Limor Fried Biography

Adafruit Industries is an electronics hobbyist company owned by an American electrical engineer known as Limor Fried. In the open-source hardware community, she’s very influential and well known by her moniker ladyada, a homage to Lady Ada Lovelace for having participated in the first Open Source Hardware Summit and the drafting of the Open Source Hardware definition. In 2003, Fried earned a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) from MIT where she studied and in 2005, she got a Master of Engineering in EECS. She created a project called Social Defense Mechanisms: Tools for Reclaiming Our Personal Space as part of her qualification. She prototyped glasses that darken when a television is in view, and a low-power RF jammer that prevent cell phones operating in a user’s personal space by following the concept of critical design. Fried founded what became Adafruit Industries in 2005 in her MIT dorm room, then later moved to New York. Strictly for the hobbyist market, the company designs and resells open tools, components and source electronic kits. With eight employees the company shipped more than $3 million worth of product in 2010. The mission of the company extends beyond the adult hobbyist audience to pre-school STEM education. The Electronic Frontier Foundation awarded Fried the Pioneer Award in 2009 for her participation in the open source hardware and software community. In 2011, Fast Company Magazine awarded Fried with the Most Influential Women in Technology award and she became the first female engineer to be featured on the cover of Wired. She goes on to say “If there's one thing I'd like to see from this, it would be for some kids to say to themselves I could do that and start the journey to becoming an engineer and entrepreneur” in an interview with CNET. In 2012, Entrepreneur named Limor Entrepreneur of the Year and she was the only female out of 15 finalists. Along with Phillip Torrone, Fried organized a $1,000 challenge to create an open source driver In response to the launch of Microsoft's Kinect for the Xbox 360 in 2010. Adafruit increased the prize to $2,000 and then $3,000 after Microsoft condemned the challenge as a modification to their product. This caused a response from a Microsoft company spokesperson: “Microsoft does not condone the modification of its products… With Kinect, Microsoft built in numerous hardware and software safeguards designed to reduce the chances of product tampering. Microsoft will continue to make advances in these types of safeguards and work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant.” Spokespeople from Microsoft stated that they did not criticize the challenge rather, they were excited to see what the community developed after Microsoft condemned the challenge as a modification to their product.

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