While my memories are still fresh I think it could be interesting to describe what happend at the European Maker Faire from my point of view.
It was a huge success with tens of thousands of visitors and thousands of makers from around the world.
I'm not "new" to technology events and I had already seen most of the 3d printers and stuff presented during the event on blogs and so on. So this report won't talk about how impressed I was about seeing 3d printers everywhere, robots, wearable, electronics etc.
The first thing that really pleased me was how easy it was to talk to the people. Makers, entrepreneurs, geeks at large, everybody was keen to learn and discover new projects and meet others. I got in contact with very talented people and promising companies, I will keep in touch with them hoping to do new projects with collaborations all over the world.
I also met lots of "stars" in the maker world and even outside. I chatted with them, they where happy to answer any kind of question, helping anybody needed some information or hint, or even joking around. This is a great value of joining a Maker Faire and I suggest anybody to go visit one if they can.
Among them I must cite Massimo Banzi, Alessandro Ranellucci, Josef Prusa, David Cuartielles, Bruce Sterling and thank them for making every of the last four days memorable.
There also were what I consider three big announcements:
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Intel joining the maker world with an Arduino-approved board, called Galileo. Like all the other makers attending the announcement, I got a sample board, and will try to write something about its inner working in the next few days.
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Arduino TRE, a new powerful ARM-based board made by Texas Instruments. Unfortunately available only in Spring, but very promising, not only for the fact it is the first Arduino platform supporting audio.
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A new model for the Arduino Community, with a deeper involvement of makers into new products development, including the possibility to earn money from it, which I consider very useful to reduce the fragmentation and speed up the community projects.
All of these imply the maker movement is making huge steps forward towards the "mainstream" market, with big corporation trying to get into it in different ways.
I suspect more will join the train, and I'm very excited about that.
On my side I'll try very hard to follow and develop new exciting stuff with the new boards, not forgetting the Yun for which I'm going to release a project I'm working on since its launch, and which I think could be a very useful contribution.
On the business side, I received a very good feedback for my Leap Leather Case at Maketank.it stand and for the Tworologio concept of a twitter connected arduino based smartwatch.
Finally I had the opportunity to present my Woody UI Kit in a room full of people, and answer interesting questions. I hope the project will have a good following, and more than 800 visits in one day to the Instructable I published could be a first proof of that.
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