Whew! Just got back from vacation in the US visiting family and also getting the chance to see the Bay Area Maker Faire for the first time. Actually, it was my first Maker Faire outside of Japan and it blew my mind. The scale of the projects were just on a different level compared to Maker Faire Japan. Projects in Japan are much smaller, mostly because we can’t fit three story fire breathing, steel dragons inside our tiny cramped apartments.

I was on the train coming back from the airport last night when I saw an interesting article at Make Magazine called Why the Maker Movement is Here to Stay. The author, Ken Denmead, discusses an article written on the tech blogging site gigaOm about Sparkfun. Actually, the gigaOm article starts out being about Sparkfun, but towards the end, the author generalizes Sparkfun’s business and business model into the recent surge in popularity of the maker movement. To be honest, I probably wouldn't have thought too deeply about that article except that Ken made some interesting points that got me thinking. In the latter part of the gigaOm article, the author makes an effort to end on a thought provoking note:

"To me, and for others watching the maker movement unfold, SparkFun is a chance to answer what is an important question. How big can the maker movement get?"