Blogs are Wrong

Well, I’m wicked proud of this ‘bot. Dig it:

This cute little bristle bot is about 2″ large, costs ~$5 to make, and I’m amazed at how well it zips around my kitchen floor.  It’s just two vibrating motors, two toothbrush heads, and a remote control pulled out of another robo-toy.  I really want to see a little swarm of these guys with a little bit of intelligence, even if it’s just light-seeking or light-fearing.

I prototyped this guy in four days in hong kong, starting from scratch with my first bristlebot:

Then moving on to an R/C, steerable ‘bot made entirely out of mangled toothbrushes and hot glue

And then moving on up to 3D printed bodies.  Square bodies don’t work so well, because the robot can only drive forward and turn, so it gets stuck.  My third iteration is the circular ladybugbot

Here’s some video of the ladybugbot being adorable:

So, that’s the ladybugbot.  It’s stunningly cheap and fast to build–the motors are fifty cents each, the bodies take about an hour to print out, and my latest and greatest prints come out of the makerbot complete with bristles and snap-mounts for the motors.  I’d like to end up with some $5 ‘bots that have some smarts–enough to do basic communication and navigation. The future is coming, and it’s small, round, and pink!

If you like it, make one for yourself!  You can use pretty much any vibrating motors you can get your hands on–I’ve been ripping mine out of cheap little vibrating toys, but there’s lots on ebay, in junk stores, and on hobbyist electronics sites like seeedstudios.com

I ripped the electronics out of a deskpet (http://www.mydeskpets.com/) to make my remote controller, and that gave me a cheap remote, motor controller and battery.

The 3D printed files are all up on thingiverse here:  http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:12975

And the toothbrushes you can get at your preferred toothbrush retail location.  Hold everything together with some dabs of hot glue, and away you go.  If you make one or improve on it, let me know–I’d love to see more little pink robots in the world.

photo credit:  Flickr usr bluman

I don’t like the last thing I wrote on Moleskine, don’t like it one bit.  There’s no moral to the story, just a grumpy old man kvetching about how he can’t get his favorite esoteric notebooks.  It’s time for a do-over.

Moleskine is giving us a glimpse of the future, a glimpse of what products and production and stock shelves will look like when it’s drop-dead-simple to make a new product.  The magic of Moleskine is in the production–they have a set of machines that can literally make anything within a certain class of product.

Take a look at this moleskin-esque notebook supplier in Guangzhou:  They have a production line that can make just about any style of notebook, and they specialize in custom orders and low volume production.  A notebook costs $.5, and they have a minimum order of 1000 notebooks.

http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/448946289/OEM_high_quality_hardcover_notebook.html

So, with production like this, it costs $500 to go from a design to production.  They deliver seven days after you pay them.  That’s insanely accessible.  The barrier to entry is so low, it can’t even really be considered a barrier.  It takes far more  money and time to design the product than it does to bring it into production, but even the design effort isn’t a big deal.  If you’re a company like Moleskine, that has a brand and a way (web stores, retail shelves, etc) to put new products in front of people, why not experiment with a lot of new products?  The cost of designing, of experimenting, of trying out a new idea is so low (and Moleskine’s ~1000% profit margins on their $16 dollar notebooks are so high), that even if a new product sells terribly, it’ll probably break even.

What’s interesting here is that Moleskine’s retail presentation hasn’t caught up with the flexibility of its production.  They have 400 products that they’re actively selling, but you haven’t heard of most of them.  Their store shelves have no advertising, no way of telling consumers about a new product.  They just have an undifferentiated pile of products on a shelf.  Who knows, maybe that’s enough.  The bottom line, though, is that Moleskine is a business where the bottleneck isn’t the design or the production, and Moleskine is pushing it for all it’s worth, cranking out new, different products at a mind-boggling rate.

I have mixed emotions when I look at the Moleskine shelf.  On one hand, I see a pile of exceedingly similar products, where the product I love is buried somewhere in a pile of shit I don’t care about.  One the other hand, I see a product meritocracy; a world where the barrier to entry for a new product is almost nil, and it’s so easy and cheap to try out a new idea that it happens all the time.  Where the products people love rise to the top and the others fall to the wayside.  Where sales aren’t correlated to advertising efforts, but to the utility of the product.  The low barrier to entry does for journals what online blogging did for publishing–it’s cheap, it’s easy, and anyone who cares can contribute and get ideas out into the world.  There’s one thing the Moleskine shelf lacks, though, and that’s a way to search for the product you want in a field of similar, but inferior products.  It needs a search engine.

