The men and women behind these companies often started as tinkerers wanting to improve their own equipment.
It took a century for the nation of tinkerers and basement inventors to be awarded the first million patents.
To that end an SDK and HDK will be made available allowing tinkerers to craft up their own innovations.
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Backyard tinkerers have moved from custom cars and home-brew computers into once esoteric fields like neuroscience, biology, genetics and robotics.
As most readers know, I profile makers, artisans, inventors, tinkerers, in addition to the stuff that makes life as a business owner easier.
Fenelon had found what all casual dreamers and determined tinkerers crave: an elegant solution to a nagging problem, attached to a potentially giant payoff.
Speaking to its OS, tinkerers should be pleased to know that D2M plans to continually enhance its functionality, and potentially open it up to developers.
They can afford to equip their tinkerers and visionaries with the most advanced materials, instruments, and knowledge, and the result has often been a superior capacity for innovation.
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They contend that, by widening the possibility of challenging a patent, the bill threatens to scare off not only basement tinkerers but the venture capitalists who stand behind them.
"Tinkerers and amateurs are the real innovators, " she said.
There are free Android and iOS apps for those that just want to check their vitals and be done with it, but tinkerers can have a field day with the open-source hardware and upcoming API.
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Our friends at Make share our enthusiasm about independent inventors, tinkerers, and makers of all stripes driving innovation in the technology world, and we're excited to welcome them as an official Expand media partner.
The project is part of a broader trend: Innovative consumer hits, like the iPhone, Google Earth, Second Life, and the Wii remotes and accessories, are increasingly put to unexpected -- and often unauthorized -- uses by outside researchers and tinkerers.
When he started researching online, he found out about RepRap, an open-source project for 3D printing, which provided the foundation to at least start creating a 3D printer, not only because of the open-source instructions but also because of a community of enthusiastic tinkerers like himself.
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When computers were the province of corporate programmers and youthful tinkerers he saw their possibilities for illuminating the lives of all of us, seizing on the first gropings by Xerox researchers who developed a primitive mouse and graphical interface, and perceiving in a flash there the chance for an epochal extension of the capabilities of everyone.
Renault is particularly keen to promote fast-charging stations, along with exchange centres on motorways where depleted batteries can be quickly swapped for another one during long journeys. (This approach is being championed by Better Place, a start-up which has developed robots to handle the battery-swapping process.) Meanwhile the tinkerers are already at work: some are planning to build small, petrol-powered generators which can be towed behind battery-only cars on long trips.
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