When Pete Wood Met Massimo Banzi

Well, actually I'm one of the curators, so one of the people who started this thing and part of the organization. So this is my fifth time. This is the fifth edition we have. So this year we have over 700 makers represented, 40 countries, of which all of the 28 EU countries, current EU countries. And so it's pretty amazing. We started off with 35,000 people four years ago, and now we are... last year we were a hundred thousand visitors. We hope to do better this year. So it is kind of going out of control. We didn't expect it to be so successful.

Well, I think every sort of the maker movement has different identities depending on where you are. Italy is a country of small and medium companies. There are over 400,000 companies in Italy who are about manufacturing of different kind. So you can imagine there are all these companies, maybe 1, 2, 3 people. So a lot of the makers here are also like a small company, or like small companies that are kind of... they are just going to make your methods when they cannot develop their own stuff. So I think in Italy that is more kind of a junction between the small and medium enterprises and the makers. So you see a lot more around makers becoming into the business space now.

Yeah, so we see a lot of this happening, which is quite nice. But I also see some small companies maybe don't have the same resources as a big company to develop, and they were using maker tools like the open-source 3D printers, the Arduinos, and all of the stuff to create products. And so that's, I think, a very nice contribution that I like very much.

Yes, the last time we counted there were about 100 maker spaces and fab labs in Italy, which is insane considering that in the US there probably about 200. Yeah, that's incredible. Yeah, there's a lot of enthusiasm. I think a lot of these places will probably close down very soon because a lot of them they started with a lot of enthusiasts but don't really have a business model. But the ones who survive found a way to interact with their local communities, to be useful to the local companies, to provide education. So they are integrating within their own communities and they're providing a lot of value.

So I'm very interested in helping out the small and medium companies being able to take advantage of the same tools that bigger companies are using for their digital transformation. So something that we call Industry 4.0 in Europe, it has different names in other places, but it is a digital transformation of the whole kind of production processes from manufacturing to sales. So helping the smaller companies requires tools that are available off-the-shelf, that are simple to use, software platforms that are simple to use. So that's what we are focusing on right now, in our window providing off-the-shelf components that are certified, our online cloud, we're doing a lot of work on gateways. And so we're doing lots of things to help people being able to implement this process in their company without huge investments, and also being able to use Arduino as a way to, for example, train their workers, because it's also difficult to find people that you can employ. There's a demand for people. Although our program with it was completely a beautiful help in that as well. Fantastic.

Yes, one good example is this MKR maker rabbit line because it's a new small size for Arduino designed for devices that have wireless connectivity and they also have battery chargers on board. So you can power them with batteries. They are slightly more powerful than the regular Arduinos because they run on Cortex M0+ processors, and they also have security hardware embedded in them to make it more secure to connect to the cloud. So the basic model is the MKR 1000, it's a Wi-Fi device. But we also have now MKR Fox with Sigfox connectivity, one with LoRa, and one with GSM 3G connection. They are on display here. There's a demo that shows how easy it is to buy a carrier board, plug a board, plug the sensors, and basically you use our online cloud and your place on the cloud.

Actually, I haven't had the chance to see anything. Maybe I'll see the project come in, but I never see the fair because I was knocked around. But one of my favorite things is over there. It's a sensor that measures the size of pears as they grow on trees. Wow. It's a sick box kind of connected device. And I love the idea that you measure this like a caliper that measures the pear as it grows on the trees. But that's incredible.

Thank you. Welcome. Thank you.