talks

We're giving a repeat of our Maker Faire small business talk "Turning Pro: Becoming a Professional Maker" at The Remake Lounge tonight as part of the monthly SF:Make meetup.

The talk was a hit at Maker Faire, for it's all about basic business lessons we've learned from the perspective of a professional Maker.

Come check it out, and hope to see you tonight!

We're giving a repeat of our Maker Faire small business talk "Turning Pro: Becoming a Professional Maker" at Tech Liminal (an Oakland technology salon) tonight as part of the SF:Make meetup.

The talk was a hit at Maker Faire, for it's all about basic business lessons we've learned from the perspective of a professional Maker.

We'll be giving it again later this month in San Francisco as well.

Come check it out, and hope to see you tonight!

Catch us on the Innovation Stage at noon on Saturday, May 22nd. We're giving a talk on 'Turning Pro: Becoming a Professional Maker' and we're super excited to be there!

We'll also be spending our first Maker Faire actually hanging out, visiting with people, and generally walking around instead of running artgolf or a booth or a CNC machine or other craziness like all the years past...

Hope to see you there!

Last weekend we were in North Carolina visiting the birth place of Frank, also known as the Shopbot Headquarters. We went to give a talk at their yearly Jamboree, which is basically a small Shopbot conference. And it was really great! They do satellite Jamborees across the country, so look out for the next one. There were lots of great talks, great tips and interesting people. And lots of Shopbot demonstrations. Our talk was on marketing and how to reach out to potential customers. There is a quick post of the talk here And, the photo below is the new Tyro cutting away. This is their new table top CNC that is not for sale yet, but coming very soon. We were also treated to an afternoon in the Shopbot manufacturing warehouse, where we got to ogle all the blue powder coated parts. Not to mention this new machine set up where they have turned the gantry 90 degrees, now spanning over 8ft and allowing your machine bed to be open on the longer axis. Pretty cool. Note worthy: While we were in the North Carolina Raleigh / Durham area, we went to the new Art Museum, which has just had a major addition and renovation done. It is very cool and worth seeing. And we got some BBQ. Also, very worth doing in NC.

Come see us at Maker Faire 2010!

We're happy to annouce that we'll be giving a talk at this year's Maker Faire!

It's going to be on going Pro as a Maker, somewhat along the lines of our recent Make: Blog post.

We're very excited and looking forward to a great Faire!

BIMForum was amazing. We were honored to be included! The presentations were all great. It's certainly wonderful to see the newest developments out there within our industry. As always, the steel fabrication guys are way ahead of the curve. We got to see a presentation from Chris Fischer of Schuff Steel where they talked about going from BIM models (Tekla, in this instance) to their fully automated steel shop, where huge CNC plasma machines and automated conveyer systems process massive steel beams all day long. It's just like we do, except a whole lot bigger and heavier! We also got to hear from my old boss Ken Sanders and a fellow Gensler friend Shawn Geile with a stunning presentation on the epic towers Gensler is working on. One of which was just finished at the LA Live! Center. It was great to see that building complete, as I helped out in the early stages of it years ago when I was still at Gensler. A very complex project that could only be done via BIM, yet a complex project to do with BIM! When it came our turn to talk we focused on our in-house process we use for fully leveraging CNC and BIM together for creative interiors. Happy to say that it went over very well and that we hope to get a video of it up soon. Best thing about the conference was all the new friends we made. There are some amazing people out there doing simply incredible things. Specialty contractors making mountains for Disney, civil engineerings using automated robotic grading machines, huge contractors coordinating whole skyscrapers, to programmers developing totally new ways of collaborating together: across the board, everyone we met was up to something mind-blowing and awesome. We're sad that our schedule won't allow us to make the next one in June. But we certainly hope to go again soon!

We're excited to be invited speakers at 2010's Shopbot Jamboree, their annual convention!

It's going to be tons of fun to go and visit where Frank, our CNC routing table, came from as well as get to meet a whole new circle of great Makers. We're really looking forward to it!

We're going to be talking about some business and online marketing stuffs. So catch us in North Carolina in April!

We're honored to be included in this year's BIMForum conference in Phoenix, AZ! We'll be giving a talk about BIM-to-CNC fabrication on Thursday afternoon, January 14th, at 3:15 pm. We'll be focusing a lot on our in-house process we use to go from BIM to Digital Fabrication. We'll also be talking about the big changes that have been recently happening in that space. With a few fun things to show off, we've got high hopes that it will be a great talk!

In the past, CNC machines were used to solve one of two problems: either you needed to make a whole lot of something quickly, or you needed to make something that wasn't easy to make by hand. CNC machines were all about high production rates. And they had to be, for they were ungodly expensive, and the software and know-how even moreso. But now with CNC machines getting cheap enough, and the knowledge widespread enough, so that anyone can use them for almost anything they can think of, well, it really changes the whole game. And that's exactly what were going to be talking all about!

The BIMForum conference is held twice a year by the Associated General Contractors of America, an industry group akin to the AIA or AIGA but for builders. With a focus on emerging technology and it's use in the building industry, BIMForum looks to be wonderful conference of AGC people. People who are really making changes and making things work. So many of these technology-focused building industry talks can wander into the tall reeds of theory. So we're rather interested in talking to a bunch of people who are more about the day-to-day realities of getting things built! We're really looking forward to meeting everyone.

Hope to see you there!

Tomorrow I'll be part of the AIA TAP conference in Chicago, via teleconference and video!

We were honored to be included in the annual AIA convention this year. Back in April, the San Francisco Digital Design Breakfast Club, an informal local group of designers who get together monthly to talk technology, organized a short Pecha-Cucha style series of short talks for the AIA.

We were invited to give a short presentation on our in-house process, and had a great time boiling that process down into a quick five minute talk. You can see the videos here.

There is a sub-group within the AIA called TAP, or Technology in Architectural Practice, that focuses on uses for new technology and process within our industry and holds a conference from time to time. These talks were part of a mini-TAP conference, as a leadup to their main conferece this month in Chicago.

Much to our delight, some of those videos (including ours) are going to be reshown at that big main TAP conference, and we'll then be on-hand via teleconferencing to answer questions.

That's right Chicago, I'll be a giant head on a video screen tomorrow morning! Mwuhahaha!

Honestly we're really excited to be part of the TAP conference, and are looking forward to it!

Back in April, we were invited to give a brief talk at the AIA conference in San Francisco. You can download the video here, and the slides are available as a PDF here. No embed, sorry, don't know why the AIA site decided to go with a download for the video.

The talk is a five-minute overview of the five-step process we use here at Because We Can to make stuff, and we're pretty happy with how it came out.

While the AIA puts on a different conference just for technology-focused topics called TAP, for Technology in Architectural Practice, they also had a 'mini-TAP' if you will during the main larger AIA conference.

The San Francisco Digital Design group, an informal breakfast club we're part of, did a group presentation as part of that 'mini-TAP'. It was a http://www.pecha-kucha.org format, i.e. 20 slides with 20 seconds per slide, with ten different people presenting. We were excited and honored to be one of the presenters, as our other nine co-presenters were all terribly smart and experienced experts. I highly recommend watching all the presentations!