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Maker Faire halts operations and lays off all staff – TechCrunch

Published

4 years ago

June 8, 2019

Financial troubles have forced Maker Media, the company behind crafting publication MAKE: magazine as well as the science and art festival Maker Faire, to lay off its entire staff of 22 and pause all operations. TechCrunch was tipped off to Maker Media’s unfortunate situation which was then confirmed by the company’s founder and CEO Dale Dougherty.

For 15 years, MAKE: guided adults and children through step-by-step do-it-yourself crafting and science projects, and it was central to the maker movement. Since 2006, Maker Faire’s 200 owned and licensed events per year in over 40 countries let attendees wander amidst giant, inspiring art and engineering installations.

“Maker Media Inc ceased operations this week and let go of all of its employees — about 22 employees” Dougherty tells TechCrunch. “I started this 15 years ago and it’s always been a struggle as a business to make this work. Print publishing is not a great business for anybody, but it works…barely. Events are hard . . . there was a drop off in corporate sponsorship.” Microsoft and Autodesk failed to sponsor this year’s flagship Bay Area Maker Faire.

But Dougherty is still desperately trying to resuscitate the company in some capacity, if only to keep MAKE:’s online archive running and continue allowing third-party organizers to license the Maker Faire name to throw affiliated events. Rather than bankruptcy, Maker Media is working through an alternative Assignment for Benefit of Creditors process.

“We’re trying to keep the servers running” Dougherty tells me. “I hope to be able to get control of the assets of the company and restart it. We’re not necessarily going to do everything we did in the past but I’m committed to keeping the print magazine going and the Maker Faire licensing program.” The fate of those hopes will depend on negotiations with banks and financiers over the next few weeks. For now the sites remain online.

The CEO says staffers understood the challenges facing the company following layoffs in 2016, and then at least 8 more employees being let go in March according to the SF Chronicle. They’ve been paid their owed wages and PTO, but did not receive any severance or two-week notice.

“It started as a venture-backed company but we realized it wasn’t a venture-backed opportunity” Dougherty admits, as his company had raised $10 million from Obvious Ventures, Raine Ventures, and Floodgate. “The company wasn’t that interesting to its investors anymore. It was failing as a business but not as a mission. Should it be a non-profit or something like that? Some of our best successes for instance are in education.”

The situation is especially sad because the public was still enthusiastic about Maker Media’s products Dougherty said that despite rain, Maker Faire’s big Bay Area event last week met its ticket sales target. 1.45 million people attended its events in 2016. MAKE: magazine had 125,000 paid subscribers and the company had racked up over one million YouTube subscribers. But high production costs in expensive cities and a proliferation of free DIY project content online had strained Maker Media.

“It works for people but it doesn’t necessarily work as a business today, at least under my oversight” Dougherty concluded. For now the company is stuck in limbo.

Regardless of the outcome of revival efforts, Maker Media has helped inspire a generation of engineers and artists, brought families together around crafting, and given shape to a culture of tinkerers. The memory of its events and weekends spent building will live on as inspiration for tomorrow’s inventors.

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Gadgets

Android phones get PC webcam capabilities in the latest beta

Published

11 hours ago

September 22, 2023

Francisco Peguero

Enlarge / The Pixel 7 Pro camera layout. Between the first two lenses, you can make out sensors for laser autofocus and a color sensor.

Here’s a fun new use for your Android phone: A PC webcam! In the latest Android beta, plugging a phone into a PC will reveal a new option in the USB Preferences menu for webcam functionality. Just pick that option instead of the default “file transfer,” and the phone camera will register itself as a webcam. Then you can fire up Zoom and start video calling.

The Android build with this feature is “Android 14 QPR1 Beta 1.” Android’s getting confusing with all these overlapping betas, but the current stable version is still Android 13. Android 14, currently on its 10th beta/developer preview, will most likely be out alongside the Pixel 8 in October. Android 14 QPR1 is the quarterly release after the first stable build of Android 14, and it should be out around December. (QPR stands for quarterly platform release.) These happen between major releases, often marketed as “feature drops.” Right now, Android 13 is technically “Android 13 QPR3.”

Android's 14 QPR1's webcam settings. — Enlarge / Android’s 14 QPR1’s webcam settings.

Ron Amadeo

Android is technically copying this feature from iOS. In Apple land, this is called the “Continuity Camera,” and will work wirelessly between an iPhone and a Mac, which is pretty cool. As usual, the Android version is much more flexible since the feature presents as a generic USB webcam. It should work on almost everything, like Windows, Mac, Chrome OS, and probably Linux. You can even plug an Android phone into another Android phone and use the first phone’s camera as the webcam for the second phone.

