Seems the SEC spilled the beans (nothing we could do!).  But yes, Bug Labs has raised some fresh capital – $3M to be exact – just in time for some exciting announcements we have planned for the coming months.   I know we’ve been quiet lately on the blog front (though if you follow me on Twitter (psemme) I’m not so silent J).  The reason is much of what we’ve been working on has been for corporate and government customers who have prohibited us from discussing our joint work.  But that is about to change as we start rolling into new phases of development.  So stay tuned for some interesting updates.

Also – we announced our BUG 2.0 version earlier this year and we’re readying a number of exciting updates on that front as well.   And for those of you who don’t know, there is always interesting stuff going on over on our “other” blog” – community.buglabs.net.  Be sure to check it out.

More soon!!

The 2010 Mobile World Congress ended today.  It was the first time I attended and I leave feeling gratified for a couple reasons.  The first is best illustrated by the photo at left.  As you can see it’s an Accenture booth within the GSMA’s (organizer of the MWC event) Embedded Mobile Zone section of the conference.  What’s not obvious from the picture is that every demo in that booth is tied to a BUG.  BUGs as edge devices determining air quality, BUGs as real-time vehicle tracking devices, BUGs as mobile medical information servers, BUGs as gateways to back-end cloud computing systems (Accenture’s Mobility Operated Services) and BUGs as hardware-crypto security devices.  All the demos were not only using BUGs but were great use cases for BUGs.

The second reason I felt gratified is exemplified by the next picture, again from the Accenture booth.  If you look closely you’ll see the Pitney Bowes name on the screen.  This is another Fortune 500 company successfully using BUGs to innovate in new ways and talking about it publicly.  In this case, we’ve helped them build a BUGmodule that incorporates a new hardware-based, cryptographic engine that creates an incredibly secure foundation for applications that require it – financial, pharmaceutical, and medical are good examples.   The response they received was awesome.  And they’re happy to tell anyone that asks, their BUGs made all the difference in getting the project done and applications written quickly and cost effectively.

I met a bunch of great people here.  I made a lot of great business contacts and collected many business cards.  But at the end of it all, what I’m most proud of is that we were able to show visitors how we help our customers innovate faster and more economically in hardware.   I’m looking forward to an even more impressive show next year.  Thanks to Accenture, Pitney Bowes and the Bug Labs crew for making this event so memorable.

Looking back on 2009, the first word that comes instantly to mind is “thanks”.  I feel grateful to so many people, organizations and, plain ol’ good fortune.  From our customers and partners to our community, team members and financial backers, I feel fortunate to have worked with them all over the past year.

It was a demanding year.  We re-oriented our solutions to more of an “enterprise” focus.  We introduced the BUGbase WiFi and two new BUGmodules (BUGbee and BUGsound) and worked with our customers and partners on a bunch of challenging projects.  Our fourth quarter is looking strong and 2010 holds great promise.  We’re looking forward to making some big announcements in the first quarter so stay tuned.

I’ve included a couple pictures of the Bug Labs crew – one of them depicts how we normally behave – I’ll let you choose which one   Happy Holidays from us all to you and yours.  And here’s to a peaceful, happy and healthy New Year.

These pictures were taken last week at the University of Valparaiso – Biomedical Engineering Department, Science Faculty – in Chile.  And yes, the gadgets you see on their desks are BUGs.  As far as we know, this is the first ever college level course made available in South America.  Needless to say, we are thrilled.  You’ll be hearing more about this program in the near future.

Seeing BUGs in the classroom puts a huge smile on my face.  One of our whole reasons for existing is to make technology more accessible and easy-to-use.  Getting feedback from schools and students using BUGs to do real-world, useful things is invaluable.  And as we’re learning, this audience is great a telling us what they think.  We couldn’t be happier working with them.

The University of Valparaiso joins a growing list of top universities using the BUG platform for pedagogical and other innovative purposes.  We wholeheartedly encourage this direction and offer discounts to students and educational organizations to help spur it on.  Please let us know if you are interested in using BUGs in an educational setting and we’ll do our best to support you.  We’ve been working on programs now for over a year so we have a good feel for what’s working and what is less optimal.  We’d be happy to share it all.  Contact Alicia Gibb here for more info.

