New Tinker it! site! Massimo writes –

Dear Arduino and Tinker it! Friends.

Finally, after months of preparatory work, we can give you a fuller picture of what’s going to happen with Tinker it!. On the heels of the rebrand of its UK consultancy and education services (Tinker London) last month, Massimo Banzi and David Cuartielles have joined a new and exciting startup called Socialtronics that specialises in designing, manufacturing and distributing open hardware.

The Tinker it! website is going to become the new online store for Arduino products, the TinkerKit toolkit and a lot more funky electronic parts.

How this is going to be different from what’s available now? First of all we’re based in Europe so we’ll make life easier for European customers to get their hands on those funky electronic parts that you had to buy in the US or China. We’ll be introducing content in other language and slowly go multi-lingual, bringing to a wider audience the cool work that people are doing outside of the english speaking countries. Our products are made in Italy in the same factory that makes most of the Arduino boards, so you get Italian quality and sustainable manufacturing at reasonable prices.

Today we start by opening our blog and you can expect the shop to open in the next few weeks. At the moment we are undergoing quite a lot of testing to make sure that each combination of country/language/tax regulation is taken into account (yes EU users, you can get VAT invoices!) The new Tinker it! website will be the place where we will be experimenting with more and more ways to turn your ideas into a real product!

For the folks who have followed the Arduino story, this sounds like a great next chapter in open hardware.