Bug Blogger

Greetings from Bug Labs

We're out of the gate.  The decision to start talking publicly about what we're up to here at Bug Labs was a little hairy.  Are we starting too early?  Too late?  Ultimately, we chose to just start the conversation and let the story unfold.  To that end, Jeremy Toeman (my head of marketing) and I had dinner last night in San Francisco with some well-respected thought leaders in high tech - Dave Winer, Ryan Block, Robert Scoble and Jerry Michalski.   Dave posted about it already (twice!) and sums it up nicely.  Update:  Robert Scoble has posted here (thanks).

I wanted to take a moment to share a bit about the Bug Labs vision.  For us, the consumer electronics industry is due for a change.

Consumer electronics products come to market today in a way that has not changed in decades.  Companies employ smart people who try to divine what the majority of their target customers will want to buy, fund massive market research programs, build expensive production lines, execute huge marketing campaigns and the majority of the time fail to achieve their objectives (see "Innovator's Solution", Christensen, "The Change Function", Coburn).

On Monday, NY Times reporter G. Pascal Zachary wrote an article that succinctly points out where this trend originated - "There is an unbroken line between Henry Ford (with his Model T) and Steve Jobs. The new iPhone similarly reflects the elite, corporate innovator's drive to find one size that fits many."  It's an expensive, wasteful model for everyone involved - producers, suppliers, customers and last but not least, the environment.

We see ourselves, our company and our product as a "bug" in the system of traditional CE; an agent for change.  We want to put more power in the hands of the individual to decide what gadgets they want and what features they should include.  We envision a world where CE stands for community electronics, where the long-tail of devices profitably exists and hardware mashups are as prevalent as their software counterparts.

So what is BUG exactly?  It's Legos meets Web services & APIs.  Imagine being able to build any gadget  you wanted by simply connecting simple, functional components together.  Now imagine being able to easily program, share and connect these gadgets in interesting ways.  In essence, we're building an open source-based platform for programmers to build not only the applications they want but the hardware to run it on.  Over the coming weeks and months I will update this blog with our latest progress.  And while I used wooden blocks at the dinner last night (easier to get thru airport security!) I will show pictures of the actual products soon.

We expect an interesting, windy road ahead.  I look forward to sharing the journey and would love to hear any/all thoughts on what we're up to.

Peter

Committing to Open Source

I'm not married, but I am aware of the traditional wedding vows, the vows that say "for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish," and on.  Now, getting married is probably the most important commitment anyone can make in their lives and, despite the statistics, I see more successful marriages than failures.  This leads me to one clear and obvious thought:  With so many people capably committing to spending their lives with another, why is everyone still using Windows?

Most people, afraid of the open source software commitment, simply use the OS that comes on their computers, which is probably Windows.  They may use Firefox or some other open source software, which is akin to dating open source, but until you boot the Ubuntu live CD and ceremonially repartition your hard drive to install Linux, you haven't committed.

Committing to OSS used to be much harder than getting married.  In the olden days it would take a village  (Linux, btw, comes with a huge village known as the OSS community) just to get the NIC working.  But that was before Ubuntu.  With Ubuntu Linux, in many ways more so than in Windows Vista, things just work.  Sure, Linux might take some getting used to in the beginning, but once you've adjusted to your new partner, you'll find that poorer and sickness just don't happen as much as they did before you got hitched.

Here's a short list of some vital open source software that you'll be using as your relationship with OSS progresses.  Most of these can actually be installed on Windows if you still just want to date:  Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird of course; OpenOffice.org, an excellent alternative to Word; VLC, a swiss-army-knife-like movie player; GIMP instead of Photoshop; Inkscape instead of Illustrator; ClamAV for your anti-virus, and many other OS tools such as gThumb, Xine, and gEdit which come with most desktop distros running Gnome.

So install it already.  Take the plunge.  Use one of the friendlier distros, like Ubuntu.  This is an excellent chance to breathe life into your old laptop.  The very latest, cutting-edge hardware might be problematic at first (for example, at the time of writing, the Thinkpad T60 seems to work better than the T61 with the latest Ubuntu release).  Also, use one of the graphical package management tools, such as Synaptic on Ubuntu, to install all your software.  Synaptic is the precursor to that wonderful bit of nano-tech pie-in-the-sky invention, the feed, where you type in some parameters and exactly what you want appears before you.

And that's what it's about -- getting exactly what you want, for free, and in the process supporting a community of minds that are rethinking everything and openly sharing these thoughts.  It feels good, not like a commitment at all really, more like liberation.  So free yourself.  Commit to open source software.

Google Maplets and Us

While browsing the usual tech blogs, I stumbled upon an article about a new addition to Google Maps – Google Maplets
(http://www.searchenginejournal.com/introducing-google-mapplets-a-mashup-of-mashups-on-google-maps/5297/).

The idea is that you can combine different Google Maps mashups that according to you make sense in a particular context and present these mashups on one map. Video presented by Google Maps product manager Thai Tran explains very well what Maplets are and can be seen here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFtfxv1JdXI).

What's interesting about the video is not the presentation of the topic – it could have been any new technology or gadget, but the last 10 seconds of it where Thai says “We can't wait to see all the great things that you'll create with maplets.” Why is this so important? One reason – us. We, human beings get bored too fast. Our minds are hungry for information and abstract thinking, we can't just take something that performs one, two or ten things and be happy with it. We need something that can do whatever we want it to do, not something that it was programmed to do. We need to imagine something and the make it.

This is the reason why Google Maps is so successful and important - anybody can create a simple mashup to express some data visually – just search mashups repository to find what you need and apply to your map. Found something that you can use but don't like how it was done? Change it! Can't find what you are looking for – create it! And from these three levels, beginner, intermediate and expert, your mind is no longer bound by some pre-programmed functions but by your imagination which we all know is infinite.

Now imagine the same phenomena in hardware world. For years hardware has been literally locked by vendors; take Sony for example, a good company but they virtually lock you into using their Memory Stick which is nothing more than a regular flash card made to Sony's standards. Why lock users into using proprietary hardware that hardly differs from the widely available CF? One reason - money. They want you to use their product, that's all. And this is just a small example of hardware monopoly by vendors.  Their final goal is for consumer to buy new products even if they are just derivatives of previous ones.

Over the years the software industry has been changed with open source software and it has been proven to be a successful model, it's about time hardware industry experienced the same open revolution.