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- Chris got his notice that he can pick up his Google Glass! Now to find the money for it…
- If all works out, we’ll have a meetup in NYC the weekend of July 6th.
- We’ll start giving away T-shirts for stories on the /r/TheAmpHour subreddit. Each story we talk about will be put into a drawing and drawn for a shirt.
- You have to be careful with product definition. Woodshedding is easy when you ask large groups of people what they think.
- Similarly, “Voice of the Customer” (VOC) can be stupid because even your target customers mostly say they want what they already have with incremental improvements.
- So what can you do? Design and iterate…then show it off and do it again! (Chris realized after the fact that this is basically the ideas of The Lean Startup.
- Dave calls this WYSIWYG engineering.
- Google admitted their interview questions don’t really do anything. Instead, the author of this TechCrunch article suggests you have a portfolio and weed people out with simple questions.
- Should you put everything on your resume? Even if you’re at a short run job? Dave says no, but Chris says you should explain and talk about what you could have done differently or if you were in charge.
- MakerBot was bought by Stratasys for $403 million.
- Is it possible to start an industrial hardware company these days? There is a lot of interest in hardware startups, but even Zach from HAXLR8R tweeted about not needing any more apps that turn on lights.
- Tesla Motors is a possible example, except they had lots of government funding and Elon Musk’s money. And old infrastructure to build on. (and of course, beautiful design and great engineering)
- Energy Micro and Touchstone both started as fabless semiconductors because of the investment it takes to start a wafer fab. (links go to the shows where members of those companies were on The Amp Hour!)
- Oh yeah, and Energy Micro was bought by Silicon Labs!
- “Speaking of crack”… Dave doesn’t know the difference between drugs, Chris suggests he would if he watched Breaking Bad.
- Coffee is basically just legalized crack right? There was a lifehacker article recently called Beer for big ideas, coffee to get them done.
- The next PCB type might be…cells? The next big market for electronics will be the body. IEEE Spectrum has an article about a pacemaker for your digestive system.
- Shonky town of the week? There is a town in West Virginia where people can “escape electro magnetic exposure”
- Dave says the inverter on the solar panel in that town will kick off some radiation. Chris suggests they lose efficiency and move to a sinusoidal waveform driving the transformer/switcher.
- Heathkit is back…again? Maybe? We doubt it, but who knows?
- We have a new idea! If you are interested in helping interview experienced people in the electronics industry and gather their stories, please let us know! This will be similar to Story Corps which is stored in the Library of Congress and airs on NPR.
- We said that to send us an email (and you always can at chris@theamphour.com and dave@theamphour.com) But a better way is to fill out the survey below:
Slate article needs an edit, you have a space in the middle of the URL.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/04/green_bank_w_v_where_the_electrosensitive_can_escape_the_modern_world.html
Should be fixed now, thanks!
What I think is interesting is bio feedback and human machine interfaces. EEG, EOG, EMG are very interesting. I only know what I read on the web though. You should try to invent a biofeedback control for your google glass.
I think coffee increases my creativity or at least my curiosity.Plus it keeps you up all night to make stuff.
I disagree with Dave concerning the resume discussion. If a company you’re interviewing with has a problem with something on your resume, you generally don’t want to work for that company anyway. That advice about leaving a < 1 year on the job item off your resume is complete BS.
I understand the realities of what may/may not be available at the time, or in a place of your choosing, but companies reveal a lot about themselves during the interview process if you know what to look for; and you should be interviewing them too. Any company worth working for will not put you in a defensive position – there are ways to determine if you know your stuff, or are what you appear to be on paper, without intimidation and odd questions. In the Software world, there are many stories and legends about interviewing practices, and you know what – most of the time the really odd practices cease after a time because they don't work and didn't focus on the person as an individual rather than a thing.
Obviously you heard what I said on the show, bu I think you have a great point of view here Russ: if it’s a place you want to work, they want the actual story, not just the top line fact that you worked somewhere. The only time I would agree with Dave on this is to bypass an HR person (because short work times are something they look for)…but then if you were asked point blank by the real interviewer, you’d be in trouble because you intentionally left something off.
Woah, dude, the end was so meta…
this episode definitely needs more LEDs!
“Woodshedding” is a jazz term for privately practicing over a period of time to hone your skills. And as a Southern boy, I have to note “taking to the woodshed”
Damn, you’re right. It’s “Bike Shedding” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law_of_triviality
Medical device development; that’s what I do. We tell our customers that taking an idea through to FDA approval is “6 and 6”, six years and 6 million dollars.
There are a lot of medical projects that get messed up by VCs because VSs want ROI chop chop. Unfortunately, the FDA requires that you cannot make a profit on drugs or devices that have not been approved for sale, you can recover costs, but cannot turn a profit. There are special types of VCs that will let you use their money for 6 years and not show a profit.
We keep having inventors in the news saying that their widget will be ready for sale in the medical market in 6 months. Hee hee, we’ll have a chat with them in a couple of years when their prototype is settled and they’ve been told to get serious.