Maker Faire and Make Magazine Have Laid Off All Staff and Paused All Operations (techcrunch.com) 117
McGruber quotes TechCrunch:
Maker Media Inc ceased operations this week and let go of all of its employees — about 22 employees" founder and CEO Dale Dougherty told TechCrunch. "I started this 15 years ago and it's always been a struggle as a business to make this work. Print publishing is not a great business for anybody, but it works . . . barely. Events are hard . . . there was a drop off in corporate sponsorship." Microsoft and Autodesk failed to sponsor this year's flagship Bay Area Maker Faire.
But Dougherty is still desperately trying to resuscitate the company in some capacity, if only to keep MAKE:'s online archive running and continue allowing third-party organizers to license the Maker Faire name to throw affiliated events. Rather than bankruptcy, Maker Media is working through an alternative Assignment for Benefit of Creditors process.
"We're trying to keep the servers running" Dougherty tells me. "I hope to be able to get control of the assets of the company and restart it. We're not necessarily going to do everything we did in the past but I'm committed to keeping the print magazine going and the Maker Faire licensing program." The fate of those hopes will depend on negotiations with banks and financiers over the next few weeks. For now the sites remain online.
But Dougherty is still desperately trying to resuscitate the company in some capacity, if only to keep MAKE:'s online archive running and continue allowing third-party organizers to license the Maker Faire name to throw affiliated events. Rather than bankruptcy, Maker Media is working through an alternative Assignment for Benefit of Creditors process.
"We're trying to keep the servers running" Dougherty tells me. "I hope to be able to get control of the assets of the company and restart it. We're not necessarily going to do everything we did in the past but I'm committed to keeping the print magazine going and the Maker Faire licensing program." The fate of those hopes will depend on negotiations with banks and financiers over the next few weeks. For now the sites remain online.
Maybe the staff... (Score:1)
...should learn how to code?
Re: Maybe the staff... (Score:1)
This is a maker community, not a javascript web developer community.
Unless you meant PIC and AVR assembly language, and the solder proramming language.
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Too many of them, sadly, are about teaching how to safely hold the hot glue gun.
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Adam Savage (Score:4, Informative)
This is a very sad day indeed. The amazing and brilliant team at Maker Media are true believers who gave love, support, & enthusiasm to everyone they touched, and that was a gargantuan number of people. They made the world a better place than they found it.
Re: Adam Savage (Score:1)
If only love support and enthusiasm was enough to generate unique and exciting products.
facio quia ego sum (Score:2)
Cogito Ergo Sum.
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quidquid latine dictum sit amet
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His legacy is mostly that he's the guy that said hateful (and untrue) stuff about Naomi Wu, so I don't think this says anything at all about how far love and enthusiasm might take you.
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Liberals hate Savage cause he's told tranny jokes before.
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No, I was talking about the guy in this story, Dale Dougherty. He was a major asshat to Naomi Wu, the most famous female Maker in China.
I don't have anything bad to say about Savage except that I watched his show a couple times in the distant past and the "myths" he claimed to "bust" were just shit that he didn't have enough details on to figure out what it was. If he figured it out, he recreated a simple working version of it, if he didn't, he didn't.
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That last print magazine I ever bought was a copy of the Make Bubblebots issue before a flight to Florida. I think it was also the only print magazine I ever read through fully. That being said, not a ton of practical value in it. I was fond of it and glad it existed, but you can't feed yourself with fondness. Maybe fondue.
Pretty sad (Score:2)
I just ran across some old copies of Make magazine I had, sad to see it go. I regret not ever going to a Maker faire.
I hope someone will keep around all of the digital copies of Make magazine, maybe someone will buy the company and keep that up? Seems like it would be a shame to lose years worth of projects and tips.
Re: What kind of "making" was it? (Score:1)
Well, yeah. Anyone making anything of interest can sell it, so stuff like this is for loser millennials who glue things together and call themselves makers, as though that is a meaningful word.
