Morning:
8°c
The Bay Area's Maker culture, which I wrote about a few months back, had its fourth big annual outing last weekend when some 80,000 people attended the two-day Maker Faire in San Mateo, at the Valley's northern edge.
A kind of suburban Burning Man, the event bills itself as “the world's largest DIY festival”. No, we're not talking Changing Rooms and Homebase here. This is more about do-it-yourself flame-throwing, robot-warship making, car customising, and automated panel-cutting with lasers. Oh, and knitting.
My kids especially enjoyed the man walking round with the knitted squid on his head, the human-filled mobile cup cakes that were racing around everywhere and the day-glow, ride-on Lunapillar Mutant Vehicle.
The place was packed with people who were clearly strangers to the sun and the gym, tell-tale signs of the local engineering illuminati. Every young(ish) industrial designer, computer scientist and information analyst in the area and his or her family, it seemed, was there.
The local universities, tech museums and federal research centres and many companies were in attendance, too, trying to make a good impression among the creative people they'd most like (come the end of the recession) to hire.
Most interesting to me were the Steam Punk aficionados, who were out in force. Steam Punk combines steam technology with science fiction to create an alternative, Jules Verne-like, tech-heavy past. Making huge, working machines out of metal and wood is a big part of it, but so is dressing up in a style that's part Avengers, part burlesque and part 20,000 leagues under the sea.
If other communities have their Sealed Knots and medieval combat societies, it's fitting, perhaps, that our re-enactors are all about recreating a past that's never been more than virtual.
Techies here have spent the past week trying to work out exactly how big a deal Google's newly announced Wave project will be. Google says Wave will reinvent online communication. Maybe. But will its open interface do what the iPhone has done for local office space — fill it with new start-ups eager to jump on the next developer bandwagon?
The Pentagon is again preparing to make serious investments in cutting-edge technology. Fifty years ago, it paid for the first semiconductors from Fairchild, the company that put the silicon in Silicon Valley. Now the money's going to cyber security. Local defence giants such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, as well as data-crunching tech companies such as HP, are salivating.