Just over two years ago when we first announced BUG, our goal was to shake up the consumer electronics landscape by releasing something new, something groundbreaking, something needed – the first modular, open source device platform.   A few months and sleepless nights later, we began shipping our first units, albeit with some changes to the original plan. We would only ship domestically to the U.S. (due to certification requirements) and without WiFi in the BUGbase (due to open source licensing issues).  Since then we have heard, loud and clear, that we needed to address these shortfalls.  And we’ve worked hard to make it happen.

Today, I am happy to say, we’re announcing the availability of BUGbase WiFi.  In addition to integrated WiFi *and* Bluetooth, BUGbase WiFi is RoHS and CE compliant, allowing us to ship BUG to the 29 countries in the European Union. Other improvements include a friction-fit docking connector and improved power management, along with a few other under-the-hood enhancements. If you currently own a BUGbase, we haven’t forgotten about you – we’ll be releasing a special BUGWiFi module in the coming weeks. As you’d expect from us here at Bug, all of our modules are compatible with either base.

We’re especially thrilled to begin shipping internationally, given the great reception we’ve received from Europe since day one. In traveling to events like FOSDEM and meeting with customers in Italy, France and other EU nations, I’ve noticed the European market has a terrific appreciation for open source approaches and community-driven innovation models.  So it’s safe to say, we expect to see many interesting new BUG-powered applications in the near future.   In addition, our team is working hard getting BUG ready for the 200 or so other countries in the world.

We will have some more exciting product and partnership news to share in the coming weeks so please stay tuned.  In the meantime, go download Dragonfly (our free SDK), play around with the environment and if you like what you see, head on over to our store!

BusinessWeek recently published an article entitiled “Accenture Goes the Tailor-Made Route” by Damian Joseph.   It describes how Accenture is working with Bug Labs to develop a number of compelling hardware + service offerings that they believe will drive significant interest from their customers and prospects.  In fact, Accenture’s Andy Zimmerman was already thinking about how this could work last year when he posted “Build your own Tridget” on his Accenture blog.  We are thrilled to be working with them and appreciate the media attention.

But one thing that gets a little lost in the excitement is the fact that Accenture is now a proponent of the Open Source Hardware (OSH) movement.   This doesn’t mean that they will suddenly create and publish a slew of new hardware designs.  That will happen gradually, and will focus on the verticals they identify in the article.  More importantly, it signals an acceptance of a nascent business model that could help point the way for future OSH projects.  It’s similar in form and spirit to Red Hat’s revenue model in that it’s based on services not product per se.

Bug Labs makes money selling hardware and complimentary services that help our customers get the most out of their BUG investment.  Where we see higher, longer term value though is in offering core services around the software stack that makes it all work together.  These services, ranging from OS level to application level certification and verification offerings, come in the form of annual subscriptions; very much like Red Hat.   This makes sense to many companies building new devices because they don’t want to be in the business of managing the unlying software infrastruture.  And if Red Hat can do $600+ M (2008) in revenue using that model, then I feel relatively safe in saying it works.  Of course, Bug Labs is not Red Hat.  We have a long way to go to earn that level of distinction, but then it’s always good to have a goal

This business model works for us because the devices we are building all require complex OSs and frameworks.  It doesn’t really work for less complex, non-network-connected approaches.   But we feel that, over time, as Moore’s Law continues to work its magic, it will become common to have sophisticated software foundations in cheaper and cheaper devices, with the attendant necessity to maintain them.

Open source hardware is a huge economic category.  It’s not as simple to grok as open source software.  As a result, finding a one-size-fits-all business model is impossible.  But as this example suggests, when companies start using OSH to address real business problems, solutions can be found.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I attended the “Soul of the New Machine” conference at the Berkeley Human Rights Center this week in Oakland.  I was there with Enrique Piraces from Human Rights Watch as a finalist in the Mobility Challenge.  We were honored to receive an Honorable mention in the contest.  Big congrats to the winners! – Guardian, Freedom Fone and Handheld Human Rights.  IDG posted an quick clip of BUG at the event here.

I want to also mention how humbling it was to sit in the audience and watch presentations by people who have devoted their lives to the cause of human rights.  From doing forensic investigations at mass grave sites, to working with war refugees in Africa, to providing comfort and aid to war stricken families in Burma, I was blown away by the devotion and compassion these brave men and women bring to their jobs.  They made me want to work hard to ensure that the technology we’re building is useful to them.  From the discussions we had I’m convinced we can help.

