Hello World! seems the most appropriate title for the inaugural blog post of Qi Hardware. These past 45 days a small group of us have been beavering away building yet another open company. What started in a small apartment in Taipei in late May is ready to go live. During that month of too much coffee, too little sleep, take out chinese, delivery pizza, appetizers at the Lava Lounge on Bryant street, simultaneous Skype calls and Google chat, cursing at google docs and the US trademark office, walking down Market street with a epson printer on my head and blow up mattresses for visiting teammates, we managed to accomplish a huge amount. So, some hat tips are in order.
I’ll start with Xiangfu who has been coding away on our first product. He is currently working on getting the kernel up and running on the hardware. Adam Wang comes next. He is a production engineer , the guy who makes sure that devices can actually be manufactured. He’s working in Taipei, documenting our first product, NanoNote, putting the design into kiCAD , and researching the options for the second version of the product. More about that later.
Next is Yi Zhang. Yi is buzz saw with sharp eye for detail. She got my attention late one night before a demo for Openmoko’s new product. Earlier in the day I suggested a last minute addition to the demo software. At 1 AM Yi was still there. Everyone else had left the building, but Yi pressed on and finished the task. That kind of loyalty to finishing one’s job made an impression on me. It didn’t take any intuition to see that she would be a great addition to Qi Hardware. For all of June, Yi was here in San Francisco. She helped me get incorporated, file trademarks, select a fulfillment house, select a shopping cart and accounting system, work the logo selection, and work with our vendors. Software engineers are very versatile.
None is more versatile than the next addition to the team: Mirko Lindner. During my last two weeks at Openmoko I shared an apartment, crazy hours, McDonalds, coffee, cigarettes, old danish linguistics and some sinister plots about killer apps for twitter with Mirko. A former student of literature and self taught programmer, Mirko was responsible for implementing the last UI design on the FreeRunner. As a former student of literature and self taught programmer myself, I was struck by his creativity. We spent many hours discussing how we would have done the UI differently, if given the chance. Old UI guys never die, they just bitch about other people’s design. At Qi it wasn’t clear what role I would put Mirko in, since we don’t plan to do UIs. He’s got web skills, so I put him to work on that and then a whole host of product marketing tasks and art design tasks cropped up. From the mundane— creating a business card, to the complex—designing a keyboard layout, to the artistic— selecting and designing logos and creating a giftbox. With 11 years of product marketing experience I figured I would be the best man for the job. Wrong! I did the first keyboard and Mirko shot back his version. Can you say pass the torch? I did. My very first boss gave me advice I will never forget. “Hire people who are better than you!” In the course of a week Mirko has completed the color scheme for the company and the product, redesigned the keyboard, designed the outer box, and completed all the artwork required to make it a shipping product, did taglines for the company and product, and started the web page. He just needed a little freedom.
I’ll end with Wolfgang Spraul, former VP of engineering at Openmoko, now Chief Operating Officer of Qi Hardware. After cleaning up some unfinished details at OM, Wolfgang has travelled the world informing many of our past hardware partners of our plans to start this new venture. His travels took him around the world; and, after a short stay in Argentina with Werner, Wolfgang arrived on my doorstep–with a fever of 39C and a smile on his face. The Qi was with him. What’s next?
We believe that an army of david’s can conquer goliath, that by enlisting the help of the open source community we can build better products. We are going to open more of the process to the community. That starts here and now. You can watch us pull things together or pitch in and help. All the openings are volunteer right now.
Tags: qi history, team
wowow~~~I was wondering about you guys what you doing with~Im decided that I will buy ben NanoNote when it could be sell!
I think educational meaning of the product(nanoNote) more than in commerical.I can use the open devices with free software to teach the kids how to hacking.Thats why God wanna people to do it!
Great stuff~waiting now…
Goodbye world?
Who are you sell the Ben NanoNotes to?
The it seens to be a knock off of the Zipit Z2 only with out WiFi and more Expensive.
