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by andrewguenther 1074 days ago
Maker Faire has a really special place in my heart. In 2011 I ran the iFixit booth where we not only ran phone repair workshops, but we also did a teardown of a car...live. A volunteer was kind enough to lend us his VW Golf, which he was also going to need to drive to work the following Monday. We were the last exhibitors out as it took us until around 2AM on Monday morning to get the whole thing back together and drive it out. We got two Editor's Choice awards and the Education award that year. One of the best weekends of my life.

Sadly, we never got to do anything like that again. Over the next couple years, large corporate sponsors started taking up more and more space until most of the main hall was just a bunch of ads. We were never able to get a space to do anything like that ever again. I really hope that the return of Maker Faire is also the return of makers at Maker Faire.
3 comments
nrp 1074 days ago
That’s the same year I exhibited the first time, and agree it might have been the pinnacle as an event for makers and hackers before it went corporate. I remember being disconcerted that the two person startup in the booth diagonal from mine was showing a closed source project, because it felt so out of place (they are now a billion dollar publicly traded company).
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iancmceachern 1074 days ago
Who was it?
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nrp 1074 days ago
It was the other booth doing interesting things with a Kinect: Matterport.

Mine was this (it did not become a billion dollar company): https://makezine.com/article/digital-fabrication/3d-printing...

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B2B_human 1074 days ago
Funny timing for this convo. Matterport just laid off 30% of their staff today. https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/matterport-tech-layoffs-...
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tomcam 1074 days ago
You rock! What’s your perspective on the Kinect now? What are you working on these days?
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andrewguenther 1074 days ago
Related: If you happened to be there at Maker Faire 2011 and have pictures of the iFixit booth, please let me know!
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dieselgate 1074 days ago
Cool. What constitutes tearing down a car in this case?
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andrewguenther 1074 days ago
We disassembled it as much as we could on day 1 of the show and started putting it back together about halfway through day 2.
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nivenhuh 1074 days ago
Sounds epic, I hope there are pictures!
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