Limor "Ladyada" Fried from Adafruit will be interviewing Ayah Bdeir from littleBits and Catherine Wong.
Ayah Bdeir is the founder and CEO of littleBits, an award-winning library of Electronics dubbed "LEGOs for the iPad generation." Bdeir is an engineer, interactive artist and one of the leaders of the open hardware movement. Bdeir's career and education have centered on advancing open source hardware to make education and innovation more accessible to people around the world. She is a co-founder of the Open Hardware Summit, a TED Senior Fellow and an alumna of the MIT Media Lab. Bdeir was named one of Fast Company's 1000 Most Creative People in Business and one of Popular Mechanics' 25 Makers Who Are Reinventing the American Dream. littleBits was named as one of CNN's top 10 Emerging Startups to watch. In two short years, littleBits has garnered praise as the most extensive, versatile and easy to use hardware platform out there and partnered with leading science, art and technology organizations such as MoMA and KORG. Originally from Lebanon and Canada, Ayah now lives in New York City.
littleBits is an opensource library of electronic modules that snap together with tiny magnets for prototyping, learning, and fun.
littleBits (spelled lower case L, upper case B, all one word) consists of tiny circuit-boards with specific functions engineered to snap together with magnets. No soldering, no wiring, no programming, just snap together for prototyping, learning and fun. Each bit has a specific function (light, sound, sensors, buttons, thresholds, pulse, motors, etc), and modules snap to make larger circuits. Just as LEGO™ allows you to create complex structures with very little engineering knowledge, littleBits are small, simple, intuitive, blocks that make creating with sophisticated electronics a matter of snapping small magnets together.
With a growing number of available modules, littleBits aims to move electronics from late stages of the design process to its earliest ones, and from the hands of experts, to those of artists, makers, students and designers.
Catherine Wong is a previous Google Science Fair Finalist and she is working on building hackerspaces for schools Specifically, aiming to bring hackerspaces - filled with relatively inexpensive but awesome equipment ranging from 3D printers to soldering stations, as well as stations for CS and engineering classes - to the high schools or communities of students in disadvantaged neighborhoods; our mission is to reignite the excitement of learning in students who might otherwise be struggling by giving them access to the tools to build and make.
Limor "Ladyada" is a MIT engineer, open source hardware and software pioneer and entrepreneur. She is the founder of the educational electronics company, Adafruit. Her goal was to create the best place online for learning electronics and making the best designed products for makers of all ages and skill levels. Limor was the first female engineer on the cover of WIRED magazine, an EFF Pioneer Award recipient for open-source software & hardware and was recently awarded Entrepreneur magazine's Entrepreneur of the year.