Hardware Incubators Are Critical To The Future Of Making Things #makerbusiness

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Hardware Incubators Are Critical To The Future Of Making Things @ TechCrunch.

Hardware is hot — and poised to get hotter. Venture capital investment in connected device hardware startups reached approximately $1.48 billion in 2014, more than triple the amount of two years earlier.

Meanwhile, the “fairy tale” acquisitions of Dropcam, Nest, Beats and Oculus — and the IPOs of Fitbit and GoPro — fuel public interest and momentum for new startups in hardware.
Hardware is the new software.

The past decade made it increasingly easy for anyone with a bright idea to launch an app, thanks to the emergence of support factors as varied as crowdfunding, cloud infrastructure and open-source communities like GitHub.

Today, an entrepreneur can just as easily bring a viable hardware product to market. Credit is due to many of the same factors — but also to a new breed of facilities that allow people to turn their bright ideas into physical products more quickly than ever before.

Read more – we’d also like to see a map or component companies (like Adafruit) that are commonly used for these start ups and more.


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1 Comment

  1. What are hardware accelerators doing to support cool ideas that really require top-of-the-line compute horsepower at the edge of the network to design and implement? These are applications that cannot rely on the infinite compute resources that’re available in the cloud for a variety of reasons—you need them down at ground zero. Legacy compute hardware for building mundane activity trackers or fancy thermostats and the like would work on contemporary microcontrollers that can push the data to your smartphone or online for processing and deriving actionable insights.

    Take for example retail analytics, interactive smart displays and digital signage, computer-vision/machine learning intensive applications, high-end video and image processing, portable/connected medical devices, etc….you get the drift—my grandma’s microcontroller or the wildly popular Raspberry Pi’s and copycats ain’t gonna cut it. They just don’t have the teeth to bite into such CPU intensive applications. Have you considered the powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon processor-based compute platforms for hardware designs? You get high-performance processing at mobile power efficiencies. Can’t beat that. Inforce Computing, a licensee of the Snapdragon processors eliminates the mumbo-jumbo of designing the compute hardware out of the equation by providing modular systems on top of which you can throw your secret sauce and build your entire hardware. Check them out.

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