BWC Business

Hey all! It's time for another EAT FOOD TALK SHOP tonight. 2nd Thursday of the month. It's still at our shop, but will be hopping around town in no time.

It's kinda like a Dorkbot / Meetup / Maker Day / Pepakura but with BBQ & beer and a little more fabrication-focused.

Bring something to share and something to show off (or at least the desire to talk to other fabricators). Bring your friends too! This time we'll be carving pumpkins. So bring a gourd of your choice and carve away! We'll be making hot dogs - so bring something to add to the mix...

Goes from 6:30 PM to 9PM at The Because We Can headquarters.

There's parking, a new grill (yay!), and old grill, a big fridge, a big robot, and plenty of room. We don't have a video projector or forklift (yet) so if you need one to show off what you brought then you'll need to bring your own. We hope you can make it!

Watch out for the giant fire snail that showed up last time!

We're starting a new mini-event called "Eat Food Talk Shop". After the first one, everyone thought that second Thursdays worked better than a Friday. And, lo and behold, it's the second Thursday tomorrow, Sept. 11th!

It's kinda like a Dorkbot / Meetup / Mini-Maker Day / Pecha Kucha but with BBQ & beer and a little more fabrication-focused.

Bring something to share and something to show off (or at least some ideas or questions to talk about).

Bring your friends too!

We'll have some food and beer and cool stuff to show off and music to help get things started.

In time it's going to be a roving party, so that each month it's at someone else's shop.

We all get to see neat stuff and learn something new!

It starts around 6 PM, wraps up around 10 PM, but come whenever to 1722 15th Street, Suite C, Oakland CA 94607. Walk through the gate with the big wooden robot-cutout, and we're down a bit and on the left. Huge roll-up door and '67 Dodge van. Can't miss us.

There's parking, a (new) grill (yay!), and old grill, a big fridge, a big robot, and plenty of room. We don't have a video projector or forklift (yet) so if you need one to show off what you brought then you'll need to bring your own.

We hope you can make it!

Built it, and they will come:

The interior we did for Three Rings has drawn some attention in the past, but nothing like this. Our friend's interns at the Instructables got all made up as pirates, documenting it as they went in true DIY style, then crashed Three Rings and rampaged through. With Daniel's fancy swordplay, valiantly fighting them off, we can see why he's the CEO on that ship!

Wordle is a fun java toy that takes a webpage or feed and turns it into neat graphics based upon word count. Here's our Business Plan:

What do cities of the future, light fixtures, wearable computers, and 3D printed flutes have in common? They were all things shown off at our first Eat Food Talk Shop!

 read more »

We're starting a new mini-event called "Eat Food Talk Shop".

It's kinda like a Dorkbot / Meetup / Mini-Maker Day / Pecha Kucha but with BBQ & beer and a little more fabrication-focused.

Bring something to share and something to show off (or at least some ideas or questions to talk about).

Bring your friends too!

We'll have some food and beer and cool stuff to show off and music to help get things started.

In time it's going to be a roving party, so that each month it's at someone else's shop.

We all get to see neat stuff and learn something new!

The first one is this Friday, August 8th, and starts at 6 PM at our shop: 1722 15th Street, Suite C, Oakland CA 94607. Walk through the gate with the big wooden robot-cutout, and we're down a bit and on the left. Huge roll-up door and '67 Dodge van. Can't miss us.

There's parking, a (new) grill (yay!), and old grill, a big fridge, a big robot, and plenty of room. We don't have a video projector or forklift (yet) so if you need one to show off what you brought then you'll need to bring your own.

We hope you can make it!

So a little over a year ago, I posted about how we'd adopted Scrum-style practices in our business.

And, one year later, we're still at it, however we've really changed our interpretation and flavor of it.

 read more »

While embodied energy, material source, durability, and recyclability are all important factors in sustainable design, there is an often overlooked factor that we call 'Love-ability'.

That super-eco-friendly sustainable cradle-to-cradle product you're designing or producing is great. However if it winds up in the trash in the end because someone didn't love it enough to keep it around it sorts of defeats the whole idea. Even if it's recyclable, the energy that was used to produce it in the first place was now wasted. And most things don't recycle endlessly, and with each cycle break down into less useful materials. Even the so-called 'cradle-to-cradle' stuff.

 read more »

We just got our extra Maker's Notebooks! When the Make: Magazine folks contacted us (along with a wonderful small army of others) to give advice to make 'the best project notebook evar' we were both honored and totally jazzed to help out. While we bought some at Maker Faire, and Toast got one at Foo Camp, we just got two more for helping out. Which reminded us how much they rock!

 read more »

So we've decided to post our business plan online for everyone to see. Click here to read it.

Why? Well, we thought a lot about it, and honestly it makes sense for us to do it.

 read more »