Bug Blogger

1000 Days To Maker's Faire

My personal road to the Maker Faire has actually taken me three years, as last year at this time my son was born, and the year prior I had a 48 hour long trip to Sweden.  But this year nothing shall stop me (despite being in New York instead of San Francisco as I write this). It's an event I've been looking forward to for quite some time, and not only am I attending, I'll be participating the whole time.

My impressions of Makers Faire were formed from reading various blog posts and hearing personal tales over the years.  In my head I picture a huge field covered with bits of silicon, oddly shaped plastics, insanely huge gears and blowtorches.  Not sure why the blowtorches, but I picture many of them strewn about.  It's the place the teenager in me would've hitchhiked just to get to.  Then again, back then my computer had no case and instead  sat on a piece of foam until the one fateful morning when I wiped it out by accidentally touching the edge of my CGA card (yes, you read that right) and shocking the heck out of it.

Part of why I'm excited about Makers is that it gives those of us who look beyond the Web/computer as "the platform for innovation" a chance to share.  Living in San Francisco I feel heavily immersed in online culture, and while there's phenomenal creativity occurring in that culture, I still believe there's so much more to technology and imagination.  Last week I tried playing with Yahoo Pipes for the first time and felt it was pretty impressive that I could so easily "mash up" various feeds and services.  Experimenting with their tools was definitely dabbling in creation. 

I look forward to this weekend where I can have the chance to meet others who are taking their visions well beyond the screen+keyboard+mouse.

On the road to Donny Deutsch

CNBC's show, The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch, is featuring a series of episodes entitled The Road to CES.  Each segment brings in different companies and different experts discussing how to grow the businesses from their various stages.  Bug Labs was selected for Episode 2: Becoming a Household Name.  It was a two-day shoot, and I took a bunch of pictures for our own little "behind the scenes" blog post here.

We arrived at the CNBC studio in Jersey Tuesday morning, were brought to our green room, then into some briefings.  The week prior to the show involved quite a few discussions about the show and Bug Labs as the segment producers went to work on creating a good flow for the episode.  A discussion guide helped get all the other panelists quickly up to speed on the company so they could be comfortable talking about what we do on the air.  The other panelists included executives from Kodak, TASER, Travelocity, and some independent consultants. Each brought a different perspective, from sales to marketing to PR, etc.

While watching the group chat, led by Donny himself (who was really engaging btw), I'd say as it started Peter was at about a C, maybe C minus.  Now sure, it's a little nerve-racking being under a massively lit up stage, seeing the world through blurry glasses-free eyes (not even for posterity), and knowing you're the little guy in a roomful of people about to pounce on your startup.  But it's another thing altogether to be told in the first 5 minutes that they don't like your name, your slogan, and your appearance could 'use some work'.  We'll see how the edit comes out, but there was a moment where I'm pretty sure Peter felt like he had been sucker-punched. 

That said, Peter really did rally through the second half of the shoot.  Also, the execs from Travelocity and Kodak were extremely supportive and encouraging of the company's vision.  It was also interesting listening to us getting told we need to talk to bloggers and local media if we want to have a good story!  Anyhow, with his A-game on for the end, I'll call the overall performance a B.  Not bad for Peter's first time on nationwide TV.

Yesterday I met with a production crew at Bug Labs HQ (NY) early in the morning for them to load in 3 tons of equipment into the office.  The series of tables and workstations was transformed into a mini TV studio.  Lights, camera, legos!  (you'll see).  The team that came out was really great to work with, and Peter had some great 1-on-1 interviews over the course of the day.  I got to see a sample of the output that we could expect and the production quality was stunning.  You'll see it air tonight, but it looked like one of those "behind the athlete" stories from the NBC Olympics coverage.  Only with less tights. Here's some shots of the action:

The show airs tonight on CNBC at 10pm EST.  I think the production quality will somewhat exceed our internal videos, but hey, ya never know. Hope it gives you another good bit of insight into the world of Bug Labs!

Bug volunteers at the Pine Street Inn

On our trip to Bug+ Boston the team wanted to contribute a bit of our elbow grease to help out in the community.  We came across a great organization, called Pine Street Inn , who was willing to let us park our rented RV in their lot and teach us what goes into feeding the hungry.

I think 'volunteering' doesn't generally come across as a fun word - especially after a long night of Bug+ing.  But we had a blast.  We cracked hundreds of eggs, mixed hundreds of pounds of ground beef with our hands (in sanitary gloves, of course), delicately arranged hundreds of lasagna noodles, and wrapped hundreds of sandwiches.  All told, I would guess our small team prepared a big 1,700 meals or so.  Where we generally spend our mental efforts on issues like configuration compatibility and making sure a service tracker doesn't interfere with application code, we suddenly found ourselves focused on the very different, bigger, but simpler task of feeding and distributing thousands of meals.

We knew Pine Street Inn had a great cafeteria service for all who came in, and that they had a night outreach program to bring food to the hungry.  We didn't know Pine Street was a big, efficient, and caring powerhouse firing on all cylinders (unlike the motorhome), allowing homeless people to secure permanent housing and get on the path to self-sufficiency.   We saw a clean and welcoming emergency shelter where 700 individuals sleep every night - which includes the largest shelter and resource for women in New England.   There was medical and psychiatric services, job training, literacy programs, work programs, elder programs, and outreach teams bringing food, clothing, blankets, medical assistance, and compassion to streets every night.

I don't know how all this gets done.   Obviously, it takes tons of activity, energy, resources, passion, and compassion.  What would happen if places like Pine Street Inn didn't exist?  How can we be more involved in our communities?   I think I can speak for us all when I say that spending a few hours at Pine Street allowed a glimpse at the bigger (more real) world that we tend to forget about when we are living our lives. 

Bug+(BLANK)

One of the big themes here at Bug Labs is inclusion.  With get-togethers, this can be a bit of a tricky thing to do, since it’s not really practical to have a hundred people at a dinner discussion, and we’d have a tough time convincing the landlords to install all-plexiglass walls in the building.  But, we DO want to get out and in front of everyone/anyone interested in chatting.  So we'll be setting up events around the country that we're calling "Bug + (BLANK)".  Each one is a public, everyone's-invited activity of some sort.

BLANK will include words like “campus” – when we show up at a school and meet with students and teachers who are interested in learning more.  BLANK could be “Austin” – for finding an interesting venue in that fine town to have hands-on demonstrations and coding workshops with the Bug platform.  BLANK could even be “the mall”, but we’re having a tough time seeing how that would fit.

BLANK right now is going to be “bar+NYC” (I almost said "booze" - which I’ve always found an attention-grabbing word), and by that it means we are going to have a night at a bar in New York City, where a few people from the company will be on hand to chat about whatever topics come up, whether related to Bug, open source hardware, cool gadgets, or Call of Duty 2 strategies.  In fact, I’m of the opinion that all of those topics will come up and might even make a small bet on it.

So please join us on August 14th at Punch Restaurant (upstairs) in Manhattan for an open bar from 6-8pm.  As soon as we can logistically set up more BLANKs, you’ll hear about them here.  Got a BLANKing good suggestion?  Comment on the blog or shoot me an email, we’d be happy to BLANK with you anytime!