James Bowman (Gameduino) - Kickstarter to product in 90 days

http://photos3.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/d/8/e/c/event_81295532.jpegThe Gameduino is a BSD-licensed Arduino shield for video game creation.Selling through major distributors such as Seeed, Adafruit and Sparkfund around the world.

In this talk James will give a first person account of how he went from a basic prototype on Kickstarter, to volume production in 90 days.

He will detail what worked, what didn't, and what did/didn't scale up. In particular he will detail the following problems from an engineer's perspective:

Kickstarter as a launch platform for open hardware bootstrapping a small open hardware business forming relationships with contract manufacturers the day Arduino saved the project assembling and testing 500 units in one long, busy day dealing with the troubling business aspects of open hardware design the Gameduino test-and-setup rig, which is undeniably awesome.

About James:

James' background is in games and graphics - he wrote games for 8- and 16-bit consoles - and later made graphics software and hardware at SGI, 3dfx, and NVIDIA. Currently James uses the Arduino at an open source robotics company.

About Solid State Startups:

Solid State Startups make physical things. Things that hurt if you drop them on your foot. SSS is a place to share experience and wisdom that only comes from building stuff in the real world.