design, you can't quote Ruskin and try
to build Gothic cathedrals in your tiny arts and crafts atelier.
You've gotta prototype stuff, fail early, fail often, and build
scalability into it so that, if you have a hit, you can actually have a
big hit. A success as large as the problem."
-Bruce Sterling, State of the World 2008
"We've lost our Everyman ability to build, maintain, and repair
the devices we rely on every day. And that's making it harder to
solve the country's nastiest problem, like oil dependence, climate
change, and global competitiveness... The good news? A
counterrevolution is afoot. The past few year have seen an
uprising of DIY hobbyists, people who've realized that making stuff is
not only cognitively empowering but also a lot of fun."
-Clive Thompson, "Take Up Thy Tools", Wired March 2008
"I suspect the future is probably weirder than the Singularity
(it's usually weirder than we think - Bell thought the telephone would
be used to uplift the masses by bringing opera into their living rooms,
not to beam atrocity photos out of Burma)... We're apparently living at
a moment with a boundless appetite for stories of humans using
technology to transcend our destiny and even our species. Are we
disappointed that our tools haven't transformed our lives enough?
Anxious that we can't keep up anymore? Or just so overjoyed by
the new mind candy all around us that it seems like we're headed for a
kind of techno-spiritual uplifting?"
-Cory Doctorow, "Predicting The Present", Make Magazine Issue 13
"Ponoko is super-friendly to makers, and one naturally wishes
them well. But my greater concern is Ponoko's cousin: that
visibly heaving groundswell of entities that are all trying to make
real-world, nonvirtual objects. It' like there's a gnawing hunger
upon the land because all the heavy industry has fled to China.
So we're seeing a whole panoply of innovative efforts... None of these
seem to me to hit the mark yet. But boy, they sure are
suggestive."
-Bruce Sterling (again), "Ponoko: A Long-Tail, Pro-Am, Digital Maker Thing", Make Magazine Issue 13
When? Please don't email me complaining about the lack of cool products available. I would, however, like to hear about:
What you want built (to what spec and how much you'd pay)
What you have built (to what specs and for what price)
