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You can buy a Cube-Sat online. 10 x 10 x 10 cm^3, and it fits into a standard deployment thingie – which the rocket going up, with a bit of space/weight to spare, is happy to "fill-up the bus" before launch. You can buy double and triple-sized Cube-Sats, and it sounds like this one was 20 x 10 x 10 cm^3.

High-school kids do projects with these routinely. Commercial giants getting into the game is no surprise––they just don't get a subsidy to put the thing into orbit.

It is not news that anyone ran an experiment with a Cube-Sat: http://www.cubesat.org/about/

"about 4 inches on each side, weighing about 3 pounds and with a volume of about a quart."

According to the specification linked from the wikipedia article, you can offer more exact measurements in metric:
-The CubeSat shall be 100mm +/- 0.1 mm wide (X and Y dimensions)
- The CubeSat shall be 113.5mm +/- 0.1 mm wide (Z dimension)
- Each single CubeSat shall not exceed 1.33kg mass

Generally speaking, microsatellites are in the range of 10 kg to 100 kg. What you are talking about are cubesats, which are generally nanosatellites (1 kg to 10 kg) and picosatellites (< 1 kg). As others have said, the AMSAT programme is a great starting point; next August come out to the Cubesat workshop and, if interested, hang out for the USU Small Satellite Conference; lots of industry, academia, and government representation. We host a booth every year, as do most relevant players in North America.

The most important thing is to decide what you want your CubeSat to do. Are you out for a Sputnik style beacon that you can detect when it goes overhead? Are you going to be taking pictures of all the balloon cameras that didn't make it into space?

Once you decide what you are going to do, then you can start in on the design. Cubesat.org has all sorts of design guidelines, etc.

As for organizations, mailing lists, and the like, the external links on the Wikipedia page you linked into your article should provide an excellent starting point.

Look into CubeSats, most (all?) of which piggy-back on traditional satellite launches. There's enough interest that there's an open standard for the idea, and I think it runs like $10k to launch one. I think SpaceX deployed a few on one of its test launches.

Look into Cubesats

SI prefixes have been applied to satellites for a while now. They are used to differentiate satellites based on weight. Instead of three orders-of-magnitude per prefix (e.g., micro -> nano = 10^-3), they are one order-of-magnitude. In general, the classification has been broken like so:

minisatellite: 100 - 1000 kg
micro-: 10 - 100 kg
nano-: 1 - 10 kg
pico-: 100 g - 1 kg

Theoretically, these satellites come down by orders of magnitude in cost, too. An example of a Picosat would be the CubeSat program that a number of colleges have tinkered with - a relatively inexpensive satellite 10 cm to a side that could be launched with a few dozen other cubesats, thus amortizing the launch cost over many participants.

Funny but the CubeSat concept was by a Stanford professor and is coordinated by another California university, Cal Poly.

It's just that the international schools don't have the ITAR restrictions so they can actually get their satellites launched.

CubeSat has a bunch of American CubeSats ready to go, just waiting on the Russians to launch it now. http://www.cubesat.org/

Those were cool birds to. I worked on the Cal Poly team that helped with that effort and was heavily involved in tracking operations with our Earth station. To bad we were only half working at the time.

http://www.cubesat.org/

There you guys go. I get tired of people "forgetting" to mention their cool satellite was designed based on the CubeSat spec. Not DTU or AAU, they're cool, just certain other groups... Anyway the CubeSat hardware that we developed at CP and is available to the CubeSat Community. Most of the ideas I see on this page have been discussed by some developer or is in work with some developer. If not, anyone can build one of these birds, the Spec Sheet is on the page and CP is now trying to also coordinate launches for the CubeSat Community.

Exactly. Our primary cost is paying the students and a few parts. Even though everyone jokes that student time is free time (and it nearly is) we do still get paid a little.

The physical structure and equipment also costs some money. While machining on campus is sometimes an option, we need pretty accurate parts sometimes and even just running board production off site costs a decent amount. Little bits of money here and there adds up.

If you guys really want to build one check out CubeSat.org The standard is there and it's pretty open ended and we're always willing to help get more people into the community. Our primary asset is the community and their willingness to help others.

Actually there are a surprising number of interested parties out there that are willing to take the risk. Universities are one.

The two biggest problems universities face when trying to launch their satellite are cost and ITAR. A lot of the satellites that universities build have the latest and greatest because companies like to give samples and parts to universities. We stick those on some satellites and then ITAR becomes an issue. The state department laughs at us and says there's no way that's leaving the country. So now we're stuck on an American launch vehicle, which costs much more and generally has more stringent requirements for redundancy. So we sit on the ground with no way of getting into orbit.

Then comes a startup. They offer a cheap(er) ride to orbit, with less stringent safety requirements (yay, only triple redundancy instead of quad or higher), are an american company, and a little more risk on our side. So our satellite might not make it into an exact orbit with the precision that a Delta could do. So our satellite might blow up in a million parts, but hey, at least we had some fun and had the chance of getting into space. University satellites generally only have a 50/50 chance of working once in orbit anyway.

I work on a picosatellite project called CubeSat. We developed a standard system to allow universities and other interested parties to build picosatellites (10cm x 10cm x 10cm, 1kg) and then integrate all the satellites together into a single system that is then sent to the launch provider as a unit and attached to the launch vehicle. The goal is to provide cheap, easy, frequent, access to space. We have our second launch coming up this fall on a Russian DNEPR launch vehicle and will be deploying 14 satellites from universities all across the world. This same launch is also carrying multiple other small satellites.

CubeSat

It looks like eBay is becoming a cheap way to get your company, or yourself, into the media spotlight these days. Just put something strange up for auction (satellite, your virginity, your dignity, your wife, etc.) and you're guaranteed to get coverage on all major tech websites, magazines and news shows (CNN, Time, BBC, etc. are sure to run this). The fact that they porbably won't get $9,500,000 out of it doesn't really matter. Millions more people will now know that they can build satellites for a fraction of the price NASA or ESA does.

If you don't have $9,500,000, or don't want something quite as big, look at getting your own CubeSat. Dozens of these are beign built at universities around the world. You can buy most of the parts you need and just put them together. They are launched together on one rocket, sharing the launch cost and making it even cheaper than the $9,500,00 needed for a microsatellite (CubeSats are pico satellites, 10cm x 10cm x 10cm, and weigh only 1 kg).