Usually when technology product startups in Silicon Valley want to crowdfund their ideas, they make a working prototype of it in a Fabrication Laboratory (Fab Lab), to demo on their crowd-funding page.
If you were a Nigerian technology product startup, you wouldn’t have such luxury. There are no Fab Labs in the country so you have to send your designs over to some faraway lab in Asia, hoping they don’t interpret it wrongly. Because even the slightest changes in specifications mean more costs before you’re even started. Many ideas die like this probably everyday in Nigeria.
This one of the challenges Ideacentric’s Nerve team faced in producing the Nerve Mobile, a convergent smartphone target at students without access to PCs. So they have decided they want to build Nigeria’s first Fab Lab and they need your help. They have setup a crowdfuning campaign on Indiegogo and are looking to raise $49,600 dollars for their Nerve Fab Lab project. A deadline of May 30, 2014 has been set to reach this goal. Being a flexible funding campaign, all the funds raised by May 30 will go to Ideacentric, even if they don’t mean their target.
And why should you care, you may ask? Well, Ideacentric promises the Nerve Fab Lab will be open to the general public, including students from all the secondary and tertiary institutions around. And the very fact that it will be located in Yaba – arguably the heart of Nigeria’s tech ecosystem – means it will attract some of the most innovative minds from all around the country.
Watch Ideacentric Co-Founder and CTO, Silas Okwoche, pitch the Nerve Fab Lab in this short video:
There are a number of perks available to everyone who donates to this cause – including Nerve Smartphones and having the Fab Lab building named after you. The breakdown of the costs is detailed on their Indiegogo campaign page.
Photo Credit: Hindrik S via Compfight cc
