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Maker Faire and Maker Media are getting a second chance after suddenly going bankrupt, but they’ll return in a weakened capacity. Sadly, their flagship crafting festivals remain in jeopardy, and it’s unclear how long the reformed company can survive.
Maker Media suddenly laid off all 22 employees and shut down last month, as first reported by TechCrunch. Now its founder and CEO Dale Dougherty tells me he’s bought back the brands, domains, and content from creditors and rehired 15 of 22 laid off staffers with his own money. Next week, he’ll announce the relaunch of the company with the new name “Make Community“.
Read our story about how Maker Faire fell apart
The company is already working on a new issue of Make Magazine that it will hope to publish quarterly (down from six times per year) and the online archives of its do-it-yourself project guides will remain available. I hopes to keep publishing books. And it will continue to license the Maker Faire name to event organizers who’ve thrown over 200 of the festivals full of science-art and workshops in 40 countries. But Dougherty doesn’t have the funding to commit to producing the company-owned flagship Bay Area and New York Maker Faires any more.
“We’ve succeeded in just getting the transition to happen and getting Community set up” Dougherty tells me. But sounding shaky, he asks “Can I devise a better model to do what we’ve been doing the past 15 years? I don’t know if I have the answer yet.” Print publishing proved tougher and tougher recently. Combined with declining corporate sponsorships of the main events, Maker Media was losing too much money to stay afloat last time.
“On June 3rd, we basically stopped doing business. And, you know, the bank froze our accounts” Dougherty said at a meetup he held in Oakland to take feedback on his plan, according a recording made by attendee Brian Benchoff. Grasping for a way to make the numbers work, he told the small crowd gathered “I’d be happy if someone wanted to take this off my hands.”
Maker Faire [Image via Maker Faire Instagram]
Maker Faire founder and Make Community CEO Dale Dougherty
The immediate plan is to announce a new membership model next week at Make.co where hobbyists and craft-lovers can pay a monthly or annual fee to become patrons of Make Community. Dougherty was cagey about what they’ll get in return beyond a sense of keeping alive the organization that’s held the maker community together since 2005. He does hope to get the next Make Magazine issue out by the end of summer or early fall, and existing subscribers should get it in the mail.
The company is still determining whether to move forward as a non-profit or co-op instead of as a venture-backed for-profit as before. “The one thing i don’t like about non-profit is that you end up working for the source you got the money from. You dance to their tune to get their funding” he told the meetup.
Last time, he burned through $10 million in venture funding from Obvious Ventures, Raine Ventures, and Floodgate. That could make VCs weary of putting more cash into a questionable business model. But if enough of the 80,000 remaining Make Magazine subscribers, 1 million YouTube followers, and millions who’ve attended Maker Faire events step up, pehaps the company can find surer footing.
“I hope this is actually an opportunity not just to revive what we do but maybe take it to a new level” Dougherty tells me. After all, plenty of today’s budding inventors and engineers grew up reading Make Magazine and being awestruck by the massive animatronic creations featured at its festivals.
Audibly peturbed, the founder exclaimed at his community meetup “It frustrates the heck out of me thinking that I’m the one backing up Maker Faire when there’s all these billionaires in the valley.”
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Autonomous transportation startup May Mobility is doing more than just talking about accessibility when it comes to self-driving transportation tech development. The company recently began developing a wheelchair-accessible prototype version of its autonomous shuttle vehicle, and just concluded an initial round of gathering feedback from the community of people in Columbus, Ohio, who would actually be using the shuttle.
May Mobility’s design includes accommodations for entry and exit, as well as for securing the passenger’s wheelchair once it’s on board during the course of the trip. The company learned from the first round of feedback that its design needs improvement in terms of making the ramp longer to facilitate more gradual onboarding and disembarking, as well as optimizing pick-up and drop-off points.
It still plans to work on implementing some improvements, before deploying its vehicles, but we can expect to see accessible May Mobility shuttles in operation across its pilots in Columbus, Providence and Grand Rapids soon, according to the company.
Ultimately, though, the company says that it feels its solution is perceived as at least on par with existing accessible transit options currently in service in the area.
May Mobility Chief Operating Officer and co-founder Alisyn Malek speaking at TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility on July 10, 2019.
“For us, our focus is how we can transform cities, making them safer, greener and more accessible for everybody,” said May Mobility co-founder and COO Alisyn Malek on stage at TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility. “How can we make transportation easier for everybody? And part of that is we really have to think about ‘everybody.'”
May Mobility’s vehicles are specifically low-speed electric vehicles, for which there aren’t yet clear guidelines or regulations around their design and safety features, so the company thinks it makes sense to work directly with community members to get a head start on accessible design. And one of the constant refrains from autonomous vehicle companies is that their technology will bring access to people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to make use of cars, but few have shown concrete steps they’re taking to actually address the practical realities of true accessibility.
Some others in the industry are taking action, however, including Lyft, which is working with its autonomous technology partner Aptiv and the National Federation of the Blind on designing self-driving service that works for blind and low-vision passengers. But May Mobility’s service has the advantage of operating commercially for the public in defined, manageable engagements that provide value for the community now, which means the actions it’s taking toward accessibility will have real benefit where it’s already in service.
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