[Company] Happy New Year 2010

Wolfgang Spraul wolfgang at sharism.cc
Sat Jan 2 15:41:47 EST 2010


Ron,

> How is Qi Hardware financed? That's always been a puzzle to me. ;)
> Or is this [entirely] a volunteer project?

Here is how it works: There is a core group of people that founded the
project and donate their full-time work. We keep track of it so if the
project makes money we can start paying off this debt.
When we need cash, it comes from this core group, or increasingly also
from people that buy the prototypes or offer support for specific
development tasks. If you want to donate you are very welcome!

Then there are _LOTS_ of volunteers, very few get a small monetary
compensation but most just are in it for the sake of the project and
without this contribution we would have no chance to go anywhere.

After 6 months I have to say I am super excited how far we made it with
our extremely limited resources!
Copyleft hardware is not on the current VC buzzword list, even though you
could definitely see a connection between copyleft hardware and recycling
or local production (=green).

So going forward the challenge will be to make money to keep the project
going, in old and well-tested ways such as listening to paying customers and
serving them what they need.
In parallel if there is an investor who wants to buy into our copyleft
hardware story and business model, email contact at sharism.cc.

Bottom line: project is currently self-funded and looking forward to the
challenge of making money on copyleft hardware ASAP!

Wolfgang

On Sat, Jan 02, 2010 at 12:00:38PM -0800, Ron K. Jeffries wrote:
> Pure curiosity:
> How is Qi Hardware financed? That's always been a puzzle to me. ;)
> 
> Or is this [entirely] a volunteer project?
> 
> ---
> Ron K. Jeffries
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Sat, Jan 2, 2010 at 06:29, Wolfgang Spraul <wolfgang at sharism.cc> wrote:
> > Happy New Year 2010!
> >
> > Phew we made it into the next year and are still around! I want to thank
> > the many people that have helped push our project forward last year, from
> > technical people to documentation people to those that are following with
> > good feedback.
> > Thanks to all of you!
> > I learnt a lot from you and I think in fact many people have learnt from
> > each other in our little group...
> >
> > Where are we now?
> >
> > We have about 30 device samples with people, we have a somewhat usable
> > software image, 69 content pages in the wiki (in 3 languages with varying
> > depth and quality), 118 subscribers on this list.
> > We have _somewhat_ formulated our long-term goals as a project, although I
> > think it's not entirely clear yet and hopefully we can sort this out soon
> > and then leave it unchanged until the goals are reached...
> > We have made some progress in understanding neighboring projects such as
> > Arduino and Milkymist/FPGAs, and we have done some good groundwork on
> > the hardware side to prepare for future production runs and devices.
> >
> > Where do we want to go?
> >
> > Mostly: towards money!
> > First we need to focus on finishing the Ben NanoNote so it creates real
> > value for users. Then we need to tell our story, and create ways for our
> > distributors to make money.
> > We need that same money on the production side for new PCBs, components,
> > production runs, shipping costs, etc. Hardware is expensive, and a copyleft
> > hardware project like ours first and foremost needs to answer the question
> > "is it sustainable?" every day...
> > So I hope everybody understands there will be no free hardware from us.
> > At most we can loan stuff, but mostly it needs to be bought. We actually
> > have been amazingly fortunate - almost all people in our community have
> > paid for the hardware they have today, even if the prototypes were sometimes
> > in half-finished state. Thank you all very much!
> >
> > How do we get there?
> >
> > I can only speak for myself and once sales are starting my focus will shift
> > towards serving our customers and keeping them happy on one side, and feeding
> > any surplus money (no matter how small) back to our community to keep the
> > project going.
> > Of course I will also still support people that contribute to the project.
> > And keep learning and play with some new software and cool hacks on our
> > devices.
> >
> > At the 26c3 conference in Berlin a few days ago, I got the impression
> > there are quite a few others as well that we can count on in 2010, so I'd
> > say let's just keep it up!
> >
> > Happy New Year, Cheers,
> > Wolfgang
> >
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> >
> 
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