What kind of watch is that?

I'm a odd mix of tech and art and I'm immersed in both worlds, well as much as one can be. I'm a big fan of open source projects and when I read about open source in our textbook I figured I'd chime in.

I scan a lot of websites and I come across things from both the tech and art worlds. So when I saw Maureen with a smart watch I had to ask her about it. I saw a Tedtalk last year about Arduino's open source computer chip project that I was very taken with. And here was Maureen walking into class wearing a product from that video, almost. Turns out she has a competitor of the watch I had seen featured.

Makers Movement

Making robots is spendy, and from this frustration Arduino was born. Arduino is a small cheap programmable micro controller that anyone with a hundred bucks can acquire from their neighborhood Radioshack. It is all open source, even the chips construction, so if you're really good at soldering you don't even have to buy one, you can make one yourself. All of the software is also open source and anyone can write code for it. Making robots just got real cheap.

So, some dudes thought the world needed a smart watch. They launched a Kickstarter fund asking for $100K. They didn't get it. They got over $10 million, making it the biggest funded ‪Kickstarter‬ project ever. I guess everyone thought they needed a smart watch. Cash in hand they used the Aduino platform combined with the open source operating system Linux and created their smart watch which they named Pebble.

Pebble

Of the various smart watches out there, open source watches will rein supreme. When a project is open source that means that anyone can develop software for it. Proprietary products have a hard time going head to head with products that are open source.

Doubt it? Android is open source and their phones had 70% of the market share as of the last quarter of 2012. And the projections have it going even higher next year. Android dominates because anyone, even a company can use it to make devices.

Arduino combining open source hardware and software is a big shift in how micro controllers can be used in the future. More and more people that think the world needs "X" will have many barriers removed for them with the likes of Arduino being put out there for anyone to use for their project.I believe that this is the beginning of a new industrial revolution and I'm excited to see what comes of it.