How late are hardware startups to ship? Are all of them manufacturing in China? What is the biggest challenge that they face when it comes to fundraising? As we grew the community from zero to 410+ active members over the past four years, we saw the same questions being asked again and again not only within the club but also in the tech ecosystem. It’s why we decided to survey our community to cast light on the different aspects of running a hardware venture. This is what we found out.
Whether you’re a teacher, accountant, engineer or farmer, the digital economy is transforming the workplace as we know it. According to a study by the European Commission, 90 percent of workplaces in the European Union today require employees to have basic digital skills. And Europeans are beginning to learn these skills on their own in their spare time. This is exactly what Nik Kiene, Malte Schülein and Lennart Hartrumpf, three students from Flensburg, a city in northern Germany, did last summer. While most students spent the holidays hanging out or traveling with friends and family, the trio went back to school.
As a public school teacher and a leader of education nonprofits, Shani Dowell saw an opportunity to better communicate parents’ feedback to their kids’ schools. The parents shared ideas, praise and frustrations with one another, yet there was no system in place to give more routine feedback to school administration. So Shani created Possip, a platform for parents to give weekly feedback in less than a minute. It gives the schools actionable reports and helps them see trends, while allowing parents to track their school’s progress and responses to feedback.
Last week, you might have noticed we announced the creation of an application ecosystem – a rich, secure and free ecosystem of desktop and mobile apps for our Librem products. More details will be revealed as soon as we come to some key decisions regarding how it should be built; but for now, everything will revolve around Flatpak, which we believe is the best technology for what we want to achieve today. We are eager to partner with the Flatpak community, and hope to rapidly build an app store centered around our core values – Free Software and Reproducible Builds.
Hello everyone! We have accomplished so much in the last 3 months and need to share, so prepare yourself for a dense update on the Librem 5 phone, PureOS, and software applications.
