Business Benefits of Open Source Modular Design

The modular design of technology, facilitated by an open source approach, could be a key feature of a circular economy – and it could open up significant business advantage in the process.  This article was written by Paul and published at Circulate News, the news site of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. http://circulatenews.org/2016/06/business-benefits-of-open-source-modular-design-for-the-circular-economy/

Our community space now available in Ferney-Voltaire

We have just opened our space for innovation and creativity in Ferney-Voltaire. While we work to design a unique experience for our users, we are every day improving day our equipment, layout and decoration, to be ready in the coming weeks to welcome you. In addition to the tools and machines, we seek to live the values of our association in this new space. Take the opportunity to join us and help create your space!

Pangloss at Leman Make

We attended the LemanMake Festival in Nyon, to go and meet the hackers, makers in the region and to see how to democratise what can be done with fablab machines. Workshops for kids, impressive demo, conferences, everything was there to discover what the future will look like. LemanMake. Also a great opportunity to meet with our friends from all parts of Switzerland.

Robots!

Gadget Guru is a short weekly radio show on World Radio Switzerland that I do with Tony Johnston. Here's the show from January 27th, 2015: Here's the usual set of links & videos from the show: Our list of Pangloss Labs events so you won't miss our next robot workshop The Open Source (hardware and software) Thymio robot from EPFL and it's programming environment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTi7DjqlGO8#t=42 The NAO robot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8-SSwKMGnY and the much more serious and large ATLAS robot from Boston Dynamics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27HkxMo6qK0 And one of my favourite French open source robot projects, InMoov: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2L4MCFubLs Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics:
  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Have a good week, and remember that according to the original Terminator movie humanity should have been destroyed by now, so we are definitely not in that future.

Social Innovation talk at Impact Hub Geneva

Paul was asked to speak at Impact Hub Geneva's crowdfunding launch event yesterday.  The round table was about Social Innovation.  With such people in the audience as representatives from the UNHCR and the ICRC he talked about the impact of crowdsourced open source hardware. Projects described included Data Canvas Sense Your City real-time environmental monitoring,  Publiclab - the citizen science portal, the Open Source Beehive project, Local Motors and the awesome E-NABLING the  future project, providing low-cost customised prosthetic limbs all over the world and making people smile. http://youtu.be/KcPjwq9-sDc  

Open Source Hardware at TEDx

Just before Christmas I was lucky enough to go to TEDxPlaceDesNations, where Javier Serrano from the open hardware group at CERN gave a fantastic talk about the benefits of using open source hardware. You can see the talk in it's entirety right here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqHzV5ty4Kk  

The Fab10 Documentary

In July 2014 I went to the 10th annual gathering of FabLabs.  I wanted to see if a FabLab was a useful tool for building a new way to manufacture open source hardware.  This documentary gives you an overview in 35 minutes of what I spent 8 days immersed in.  And, yes, I came back to Geneva convinced I should build an ecological FabLab. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyMl_Qedd7c