It was more practical (Score:2)
I think I saw the same show, because it was kind of SteamPunk oriented there was a lot of decorative aspect to it - in terms of functional making it wasn't that complex, but they did have some interesting stuff.
The Make magazine had more interesting projects where you made more functional things, and included things like electronics and assembly of parts, some of which you formed yourself - that was a while ago though, I don't know what the modern form was like.
Maybe they were just getting outdated with the
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I just ran across some old copies of Make magazine I had, sad to see it go. I regret not ever going to a Maker faire.
I went to the Bay Area Maker Faire every year. It was a great activity for a family of nerds.
I never saw the point in the magazine. It had great content, but a website would have made more sense than printing it on paper.
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I went to the Bay Area Maker Faire every year. It was a great activity for a family of nerds.
I never saw the point in the magazine. It had great content, but a website would have made more sense than printing it on paper.
He wanted to make money, not start a hobby.
Poor Business Plan (Score:4, Informative)
If your business plan is to sell to people who like to do things for themselves, you will go broke.
On a related note, the "Nation of Makers" national conference is in Chattanooga this year, about two hours from where I live. The ticket price is $300. I'd rather spend that money on tools.
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There is still a healthy market for modules and kits. A lot of makers are not able to, say, write a driver for an LCD screen or EEPROM, but they can certainly use an Arduino library for one.
Home Depot $100 billion. Lego, Sparkfun (Score:3)
> If your business plan is to sell to people who like to do things for themselves, you will go broke.
Home Depot's $100 common annual sales beg to differ. For reference, that's about half of Amazon's revenue. Lego has also done pretty well selling to people who want to build things themselves. Directly in Make's space, Spark Fun and others are still going strong.
If your business plan is to sell to people who you don't understand, you will go broke. Know your market.
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If your business plan is to sell to people who like to do things for themselves, you will go broke.
Yeah, just like Home Depot did. Oh, wait.
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If your business plan is to sell to people who like to do things for themselves, you will go broke.
Electronics stores and suppliers will disagree with you. And thank god they do. The Maker community are not gods. We can't make make an Arduino by first creating the universe. There will always have to be someone somewhere in between providing the tools and resources for people who like to do things for themselves.
The other day I restored an old cuttingboard, just me by myself ... with the help of a local chemical company who provided the mineral oil, the help of a hardware store which provided shelf space,
The content got worse over time. (Score:5, Insightful)
I found a really early edition of Make: and was super excited (this was in about 2013-2014 maybe?). Automatic dog ball thrower! Scanning electron microscope in the garage! I subscribed and waited impatiently for each bimonthly issue. Every one I read from cover to cover. Amazing! All was well.
Then I started noticing more issues dedicated to market stuff (3D Printers!!! Drones!!! Robot kits!!! 3D Printers!!!) and less to people's projects. After a while it felt like reading Popular Electronics crossed with Wired (the new Wired, not the cool old Wired). Eventually I stopped subscribing. I occasionally buy an issue if I see it in the bookstore, but I rarely enjoy reading it, and sometimes don't finish it.
I won't miss the magazine when it goes because I already miss what it used to be. YMMV, obviously.
Re: The content got worse over time. (Score:1)
My experience was somewhat similar. I subscribed from the first issue and bought a subscription as a present for a friemd who was getting into electronics via IT.
At first the magazine had neat projects and was concerned with the nuts and bolts and fine details of turning ideas into thimgs. Id come by way of childhood electronics kits and then Horowitz and Hill, and was doing small PIC projects before the arduino launched, and for the first year and a bit the magazine was interesting.
But then the technical c
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I too was an early subscriber. I stopped my subscription just recently because something was missing. And you just described it. Making with what you have.
The last issue I received was less of the selling stuff and more about doing things with what you have.
I did enjoy some of the interviews of makers like Limor Fried in the past.
To be fair, my tastes have changed too. I've gotten into woodworking (mostly hand) and increasingly green woodworking. Most of the magazines out there are about selling stuff,
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I just ran across some old copies of Make magazine I had, sad to see it go. I regret not ever going to a Maker faire.