A phone has a lot more thickness to work with than the top half of a laptop, so most phone cameras will outclass any camera that has been crammed into the paper-thin screen portion of a laptop. The hard part is coming up with a viable phone mount that puts the camera in the right location. You’ll also still need some kind of microphone, as you can’t use the phone’s mic yet. Hopefully that gets fixed in time for the stable releases.

Gadgets

Apple’s new iPhone 15 and 15 Pro reach doorsteps and store shelves

Published

12 hours ago

September 22, 2023

Francisco Peguero

Enlarge / All the colors of the new iPhone 15.

Apple

Today marks the in-store launch of the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro, plus the likely delivery date for at least the earliest preorders. Preorders went live a week ago, on September 15.

You’ll be waiting for a while if you want the Pro model and didn’t preorder, though.

In Chicago, delivery dates for new orders of the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max from the online Apple store are currently estimated to be between October 23 and 30—more than a month from now. Next-day in-store pickup is still a possibility for most configurations, except for the 1TB iPhone 15 Pro Max.

The regular iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus don’t seem to have the same problem, though. I was offered immediate shipping or pick-up for every configuration I tried. All these estimates could be different not long after this is published, of course.

It’s tempting to look at that information and conclude that the Pro models will be more popular during this year’s cycle, but that’s not necessarily the case. It depends on how many units of each model Apple has produced, of course, and it stands to reason that early adopters who jumped right on preorders last week are enthusiasts who might be more interested in the Pro models.

A handful of companion products to the iPhone 15 lineup are also available today, including USB-C AirPods Pro and MagSafe chargers.

We currently have the iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max in hand and are working on a review that will go live next week.

In case you missed the announcement a couple of weeks ago, the iPhone 15 brings several of the “Pro” features from the iPhone 14 Pro to the current base iPhone, including the Dynamic Island to replace the notch, Apple’s A16 chip, and a 48-megapixel camera sensor that is used to facilitate 2x zoom, among other things. It also ditches the long-standing proprietary Lightning connection in favor of the industry-standard USB-C.

The iPhone 15 Pro distinguishes itself from the base model with a new configurable “Action Button” to replace the mute switch, a faster USB-C port, a more robust camera system, a faster A17 chip, which claims notably improved graphics performance, and a new titanium enclosure. The phones’ general sizes, designs, and shapes are very similar to what we saw last year.

Gadgets

Amazon adding ads to Prime Video in 2024 unless you pay $2.99 extra

Published

15 hours ago

September 22, 2023

Francisco Peguero

Next year, watching TV shows and movies on Amazon Prime Video without ads will cost more than it does now. In early 2024, Amazon will show ads with Prime Video content unless you pay $2.99 extra.

Amazon announced today that Prime Video users in the US, Canada, Germany, and the UK will automatically start seeing advertisements “in early 2024.” Subscribers will receive a notification email “several weeks” in advance, at which point they can opt to pay $2.99 extra for ad-free Prime Video, Amazon said.

That takes the price of ad-free Prime Video from $8.99/month alone to $11.98/month and from $14.99/month with Prime to $17.98/month.

Here’s how that compares against other ad-free streaming service tiers:

Apple TV+: $6.99
Disney+: $13.99 (starting October 12)
Netflix: $15.49
Hulu: $17.99 (starting October 12)
Paramount+: $11.99
Peacock: $11.99

Amazon said it’s making this change “to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time.” Prime Video is an expensive endeavor, costing Amazon $16.6 billion in 2022, with $7 billion of that spent on original content.

The Wall Street Journal reported in June that Amazon was considering introducing an ad-supported Prime Video tier amid high interest from advertisers. The company is already heavily invested in advertising, with its second-quarter earnings reporting advertising services growing 22 percent year over year to $10.9 billion. Amazon follows only Google and Meta in terms of digital ad revenue, according to Insider Intelligence.

Some Prime Video content already has product placement, and sports programming on Prime Video has ads. But bringing ads to the entire service gives Amazon the ability to generate more revenue from ads and from people who decide to cough up the extra cash to avoid seeing commercials.

Prime Video subscribers who don’t pay the extra $2.99 (and don’t just cancel their subscription altogether) are promised “meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers.”

Amazon did not provide further details about the upcoming change. However, Max says it shows “about 4 minutes of ads per hour,” and Peacock shows up to 5 minutes per hour. A May report from Insider Intelligence citing data from advertising analyst MediaRadar said Disney+ shows 5.3 minutes of ads per hour, Netflix four minutes, and Hulu 7.3 minutes.

With current prices starting at $9.99 per month, Prime Video was one of the cheapest ways to get streaming TV without ads. While the changes put pricing for ad-free Prime Video more on par with its competitors, it may still disappoint budget-minded cord-cutters. Streaming services started off as a cheaper, simpler alternative to cable TV. But as an influx in services, changes in pricing, confusing bundles, and scattered content have proven, we haven’t gotten that far from cable after all.