2017 Speaker Profile: Joshua Lifton

We’re very lucky to have Joshua Lifton among this year’s NEDME technical presenters. Josh is the CEO of Crowd Supply, at crowdfunding platform based in Portland. Josh’s talk is titled “Disruption from Below: How Open Source and Crowdfunding Are Changing the Electronics Industry,” and he was generous to share some of his thoughts with us in advance of the show.

What has been one of your favorite work projects in the last few years?
I feel lucky that my job is to help a constant stream of interesting hardware projects come to life. A few that stand out are the Novena Open Laptop and the LimeSDR software-defined radio.

Tell us about a change you see coming in the industry, and a way in which companies should be positioned to meet it.
Open source hardware will soon be just as important as open source software already is. This will affect the entire supply chain.

What is one thing that you hope people will take away from your presentation?
Crowdfunding open source software is a great way to address needs not currently being met by traditional funding and design methods. Now is the time to start planning for the changes ahead.