Congrats again to the winners and thank you Berkeley HRC for giving me the chance to meet such amazing people.

I’m at the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center “The Soul of the New Machine” conference.  We have teamed with Human Rights Watch to present a submission to their Mobility Challenge.  We were thrilled to make it to the top ten finalists and have the next two days to make our case to the judges.

I’ll let you know how we do.

When we released our v1.0 BUG platform we believed, from our initial research, that it would appeal to three market categories – early adopters/hackers, entrepreneurs/product developers and educators/students.  We guessed that the majority of orders would come from the first group – individual technologists.  This was true initially.  But quickly, our order mix tipped in favor of the enterprise, the second category.

Today over 50% of our orders come from companies, many of them big Fortune 500 corporations.   We were a little surprised by this.  We had assumed that big companies had the budgets necessary to custom build whatever hardware they needed/wanted.  We were wrong.  In talking to many of these customers it became clear that getting internal funding for new hardware projects was at least as difficult (sometimes more) as prying dollars out of a VC.   They were drawn to the BUG platform because it gave them a complete, vertically integrated hardware/software system that they could use to innovate and explore options without having to go beg for funding.  And when they did decide to make the trek upstairs to meet with the suits, they had a well tested, functional prototype to show with results to prove their case.  This story was also making sense to entrepreneurs who, like us when we started, were discovering that innovating in hardware was a looking a little more complicated than it first appeared.

What have I learned in the past 36 months?  I’m used to saying that hardware is “hard”.  And it most certainly is.  I’m reminded of it almost everyday.  But I’ve started to include a more optimistic position as well.  Having seen our customers at work, I realize now that it doesn’t have to be.  It can be made much easier, cheaper and more enjoyable.  Is our system exactly right?  No.  We still have much to learn from everyone using it to do new things.  We have to continue working hard on our platform so our users don’t have to.   We need to continue to refine our design (see picture above from our work with IDEO).  The other thing I’ve learned is that companies, organizations and even individuals are beginning to realize that devices don’t have to just come from the Big Guys.  Amazon’s Kindle is a good case in point.  This is a seismic shift.  But in order for it to really happen, the pain and suffering must be taken out of hardware prototyping, piloting and production.

As I look at the breadth of BUG-based projects going on now – in such diverse areas as health care, asset tracking, home automation, security, point-of-sale, to name a few – and in many areas around the world, I can’t help but feel that we’re on the right track.  We are still a ways from making it as easy as just snapping LEGOs together, but that vision is still the golden ring.  We’ll get there.  I look forward to telling you how we did twelve more months from now.

PS – I will devote a separate post to our experiences in the world of education.  The activity and lessons-learned there are fascinating and bode well for the future of electronics!

Three years ago we received our first round of funding from Union Square Ventures, and a small group of private investors.  While it was not the “official” start of Bug Labs, it’s as good a date as any other since I don’t really recall anything more official.  So we use the date as our birthday.  Seeing the first investment hit our bank account was a big thrill.  It meant I could now make the move from wooden block model to real, working prototype – hardware + software + web services/API.    The picture here is our first working prototype, which included an ARM9 base + Mobitex wireless modem and three modules – motion, GPS and camera.

The path from wooden blocks to shipping product is a story in itself, and I won’t spend time on it here.   It would make a great series of future posts.  But suffice to say, it was a series of tall challenges, frustrating realizations, hard work and luck (good and bad ).  Having had a twenty year career in software, I was not prepared for electronic component vendors telling me they would NOT sell me the parts I needed.  Nor the contract manufacturers turning me away because what we were doing was too strange.  Needless to say there are big differences between innovating in the world of bits vs atoms.  And, as I look back on the path we took, I see great value in it.  Mainly because we lived/live through a series of processes that are the norm for anyone looking to build an electronic device and bring it to production.  Why is that important?  First, we’ve been there and now “know that of which we speak”.  This “norm” is archaic and unnecessary.  It’s needlessly expensive, arbitrary and risky.  Second, because I started Bug Labs to help others avoid these very issues.

Later this week, I will talk about how we see the future…