[projectvrm] Re: Wired article on Indie Box. Ownership vs Outcomes

[Blibbet < >]

> IndieGoGo is not a market sizing tool; it is (self-evidently) a crowdfunding
> tool. It reaches out to a specific demographic that are either passionate 
> about
> the product or are looking for a portfolio of alternative very-early stage
> investments.

There are multiple specific demographics for hardware that're too small 
for the big players to focus on.

It is a nice era, when indies ("MicroOEMs"?) are now capable of building 
their own hardware much more easily than in the past.

Besides some of the new cloud-based devices, the Novena[1] open hardware 
box is one of the best recent examples of this. Novena got their initial 
$250K funding in a few weeks. I've think Tor Project may be using 
Novena-based hardware for their Tor Routers, as well.

Novena's demographic of hackers that don't like the poor VRM hardware 
designs today, with untrustable binary blobs and out-of-bound chips, 
like the modern era of inbred Windows8PCs that modern Intel-based, 
EFI-based PCs have become.

Besides lazy hardware innovation, bad VRM from OEMs will help create 
nice product opportunities for Open Hardware-based devices, for new OEMs 
to create VRM-friendly hardware ecosystems.

My $0.02. :-)

[1]http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3750
http://www.crowdsupply.com/kosagi/novena-open-laptop