It is often said that imitation is the mother of creation. Copycat marketing grows the market, Shanzhai culture leads innovation. Imitation in the digital age is made by curation. That is to say, curation is creation.

By 2025, six billion people all over the world will use the Internet. Everyone will be able to access any and all information. Everyone can use e-commerce and also enjoy the opportunity to get the best online education anywhere in the world. The problem is too excessive content, the flood of information. We have to select what market needs. We need a filtering tool. Crowdsourcing and curation take the role.

Excessive content in the digital age is being filtered by social curation, which is driven by the crowd. In process, a community which leads collective intelligence by crowdsourcing is formed. This community should be equipped with a curation platform to filter the content. If an algorithm is created on this platform, it becomes an intellectual property and further a business model. The pioneers of the digital curation platform are Google and Facebook.

With the use of smart phone and the proliferation of social media, content curation services are growing rapidly. They collect and curate relevant content according to the subjectivity or viewpoint of individuals, and provide users with the content that is related to or preferred by. Flipboard, which shares news, and Pinterest, which shares photos, become notable unicorn companies. Edtech, which aims personalized learning, has content curation service at its core.

It is now the era of startups. Democratization of entrepreneurship is taking place. The Maker Movement, resulted from the open source revolution, is exponentially spreading. This is because crowdsourcing is possible in open source communities based on the open prototyping platforms: Arduino, Raspberry Pi, ARM mbed, etc. Ideas and designs are shared with reusable software and library, which are optimized through repeated reuse and then become the de facto standard.

Half of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions originate in startups now. All IoT solution platforms, such as Intel’s Edison and Samsung’s Artic, which newly enter into the IoT market, make it a priority to be compatible with Arduino, the origin of open source electronics platform. Because Intel and Samsung do not have their own community and ecosystem, and because they are reliant on reusable software and library that are commonly used in Arduino community.

The open source community is now evolving into a makerspace. Online makerspace should have a curation platform, where reusable software and library serve as the API for Platform as a Service. Those enable maker to develop new prototype more easily and quickly by remixing existing prototypes with his own idea. It is then that curation becomes creation.

Cybermakerspace.com, opened by WIZnet, is an online makerspace – for makers, by makers. WIZnet Museum exhibits over 2,000 UCC’s (User Created Content) and 100 new UCC’s every month. For these users, WIZnet holds IoT design contest at cybermakerspace.com from May to September, 2017. “Curation is Creation” is the title of the contest.

– YB Lee, CEO of WIZnet, yblee@wiznet.io

This column contributed to “ET news” in Korea on May. 12, 2017