That's what everyone else said, and that is why there is no more of either.
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That's what everyone else said, and that is why there is no more of either.
My local maker faire was in the SF bay area, which is a PITA, which is why I didn't go. Having it around there meant they had to charge a lot, and it's expensive just to go there and park.
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You can still go to the Milwaukee MakerFaire on Sept 13-15th this year.
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That would require traveling to Milwaukee.
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Is /. at risk of shutting down? (Score:1)
We've heard of a number of left wing media outlets, including some primarily-online ones, significantly downsizing their operations or even shutting down because they aren't viable businesses.
So I must ask: is /. at risk of shutting down, especially now that it has moved to the far left compared to where it once was back in its most successful days?
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You think /. is far-left? It seems libertarian to me. Look at the bulk of the comments in the YT censorship article, for example.
Slashdot censors nothing, it is all there. (Score:4, Insightful)
Libertarians eschew all forms of censorship, of which /.'s moderation system is a form of.
Pardon me sir, but I am a libertarian, I have been since I was old enough to vote. and think the Slashdot moderation system is among one of the best on any website.
In part it's because nothing in censored, just moved up or down IF a reader chooses to apply a filter to hide some levels. If someone wants to see everything, they can, uno matter how down-modded something gets.
I wouldn't call most of Slashdot Libertarian these days myself, but it's hard to tell as a lot of naturally centrist people lean a bit more to the left generally because of disinformation.
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It used to be more Libertarian but they moved on and now we have neckbeards and weaboos. These are the people who can't figure out why they scare women away.
Slashdot makes little money, doesn't have to (Score:2)
I would suggest Slashdot doesn't make a lot of money, so it could easily be shut down. Two different companies have gotten rid of it in the last few years.
On the other hand, Slashdot is a Perl script. That's about all it is. No employees needed if you let the firehose moderation feed the front page. The minimum necessary expenses to keep Slashdot running are tens of dollars per month, maybe a few hundred. One part time employee would useful, but not necessary.
So I wouldn't be surprised if the owner shut i
Too early? (Score:4, Funny)
They make pink-slips.
It was fun... (Score:1)
I was a contributor early on. I really enjoyed the magazine, it inspired people to get into creation, hacking and engineering. It is sad to see them go.
I also went to maker fairs and wrote about it for other media, it was a great time
The business issues don't really surprise me.
I really enjoyed writing for them, but getting paid for my work was such a pain that I quit bothering. Here's an overview of how it went during the first year:
Submit article.
Make accepts the article sends a contract with an offer (sa
To be expected (Score:2, Interesting)
While I don't agree completely... (Score:1)
This IS a large part of the issue.
If they had really wanted it to survive and succeed they should have run it as a non-profit/not-for-profit and used donations and long term investments to keep it running. Also, at the risk of sounding like a dick, do the layoffs and other things a few months ahead of economic total collapse, so the remaining money will hold over the core assets in case you do get an influx of cash. It's worse on the employees who may or may not forgive you, but having the core assets remai
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Are you confusing them with Makerbot? To my knowledge MAKE's only products are the magazine and the Faires.
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Produce a hilariously expensive product and accessories that put both Apple and the printer ink departments of the world to shame in a dubious configuration that barely worked which would be the envy of Microsoft, and with none of the marketing skills of the aforementioned.
What?
A small glossy magazine that cost less than a fast food lunch per issue (once every 3 months) is hardly a "hilariously expensive product and accessories". Also what "dubious configuration that barely worked" are you objecting to? The linear numbering sequence of the pages was too much for you? Did you go to a maker fair and get lost among the booths and tables of people demonstrating their products?
