Lemnos Labs’ Eric Klein is chattering away about the brewing hardware revolution. He says that technology innovations in the last 10 years have made it possible for people to actually accomplish more with hardware for less. That lower barrier to entry will draw more and more people to building hardware.
“This thing is going to be huge,” he says with a smile. “I would make the assertion that it’s going to be bigger than software in some ways, because what we saw with the software revolution was an efficiency play. Everything became more efficient — how we do banking, just go industry by industry. That was in the digital world. Now imagine taking that same efficiency play and overlaying it in the physical world.”
It’s a shift that Silicon Valley has taken note of in the last couple of years. Hardware startups are increasingly sharing the spotlight with software companies. Take Nest, the smart thermostat; Lytro, a camera that lets you adjust point of focus; Square, the iPad dongle for financial transactions; and Pebble, the smartwatch that broke Kickstarter’s funding record with more than $10 million pledged. Venture capitalists are finally biting, too.
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