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!

I recently became involved with the New York Volunteering Meetup.  After my first meeting, I was most interested in the range of involvement of participants.  First of all, group membership is around 275, but each meeting generally brings in less than 15 folks.  Secondly, it seemed some attendees came ready to sign up to serve, others were explaining their causes, and others wanted to share what they’ve done in the past or just meet like minded people.  Engaging everyone, or harnessing their energy, towards the same causes doesn’t seem easy.

Thinking of our group here at Bug Labs …. the avid cyclists in our office all took interest in volunteering their time to serve as guides for the Transportation Alternatives bike ride – which involved waking up at the crack of dawn on a Saturday.   More recently, Heather, Bug Labs’ Queen of QA, signed on to be a buddy to an elderly New Yorker as part of the Caring Community program.   I think we are all passionate and giving, but it’s easy to see that if you want to volunteer and get involved – it’s personal.

As we plan our next Volunteer Meetup, I’m thinking about how we can create meaning for the entire  group.  How can you create involvement, or better yet, continued interest?   I mean, there are 275 people that went out of their way to join the Meetup, but don’t seem to be active.

Allison Fine, in her book Momentum, takes a good deal of time to explain the parallels of community involvement and open source programming.   I thought this ironic as Bug Labs is all about open source, and I had never related it to volunteering, or giving back to the community.  How naive!  That’s what open source is.  In the open source software community, people contribute their ideas and they can participate how they want to.  Power flows from people who self-organize.  While this may seem chaotic, when it is managed well (like all good open source projects) a diffuse network of builders all interested in creating a better whole, make amazing progress.  The Meetup forum itself, is a great example of open source collaboration.  It provides an organized format for people to create and contribute based on the very topics that are of interest to them.

Perhaps applying this philosophy down one more level, into our own Volunteer Meetup group, has some value?   Maybe we could facilitate the posting of causes, as well as make it easier for those wanting to give their time and expertise.  This could allow people to be active in just the way they want.   Have you volunteered and enjoyed it?  What made it a good or bad experience?  Would you participate more if it was more related to a specific cause or if it was easier?  What makes it easier for you?

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.

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!