The window was short (Score:5, Interesting)
My working theory is that the Maker's Movement roughly coincided with the Arduino period, when the Arduino was more relevant than it is now. Back then, a tiny processor with no network connectivity was an interesting thing to fiddle with. And for the first time in many years, tinkerers could put together projects themselves that did non-trivial things. You couldn't compete with the major electronics designs, but you could come a lot closer. The last time that was remotely possible was back in the 70's and the Radio Shack days.
Then IoT happened, and suddenly an ATMEGA chip with a tiny amount of RAM/FLASH and no built-in connectivity wasn't enough. The next gen solutions were slow to come, fragmented, expensive, difficult to master, or some combination of the above (Intel Edison, I'm looking at you). The other things that were hitting critical mass along side this (3D printing, home CNC machines, PCB fab) plateaued in what they could do, especially at the hobbyist price points and skill levels. Wearables have always been a solution in search of a problem, especially at hobbyist skill levels and price points.
So I've watched Make struggle to be relevant as we go back into another phase of condition normal where the hobbyist has little chance to design/fab something that's even remotely "cool" compared to the commercial marketplace. Sure, there will still be the niche hardcore Makers, but the time and money investment for the Weekend Maker has become too steep to justify the results.
Sad really, as I was truly excited to see some of that 70's egalitarian, community-based spark return. People making things, actually understanding how things work, sharing ideas that become more than the sum of their parts.
I didn't realize things were this dire, other than noticing that my boys and myself would merely skim each delivery of Make as time went on. I hope something is reborn from the ashes.
Is this not the era of Pi? (Score:2)
My working theory is that the Maker's Movement roughly coincided with the Arduino period, when the Arduino was more relevant than it is now.
I could see that, but it's not like things like Arduino have not progressed - now you have Rasperry Pi boards that are fully network capable, and it seems like very popular.
The other things that were hitting critical mass along side this (3D printing, home CNC machines, PCB fab) plateaued in what they could do
That is true in terms of local units but there's a lot of int
Re:Is this not the era of Pi? (Score:5, Interesting)
Raspberry Pi is an entirely different class of thing.
Arduino is a microcontroller and does not one bit more than what you want it to. Want to speak a protocol by toggling pins with exact timing? You can do that, so long the chip is fast enough.
Doing that on the Pi doesn't work so well. It's a Linux system. It's not realtime, so precise timing doesn't work so well, which makes it unsuited to CNC. It boots an entire Linux system from a SD card so you have to screw around with startup code. It's unsafe to just remove power from it. It starts up and shuts down slowly. It's vulnerable to disk corruption. It's power hungry. I love Linux, I use it every day, but no way I'm using a Pi to try to do the tasks the Arduino is best at -- just far too much hassle.
An Arduino on the other hand is something you can wake up for a second, log a few sensors, store somewhere, and send back to sleep.
A more proper successor is the ESP8266 based boards which have far more memory and WiFi, but still don't go with all the hassle of running a full OS on it.
Re:Is this not the era of Pi? (Score:4, Insightful)
ESP8266 and its big brother ESP32 are the true next-gen Arduino. The latter in particular, dual-core RISC at 240MHz, built-in Wifi and bluetooth, many hardware peripherals on the chip, versions ranging from 512k to 4MB RAM and up to 8MB flash, programmable as close to the bare metal as you want. And yes compatible with the Arduino IDE as well. And not power hungry. I'm using one right now to build a self-positioning autotracking telescope mount.
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Agree - I was excited about the Pi and active on its forum up until I saw the initial board layout with connectors scattered hither and yon, which negative impression was only reinforced by the undocumented Broadcom chip and weird boot process.
Thanks for the recommendation of the ESP8266, it looks like it has pretty useful assortment ofdev boards [espressif.com], though for motor control looks like it might not be as well adapted as something like the BeagleBone Blue [beagleboard.org], which though it runs Linux on ARM has two additional "r
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An Arduino, either a classic ATMega one or one of the newer models based on ARM, can also be a useful component in a system based on a Raspberry Pi or other similar Linux-based single board computer. You delegate the real-time I/O to the Arduino and do the heavy computing on Linux.
