Week 18

Applications and Implications

The eighteenth lecture on Wednesday May 31th was about Invention, Intellectual Property and Income: research&development, ecosystems, patents, copyrights (original works of authorship, notice of copyright, registration, licenses), trademarks (establishment, registration, protection), income sources (product, consumables, licenses, advertising, platforms, infrastructures, services, ...) and types (for-profit, non-profit, hybrid), funding (venture capital, incubator, angel, friends, crowdsource, loan, ...), business lifecycle and opportunities (accelerators, incubators, manufacturers, e-commerce platforms/services). Assignment given by Neil for this eighteenth week was to develop a plan for dissemination of the proposed Final Project MailPlus, and preparing a presentation slide and video about it.

License

Project MailPlus is going to be a Smart Mailbox that digitally interacts with it's owner; it will have a sensor (Hall Effect Sensor) and one or more actuators (LEDs, and maybe someday also radio) to tell the owner if new mail is (potentially) in. As verified in "Application and Implications" Week this is not a completely new idea: although it's the kind of product that is not easy (if not impossible) to spot in a neighbourhood mall, someone already made a project like this for being disseminated and/or funded and/or selled over the Internet.

Since a general idea itself can't be patented/registered but only a particular application/design, I'm not going file any provisional patent application before releasing Project MailPlus to the public, because I really don't have any motivation to do so: I've made this project primarily for myself and Fab Academy purposes, in full respect of it's knowledge-sharing spirit, and I will be very happy if someone someday, maybe browsing some websearch result index or Fab Academy webarchives, will be trying to build his own MailPlus version, following my personal experience. I'm just interested in leaving it publicly accessible on Fab Academy web archives, while still retaining the copyright about it. Therefore I decided to use a Creative Commons license with a copyleft clause: more in particular CC BY-SA 4.0

Naming and Branding

I believe that it can be good for dissemination of the project to have a particolar Identity about it, so I've been thinking about a good name and a brand; I've choosen the MailPlus name to give in a very short way the essence of the Projects, which is in fact, a particular MailBox that does something "more" (hence, "Plus") that normal traditional mailboxes can do. I also decided to design a specific logo, useful for communication purposes (website, social media, etc.) and to be vynilcutted as a sticker to put on the mailbox front door.

Small Scale Production and Distribution

About a possibile small scale production I think a viable model could be crowdsourcing, a term coined in 2005 as portmanteau of "crowd" and "outsourcing": that is a specific sourcing mode in which individuals or organizations use contributions from Internet users to obtain needed services or ideas. Most popular crowdsourcing platforms in Italy at the moment are Produzioni dal Basso and Kickstarter, now also available for italian creators. Another viable model to get some income could be cloud e-commerce platforms like Bigcartel and/or marketplaces for handcrafted items like Etsy; I'm also very interested in Fab Lab specific sourcing models like Fab Market; or Fab Lab Made, a brand created by Francisco Sanchez available as open-source to anyone who wants to make and sell products built according to the principles of the Made in a Fab Lab Manifesto.

Source files