新车间 [XinCheJian]

Xinchejian kicked off the first of the “Xinshanzhai” series of talks and discussion on how “Shanzhai” micro manufacture efficiency combined with open innovation process and open source hardware will change how China innovate. We had the honor to have Eric Pan, CEO and Founder of Seeed Studio to give the talk “Facilitate Open Innovation – The Seeed Studio Approach” [Speech Slides]. Seeed Studio was founded 3 years ago in Shenzhen to explore combining open source hardware and the electronics supply chain in Shenzhen. Today, Seeed Studio employes over 30 engineers and support staffs with over USD$1 million in annual revenue mainly from US, Europe and Japanese customers which are 98% of its business. Seeed does not yet focus on Chinese market as Eric points out that the tinkers/makers community in China has not yet matured enough for Seeed and there is not enough community. Seeed Studio has so far depends on words of mouth of open hardware community for its marketing and will launch its first marketing campaign in 2011. The following is one of the first ads to be run in Make Magazine. Seeed’s current focus is to grow its WISH platform described by Eric as a ecosystem to support open source hardware designers to better manage the product life cycle. WISH platform let designers and users propose requests and new design and through the community voting and pre-ordering process to help to bring products to the market. The process is best illustrated by this slide from the speech. Seeed also works with partners sites such as Dangerous Prototypes to promote the platform. Eric’s 30 minutes talk was followed by over 2 hours of heated discussion on the topics of open source hardware, innovation and manufacture. The talk and discussions were livecast on Sina Weibo by Steven Cheng under #新山寨#. ]]>

Time: 3pm Dec 26, 2010 Location: Xin Che Jian, 2nd floor, Yongjia Rd 50 (close to Shaanxi Road South) Cost: 30RMB for non-Xinchejian members, free of charge for Xinchejian members. Seeed Studio is an open hardware facilitation company based in Shenzhen, China. Benefiting from local manufacture power and convenient global logistic system, we integrate resources to serve new era of innovation. Seeed also works with global distributors and partners to push open hardware movement. We design modular electronics for quick prototyping and small scale projects, which could be found at Bazaar. It also carries inventories from community innovators, we help people make, distribute their designs and collect the revenue. It’s a win-win situation and taking a shape towards an ecosystem. By working with us, innovators could focus on the designs, provide better support to the user and promote the product. Seeed Studio or similar service provider could get more traffic and bring up other product sales. The manufacture part of hardware involves a lot details. We provide Propagate service to facilitate the process. Innovator send finished prototype with manufacturing files including Gerber file, BOM, test plan and other requirements. Our engineering team will validate and integrate the design into small batch production line. All products will be tested and packed under instruction. Innovators could also view current manufacture and distribution status from propagate. After deducting the manufacture costs, profit will be returned to innovators when inventory sold out. To estimate the popularity before investing manufacture, innovators could post the idea or prototype to Wish. The community would vote, comment and collaborate on projects. You could also join interested groups to see what’s hot being worked on. By participating Wish, ideas with many votes could convert the popularity into coupons to purchase product or service. The idea poster could also share some coupon to the valuable commenter as appreciation. Products and service info are hosted at a wiki called Garden. Feel free to add your guide, project or yourself as a freelancer. About the speaker Eric Pan, founder and director of Seeed Studio, grew up with DIY culture in China. He graduated as an EE bachelor from Chongqing University, with experiences and prizes from national wide contests of MCU, Embe dded Design, Robotics, and English skills. He first joined Intel in Chengdu as a FCBGA product Engineer whose main job includes quality control and new product integration. Then he worked at Beamstream LLC as international sourcing manager on system solutions. He established Seeed Studio since 2008 from bare ground and now turning it into an open source hardware facilitator with 30+ employee. 新山寨第一期: 开源硬件与开放式创新 时间:2010年12月26日下午3点 地点:徐汇区永嘉路50号2楼新车间 (靠近陕西南路) 费用:新车间会员免费, 非新车间会员每人30元 Seeed Studio 是一个位于深圳的开源硬件生产公司. 得益于本土制造业的巨大力量以及便利的全球物流系统. 我们整合不同资源从而服务于新纪元创新时代. Seeed也与全球分销商和合作伙伴合作共同推动开源硬件的前进. Eric Pan 是Seeed studio 的创始人, 他从小受DIY文化影响. 他毕业于重庆大学,获得了电子工程学士学位. 他在微型计算机, 嵌入式设计, 机器人, 英文技能领域都有丰富经验集获奖. 他的第一份工作是在成都intel 担当FCBGA 产品工程师. 其主要工作是腹侧质量控制和新产品整合开发. 随后他在Beamstream LLC 工作担任国际采购经理. 在2008年他创立了Seeed studio —从零起点开始到现在拥有30名员工的开源硬件生产中心. 更多信息可以参考 http://seeedstudio.com/]]>