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A comment on Maker Faire Bay Area Returns.

Re:Maker Faire Bay Area Returns by andrewguenther on Thursday July 13, 2023 @12:17AM (#36704957)
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.

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Re:Maker Faire Bay Area Returns by andrewguenther on Thursday July 13, 2023 @12:30AM (#36705029)
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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Re:Maker Faire Bay Area Returns by nrp on Thursday July 13, 2023 @01:18AM (#36705279)
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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Re:Maker Faire Bay Area Returns by iancmceachern on Thursday July 13, 2023 @01:55AM (#36705487)
Who was it?
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Re:Maker Faire Bay Area Returns by nrp on Thursday July 13, 2023 @03:20AM (#36706001)
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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Re:Maker Faire Bay Area Returns by B2B_human on Thursday July 13, 2023 @03:29AM (#36706050)
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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Re:Maker Faire Bay Area Returns by tomcam on Thursday July 13, 2023 @06:54AM (#36707304)
You rock! What’s your perspective on the Kinect now? What are you working on these days?
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Re:Maker Faire Bay Area Returns by dieselgate on Thursday July 13, 2023 @03:08AM (#36705936)
Cool. What constitutes tearing down a car in this case?
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Re:Maker Faire Bay Area Returns by andrewguenther on Thursday July 13, 2023 @10:57AM (#36710204)
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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Re:Maker Faire Bay Area Returns by nivenhuh on Thursday July 13, 2023 @03:54PM (#36715083)
Sounds epic, I hope there are pictures!
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