A fancy multi-core processor with multiple levels of cache CAN'T do some of the hard real time hardware manipulation that you can do with an Arduino. Even if you got rid of Linux and programmed it directly to the metal, you still
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An Arduino, either a classic ATMega one or one of the newer models based on ARM, can also be a useful component in a system based on a Raspberry Pi or other similar Linux-based single board computer. You delegate the real-time I/O to the Arduino and do the heavy computing on Linux.
Agreed, which is what I liked about the Edison, with it's Quark co-processor. Linux on a dual-core x86 processor, the RT stuff delegated to the Quark. Add in built-in Bluetooth, Wifi, plus battery management, and you got a lot for your money with an Edison. With an insanely small footprint to boot. (and an insanely difficult-to-work-with connector, but hey, RIP Edison)
By the time the Edison died, the project I had in mind had missed the window for being commercially relevant (and it was a tiny niche to
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Not about commercialization per se (Score:2)
My comparison to commercial products was not that Makers aspire to compete with commercial items. Almost by definition, Makers have an itch to scratch, and it's usually a unique, not broadly marketable itch.
It was more that we finally had inexpensive, accessible components and high-tech toolsets that enabled putting together something beyond two tin cans and a string, only to have your neighbor shrug their shoulders and pull out their iPhone. A bit of an over-the-top, silly example, but that's the dynamic
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The problem was always going to be moving people beyond kits and plug-together modules. They are a great way to get started, but eventually people will want to move past that. Moving past it turns out to be pretty hard, and there wasn't enough tutorial material or support to help people get there.
Arduino is a great example. You can write your software in bare metal C without the libraries if you want, no problem at all. But hardly anyone did, because they didn't have the skills/training to go beyond MakeWid
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People still make stuff, but the local makerspace is into biohacking, welding, cosplay, and lots of other things. We still have some people doing electronics and software, but it isn't the majority. I also don't need a physical magazine in an era where I have 9000 reference and how-to books and articles on a $20 thumb drive, and it is only 2/3 full.
IoT and Arduino (Score:2)
The Arduino movement has grown beyond the Atmel chips and the Arduino hardware. It has embraced IoT too.
So the Arduino IDE is used for all sort of stuff beyond the Atmel boards that are the 'original' Arduino.
There are things like the ES8266 ($4 and up) and ESP32 ($8 and up) which are WiFi enabled and can do a lot of IoT stuff. They have far more RAM and flash than any Arduino.
There are Chinese vendors like Sonoff that make all sort of relays and devices that are WiFi enabled.
And there is the whole STM32 ($
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My working theory is that the Maker's Movement roughly coincided with the Arduino period, when the Arduino was more relevant than it is now.
You can still use Arduino (and therefore all its attendant libraries, and more importantly, all the code written for those libraries) with newer, more useful hardware. For example, ESP32. Also, lots of jobs are still best done with Arduino. If you don't want any kind of ethernet connectivity, it's usually at least adequate.
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The next gen solutions were slow to come, fragmented, expensive, difficult to master, or some combination of the above (Intel Edison, I'm looking at you).
I don't understand this. Well I understand Edison. That was a bucket of shit if I've ever seen one, but there were plenty of "IoT" ready solutions even before IoT became a buzzwords. We had ethernet and GPRS shields from Arduino for many years, then IoT hit and one of the first things we started seeing is ARM based Arduinos followed closely by ESP8266 hitting the market. That quickly had an Arduino bootloader bolted on to it, and doing "that IoT thing" was literally no more difficult than firing up an Ardui
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The next gen solutions were slow to come, fragmented, expensive, difficult to master, or some combination of the above (Intel Edison, I'm looking at you).
I don't understand this. Well I understand Edison. That was a bucket of shit if I've ever seen one, but there were plenty of "IoT" ready solutions even before IoT became a buzzwords. We had ethernet and GPRS shields from Arduino for many years, then IoT hit and one of the first things we started seeing is ARM based Arduinos followed closely by ESP8266 hitting the market. That quickly had an Arduino bootloader bolted on to it, and doing "that IoT thing" was literally no more difficult than firing up an Arduino sketch.