My Moleskine craze has just begun.  More on Moleskines soon.

photo credit:  flickr usr flyingturtle

Typhoon Nesat just blasted Hong Kong with 60mph winds for a day and a half. My roof flooded with three inches of water in about half an hour.  It was a tremendously violent storm, and this morning, I walked around Lamma island, taking photos of the aftermath and the gorgeous lavender sunrise that marked the end of the madness.  Check ‘em out!

There’s some more photos on my flickr

Moleskine makes fabulous notebooks.  They’re these small, no-frills, hardcover notebooks that are well-made, easy to carry, durable and sexy.  I’ve been in love with them for a couple years now, enough to spend the ridiculous $15 per notebook over and over again.  I buy into the product and the brand.  I’ve experimented with the lower-cost knock-offs, and I come back to moleskine products again and again.  They won me over with a superior product, and they’ve made me into a perfect, loyal customer who’s enthusiastic about their product.

And then the MBA grads seem to have taken over Moleskine’s product strategy.  The company originally produced and sold one basic product–a simple, unlined journal.  The business-school-case-study thinking points in a clear direction:  expand your userbase by releasing similar products, produced using the same techniques and sold through the same distribution channels.  The next products were simple enough:  lined journals.  Graph-paper journals.  And then it began to get weird.

One of the business development staff at Moleskine must have called a series of brainstorming meetings on “redefining the journal.”  Within a year, Moleskine started releasing specialized journals for everything someone could possibly want a journal for.  There’s dog journals, for writing about your dog.  Recipe journals, for writing about recipes that you like.  Tokyo journals, for writing about your experiences in Tokyo.  I’m sure each of these journals only costs a couple thousand dollars for an intern to design, and the cost to put another journal into production must be marginal.

Soon, Moleskine started releasing every possible combination of notebooks. Notebooks packaged together.  Moleskines in various colors.  Product-focused moleskines.  Lifestyle-focused moleskines.  Co-branded moleskines.  The moleskine display rack in stores grew and grew.  As of September ’11, there were about 100 unique products in a moleskine rack.

The irony, of course, is that this expansion is completely obnoxious to the bread-and-butter moleskine customer.  It actually takes five or ten minutes of sifting through the piles of uselessly branded moleskines to find the simple, original journal.  The added logistical difficulty of keeping a hundred different products on shelves means that the notebooks I want are often out of stock.  But what I really don’t understand is what moleskine, the business, gains from this craziness.

It seems like moleskine is chasing small, niche groups of customers, in the hopes of capturing users who don’t identify themselves as journal-keepers.  In the business developers’ minds’ eyes, dog owners worldwide are wandering aimlessly through bookstores, flipping through the journal section, and pausing as they find the expansive “dog journal” section on the moleskine rack.  ”Hmm,” the dog owners say to themselves, “I’ve been having lots of thoughts about my dog, but I haven’t had a good place to store them.  Maybe I’ll keep them in this convenient little book, which has helpful labels for different types of dogs thoughts.  Look!  If I have thoughts about my dog’s behavior, I’ll jot them down in the ‘behavior’ section!  Thoughts about it’s diet?  There’s a ‘diet’ section!  At long last, I’ve got a way to organize my little doggy thoughts.  I’ll take eight!”

Honestly, I can’t imagine how many incremental customers moleskine gets for every incremental product.  Someone at the company seems to be infatuated by the low incremental cost to add another product, but they don’t really do anything other than to produce a random notebook and shove it on a rack.  There’s no advertising, no way to educate users about a new product, presumably because the advertising cost would dwarf the additional revenue that the advertising would drive.  Maybe this flood of products is a kind of alpha-beta test to see which notebooks actually sell.

Unfortunately, it seems to be working.  Moleskine is sold in stores around the world.  They have over 400 products sold on their web store.  I see them everywhere.  The company’s been around for fourteen years, and shows no signs of stopping.  I know people who swear by their products.  It’s just so strange to see a company drown out its popular flagship product in a quagmire of poorly differentiated, niche products.  I’m simultaneously disgusted, confused and amazed.

I live out on Lamma Island in Hong Kong.  It’s pretty great.  Twenty-five minutes from the most developed place on the planet, there’s an island with no cars, where they don’t allow any buildings taller than a palm tree, no McDonalds, farms, squatters, beaches and more nature than you can shake a stick at.  Also, we have a 4GW coal powerplant that everybody loves.

Of course, you can’t live on a lovely tropical island and get google streetview.  Lamma is kinda confusing to get around for the first time, and there’s no good online maps, so Amit and I took a bunch of photos to show you what you’ll see on the ten-minute walk from the ferry pier to my house.