Z2 $49.99 32 MB ram, MiniSD, PXA270 Arm CPU, 8MB Flash, Wifi B/G,
Ben $100? 32 MB ram, MiniSD, Jz4720 mips CPU, 2GB Flash,
Even at the Z2’s original $149.99 price it still better than a Ben and an $80 miniSD Wifi card.
BTW:
What is with this “Our device is too small to put a full SD slot in it”? Nintindo fit on into the DSi. Palm fit one into ever PalmPilot since 2001. Pandora even managed to fit two in.
Hey,
tanks for you comment.
Regarding your points:
We only learned about the Zipit2 while making the Ben, so nope, no knock off.
I do not follow the Zipit2 project closely, so I cannot comment on any comparison. However, I did read something about mandatory subscriptions there.
I agree, the Ben NanoNote is not too small for a normal SD slot, the current board simply doesn’t offer the space. The situation might change on future boards. We are going to watch the development of SD/microSD.
/mirko
> Who are you going to sell the Ben NanoNote to?
To people that enjoy using or advancing consumer electronics built with free software and free content.
> Z2 $49.99 32 MB ram, MiniSD, PXA270 Arm CPU, 8MB Flash, Wifi B/G,
> Ben $100? 32 MB ram, MiniSD, Jz4720 mips CPU, 2GB Flash,
Ben has microSD, not miniSD. You are right that there are some interesting full-size or miniSD cards right now, less so for microSD. But microSD is where all the investment is headed, and since stability of our platform is very important to us, we believe microSD is a good choice for the future.
Thanks a lot for the comparison, maybe we can start a page on our wiki to compare consumer electronics from a free software perspective?
Do you have and use a ZipIt or ZipIt2? Do you like it? It pushes people into service contracts with monthly fees, such devices are not exactly popular over here :-) Still good that you speak up.
The Zipit subscription is only required to use their Messaging application.
I haven’t goten a Zipit yet. Ben looking for something with a full SD slot so I can upload my photos with it.
I don’t like the smaller than SD sizes… Feel like a need tweezers to pick them up.
I have a feeling we just aren’t going to see MicroSD take off in the Digital Photography field. To hard change them in the field.
You don’t have kids do you?
OK, let us know how you like the Zipit once you have it.
Regarding SD sizes, let’s just leave it there only time will tell. Personally I agree with you - full size is a great size. But the miniaturization will continue, things will get smaller, faster, cheaper, etc. Maybe digital photography is different? I don’t know that market very well, my guess would be we will see microSD there as well.
I have a kid but not sure how that relates to what we talked about…
My Brother’s cellphone uses the tiny SD cards. His son ate the card.
what if someone jump from the roof?
microSDIO problem is that they are expensive
Have you read this
http://www.zipitwireless.com/eula.aspx?skinid=2
Welcome to reality. I would never ever buy anything with such an ELUA
Rakshat
what about http://thewikireader.com/
&
http://code.google.com/p/wikipediardware/
The project’s goal is to provide a bunch of software:
a set of bootloaders which load a small kernel image from SD card and execute it.
wiki-lib, a library which contains all the application’s logic
gui-lib, a very thin layer to provide glyph rendering and font file parsing
some simulators (Qt/Cocoa/ncurses) which emulate the hardware to make development easy
the ‘kernel’ code which is only a small wrapper around the hardware and uses wiki-lib and gui-lib
host based tools to generate the content from Wikipedia sources (indexing, font file generation, …)
we can win the race )
ps, i’ve ordered one nanonote already
Hey,
I am not part of the wikipediahardware project, so I cannot tell you how much of their goals are actually being worked on and how many are “if we get around to it we would love to” …
There is no winner needed :) The Ben NanoNote has a completely different idea behind it. Displaying Wikis is only one of countless possibilities on the Ben.
/mirko
also it can be used as a gadget to shoot a new series about James Bond or Mission Impossible n+1.. :)
Congrats on the new endeavor.
One nit: the blog software is not showing the date of posts, only the time.
Hi Ron,
thanks for the wishes and the pointer. I think I found the problem and solved it.
Regards,
/mirko