Make as a brand abandoned the concept for commercialisation, but if anything the DIY and Maker community itself is stronger than ever. That you don't find the projects cool is more a reflection of your specific tastes than that of the community itself. Personally I see "cool" things far better than commercial junk show up all the time, usually with source code and electronics to spare. /Disclosure: I'm biased since I love tinkering with things, but very recently I was looking at logging solutions for my smartmeter. For a cool 100EUR I could buy a product, sign up, send some 3rd party company all my usage stats and information to get the privilege of using their website to read my information. That's what the commercial world offered. Instead I found an Arudino project targeted at NodeMCU which could decode the protocol from the smart meter, open sourced schematics showing how to interface with the meter and even harvest power so I didn't need another power supply, and 10EUR and a weekend later I have my own InfluxDB server trending my smartmeter in realtime, 1/10th the cost of the commercial solution, far more expandable, not dependent on some company, no privacy issues to speak of, and I had fun and learnt something while building.
Agreed that the market in the Arduino/electronics space is starting to figure itself out again. The ESP chips in particular are maturing into a more relevant niche that the Atmel-based boards used to occupy during their era. That said, I still see a lot of issues for the weekend warrior these days. Unix-based solutions are pretty complex for the average tinkerer. There's a lot of competing choices in chipsets, I/O architectures (Grove for example), and committing to one represents a learning curve and
I shed a tear. (Score:2)
I have every edition stacked away in my woodshop.
The original small form-factor was just perfect - they put the adverts at front and back and NEVER interrupted an article with an advert.
I'm sad to see them go.
Was it ever needed? (Score:2)
From what I saw of the whole Maker "movement" as a non-maker, it sure seemed to me people have been making things and sharing the how-to for centuries. DIY and making STUFF has been around forever.
So I never quite understood why it needed to be codified under a brand or called a "movement" or organized into whatever it was organized into. People don't need all that to make things. And the creative people who would be more inclined to make stuff would also be more likely than average to figure out their o
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Yeah, I've always wondered what exactly is the difference between "someone who builds random electronics stuff in their garage" and a "maker"?
Do they suddenly become a "maker" if they were an artist before they decided to do something with electronics?
Do they suddenly become a "maker" if they found a way to use 3D printing as part of their project?
Do they suddenly become a "maker" if they shoved the Arduino stack onto their device?
They deserved it, for spelling "Fair" as "Faire" (Score:1)
I have a longstanding policy of boycotting any event that uses the spelling "Faire". I'm glad to see that I've helped speed the demise of this organization :-)
Everyone who as good at Make became a sellout. (Score:2)
I'm not going to name names, but there were several key "Makers" at the beginning who basically sabotaged the movement by essentially crowdsourcing ideas, turning them into a product, then selling them off and in the process completely closing off all OSS channels that supported the initial development of the product and drove a community to it. The philosophy of "If you can't open it, you don't own it." was basically thrown away as soon as it was convenient. That also fragmented and eventually scared off m
Microsoft (Score:1)
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+1 Using closed source software is the very antithesis of making anying.
My biggest problen with Make: Magazine... (Score:2)
My biggest problem with Make: Magazine was the fact that I could not find a way to get a PDF or Online only subscription. The only way I could get it was as a physical magazine that I did not want. This meant that I could not have them on my tablet for easy reading, I had to lug a physical magazine around with me. Not gonna happen. Make: Magazine should learn a lesson from Linux Journal (which I pay for) and go PDF and online only subscriptions. Not only would this be more convenient, it would eliminate th
I was a subscriber for several years but.. (Score:2)
... when they turned digital without notice I canceled it.
To be clear, my problem wasn't the magazine going digital but that they have done with it without any prior notice. Also, I did pay for international shipping and they said my subscription would stay the same price which I don't think is fair.