Yonatan Raz-Fridman is one cool dude. Armed with a warm Mediterranean smile he strikes you as the perfect guy to party with but the wrong dude to cross. After 3 years with the Israeli Defence Force I get the feeling that he can handle himself in some pretty hairy situations. You Don’t Mess With The Yonatan.
His Twitter description pretty much sums up his recent life: “took a flight from Tel Aviv to London to build Kano.” One year later after one of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns in the history of Kickstarter, they raised over $1.5 milllion from over 13,000 people who want to own a Kano computer.
A Kano is a computer that you make yourself. Based on the Raspberry Pi technology out of Cambridge their unit allows anyone from age 7 to 70 to literally build your own computer straight from the mailbox complete with motherboard, speaker, keyboard, memory card, and wifi connection.
Then the fun stuff happens as you start programming on it by modifying games like Pong and Minecraft and then get more technical from there. The idea is to remove the mystery behind the ubiquitous tablet and show people young and old what actually makes a computer tick.
Please join me in welcoming this fantastic story and this positive group in individuals into our London technology ecosystem. How lucky are we? I am preordering a Kano RIGHT NOW for my 10 year old and look forward to receiving it in July!
compiled by @zander-bylund.