First of all, the ferry to Lamma leaves from Central Ferry Pier number 4.  Here’s a schedule:  http://www.hkkf.com.hk/index.php?op=timetable&style=en Two ferries leave from that pier–one goes to Sok Kwu Wan on Lamma, and one goes to Yung Shue Wan.  Sok Kwu Wan is Cantonese for “I wanted to go to the other place.”  You want to go to Yung Shue Wan.

It’s a twenty-five minute ferry ride.  Once you get to Lamma, everybody will pour off the boat all at once and walk down the one road.  You might as well follow them–it’s either that or go for a swim.

Once you get down the pier, you’ll walk past a seafood restaurant.  If you look slightly to your right, this is what you’ll see:

Keep on walking.  If you walk backwards past the garbage dump, you’d look like this:

uh-oh!  Don’t go this way.  Keep going where everybody else is going, along the main street.

Here are three pictures of what the main street looks like, so you know what to expect:

After a little while, you’ll come to a mini-crossroads.  Don’t wander into the back alley

Go this way instead!

You’ve got another five minutes of walking.  Here are some things that you’ll see as you walk:

Sometimes, pizza milano is open, too.  It’ll be on your left.  Get yourself a slice!

Somebody thoughtfully collected a bunch of iron bedframes, just for you!

Here are lots of signs to confuse you:

You’ll pass Brother’s grocery shop on your left.  This is a pretty famous shop on Lamma.  Most people will know where it is, so if you get lost, ask someone where Brother’s is.

Here, Amit is showing you the proper way to not wander up the hill.

Here’s another closed shop:

You’ll walk up a little hill.  Near the top, you’ll see this sign on your left:

There’s a little road at the top of the hill, next to a bunch of trash cans.  Take a right down that road.

After 15 seconds, you’ll take another right.  Amit will show you the way.  He’s Gujarati.

The guy who invented the idea of a city grid fell to the ground, convulsing in agony when he came to Lamma.  Everything is kinda jumbled.  That’s ok.  You’re really close.  Keep it up!

Look out for the tiny little troll that lives under the tiny little bridge

And take a right as soon as you cross the bridge

There’s a couple of houses, and then my house is right after them.  There’s a little alley on your left.  It looks like this:

You made it!  Thumbs up to you too, Amit!

Now, walk in the gate.  The dogs are named Bambi and Bobo.  They like to run around in a panic barking like idiots.  Don’t let that get to you.

Well, you made it to my house, so stop reading my blog and come on upstairs.  Give me a call at 6032 9714 if you got confused somewhere along the way!

This last week, Amit and I built up the Slightly Larger Boat based on Hannu’s excellent plans here. There’s a community of people that design and build plywood boats, and I’m amazed at how much you can make out of a couple sheets of plywood.  Here’s the first plywood boat I made, the Small Boat:

One of the tenets of plywood boatbuilding is efficient use of material.  The Slightly Larger Boat is a 17′ boat that’s made of three 8′x4′ sheets of plywood, using 91% of the wood.  We use a construction technique called Stitch and Glue, which is all about plywood, epoxy, fiberglass, and not much else.

First off, we’re making a 17′ boat, and plywood comes in 8′ lengths, so there’s some cutting and gluing to make the sheets of plywood for the boat’s bottom and sides. Once we made all the long plywood strips, we built up some frames out of 2x4s liberated from some construction sites. 2x4s are pretty rare in hong kong–the quick and dirty construction material of choice is bamboo, and 2x4s are mostly for interior furnishing, and they go for ~$20/a pop in hong kong, but they’re made out of some amazing hardwood. It takes forever to saw through.

Hong Kong typhoons mean that I put together the 17′ plywood skins in my living room.  Yummy!

Next, we screw the plywood to the frames, and all at once, it starts to look like a boat.

Now, it’s just a lot of fiberglassing to get the inside and outside of all the seams.  This makes it watertight and strong.  It took Amit and I two, two-hour sessions to get the majority of the boat.  We used about $100 of epoxy (I haven’t found good, cheap epoxy here) and maybe $30 of fiberglass to cover both sides of the bottom, as well as all the seams.  Not bad for government work.

That’s most of the boat work.  Now, all that’s left is to lower a 17′, 60 pound boat off my third story rooftop down a narrow alleyway.  No big deal.

I found this video in an old folder of mine while I was coding. It’s from January 24th, 2008. I was living in an apartment in LA with an antisocial cat and a living room that flooded every time it rained. I was working on 3D printer motor controllers and solar concentrators at Idealab, learning to surf with Will, and I thought talking in a Boston accent was the best way to spend all my time. It’s pretty good to look back at life and think that I did everything pretty much right

(from the taipei airport)