This week's assignments:

• develop a plan for dissemination of your final project



• prepare drafts of your summary slide (presentation.png, 1920x1080) and video clip (presentation.mp4, 1080p HTML5, less than ~minute, less than ~10 MB) and put them in your root directory

View my final project here!

Business professor CC Chapman joined us during lab to talk about types of businesses and funding. I have no interest in persuing a business based on my final project any time soon, but the following is what my plan would be if I ever did.

Firstly, I would want to become an Limited Liability Corporation. Right now, I am technically a sole proprietor. This means that if anyone got hurt from my product malfunction, I would personally be responsible. With an LLC, the worst that could happen would be my business going bankrupt but my personal accounts would not be effected.

The only other option is a full-blown corporation, but that would only happen after scaling-up. To be a corporation, you must have a board of directors and there is much more paperwork than an LLC. You can apply to become an LLC online!

As for funding, I would probably boot strap for a while until I felt I had a product ready for market, or an MVP (Minimum Viable Product).

Only then would I feel comfortable pitching to angel investors. I could also ask friends and family for help, but I'm not totally comfortable doing so.

I decided to protect the MakerBar with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. This means that others can share and modify my work as long as credit is given and they are not profiting.

I don't think my product warrants a patent since it's basically 2 pumps and a circuit board. Also, patents are extremely expnsive.

Finally, I would want to Trademark the name MakerBar so that no one else could use it.

It is important to note that even with licensing, you still have to go after the person breaking it. So, someone could sell my exact design without me knowing, but I couldn't really sue them if it was never brought to my attention that it was happening.

Here is the link to the infomercial script I wrote this week.

I also picked out this background track. All credit goes to George Streicher.