Lots of activity buzzing over here at BUG HQ over the next few weeks, as we continue our summer of workshops in the Test Kitchen. We’ll continue throughout August, with several classes aimed at beginner and intermediate-type folks interested in learning about open source, Linux, DIY, hackerism, and much much more. Each event takes place at Bug Labs’ SoHo office (598 Broadway @ Houston – near the 6, B, D, F, V, R and W), so you can also scope all the cool BUG stuff we’re working on behind the scenes.

Below’s a glimpse of what’s going on for the next two weeks. Check out each event page for more details:

Soft Circuits Class – July 22nd (tomorrow)
Learn soft circuits with conductive thread! We’ll be stitching up electrical designs in fabric. This class will be a beginner course, the core concepts of a circuit will be covered. No previous experience required.

Urban Farming Workshop – July 26th (Sunday)
Lee Mandell from Boswyck Farms will be teaching an inexpensive method for growing fruits and vegetables hydroponicallly indoors. This class will include a quick history of hydroponics along with an overview of some of the many hydroponic methods, and it’s appropriateness for different crops. Then Lee will lead the class in constructing their own water reservoirs and associated parts to maintain their own gardens at home.

Linux InstallFest – August 1st (Saturday)
Put Linux on your laptop! We will have a few distros of Linux to choose from. Be prepared by bringing your backed-up laptop. We will also have Ubuntu on a USB stick specially for your netbook. There will also be a demonstration of Poky Linux on a BUG from Bug Labs.

Hope to see you here!

This weekend, Ken, myself and Matt (aka HaveAHennessey on #buglabs) will be in Los Angeles for SCALE 7x, marking the second year Bug Labs attends the SoCal Linux Expo. After a great turnout for Ken and Angel’s session at SCaLE 6x, we’re looking forward updating the crowd in Building open source gadgets with Linux, OSGI and Web Services, taking place on Sunday between 1:30pm and 2:30pm in Concourse A.

If you’re at the show, you can also have a chance to walk away with one of two free BUGbundles! Just look for any of us (we’re wearing BUG shirts) and we’ll give you more information. UPDATE: The Win-a-BUGbundle at SCALE 7x survey is up!

See you there!

Using the VonHippel module and a simple c program compiled for the ARM, BUG can talk to the Arduino (in the picture, the USB cable and USB to serial chip on the breadboard are probably superfluous as the VonHippel has serial on it).

Editor’s Note: This was supposed to go live on Friday! Apologies. Pictures are live now.

We’ve been having a great time with the BUGbundle this week in Nairobi. Two local Java gurus are creating a demo app for the upcoming Barcamp Nairobi, which looks like it will be an amazing success. Because we couldn’t get a GPS antenna in time, we settled on creating a game using the accelerometer. But, here are some of the ideas that we came up with:

1. Pothole Mapper (we’ll likely hack this tomorrow at Barcamp once we get the antenna) How about one to figure out road conditions. One of the most stressful things about driving upcountry or within Nairobi on unfamiliar roads is potholes or unmarked bumps. If you’ve moving at high speeds and one just pops up suddenly… We can use the accelerometer to detect violent jerks, up-down-up-down movement (bumps) and/or use accelerometer+gps to detect the vehicle swinging to one side to avoid potholes, gps to figure out where vehicles slow down+jerks to evade something… then send this data to a central server for every other bug user to benefit i.e. the bug beeps wildly when a pothole or bump is coming up.
2. A shopping price comparison tool
   You go around town Nakumatt, Uchumi, Chandaria and start taking pictures of goods. These get entered into a database and you can now start monitoring where it’s cheaper to buy goods. Could even be done in an open air market with a picture and price entry of goods. Then make that info accessible on the web as a service for other people who are going shopping. Maybe you can even create shopping lists at home and retrieve them with this device, pointing to the “overall best” grocery store to buy all your goods for the lowest price.
3. Stolen Vehicle Monitor
   Point a camera to a vehicle’s number plate (like the cops do with the speed guns) – the registration number is extracted and the looked up against a database to determine if the car is registered or has been reported as stolen.
4. Extortion Cop Monitor
   Closely related to #3, use the same idea in reverse, and use the camera for facial recognition of the police. We can then create a database of “likely bribery” levels and create a Nairobi heatmap out of it as we begin to know each policeman’s favorite hangout and “prepaid fine charge”.

Okay, that last one might not be realistic, but it was a fun thought, as we had just been extorted for 2000/= ($32) the night before, on our way back from hacking for the first night. Ahh, the dichotomies of living in Africa.

Erik Hersman
www.AfriGadget.com
www.WhiteAfrican.com

It’s only a matter of time before you see headlines like this for virtually every product category – digital and physical – User-Generated Content Is Top Threat to Media and Entertainment Industry, Accenture Survey Finds

What is a database but a resting place, however temporary, for bytes
(being an arbitrary unit of measure) of data waiting to be consumed by
some application.  It is useless otherwise.  But in essence, isn’t the
real world just a database?  Everywhere is information waiting for
consumption.  Our senses are applications that consume data.  Our
bodies themselves consume data (all living things do).  Evolution
itself could be seen as versions of applications responding to changes
in the Earth’s database.  What I’m trying to say is, there must be some
interesting way to make use of this fact. 

There is data everywhere. We
are all applications.  Why don’t we build better bridges between
ourselves so that we can better share our data?  Right now, as I sit
here, the application known as Peter is consuming data. Is this info of
interest to anybody else?  Depending on one’s knowledge, care and/or
use for me personally you could probably draw concentric rings
eminating from me that demonstrate levels of interest.  But that
interest quickly tails off.  My data becomes interesting only insofar
as it describes environmental or other sensory inputs (this may not be
strictly true – my editorial input may have value – e.g. The temp is 70
but that’s unusual for this time of year). What’s the barometric
pressure at my lat/lon, etc.  Do I see the Golden Gate bridge from
where I stand? Is there a line at the Starbucks where I am sitting?  If
I go out of my way to post this data, would someone be interested in it
(Flickr is a great data point)?  If everyone posted random bits of data
what would that truly provide?  Useful information or meaningless
noise? 

Perhaps the Long Tail concept applies.  It rapidly becomes a
problem of search and categorization to make sense of it all, but maybe
Google could help.  Maybe it’s self organizing. People are drawn to the
info they’re interested in and post the same.  Who would take the time
to make inputs?  It’s a social networking question but my bet is there
could be a healthy quid pro quo.  At least from a core initial group.

There are probably good existing analogs. Spies, for instance, make it
their job to constantly input data.  The unbelievably prescient book Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson imagined individuals called Gargoyles whose business it was to ceasely collect any/all information in their immediate vicinity.  The latest incarnation is justin.tv.  If the value to the greater good
could be easily demonstrated, who knows?  There may even be an economic
model that could support it.  I become a data source, a streamer, that
people can rely on, subscribe to (RSS).  I could be a specialist on
parking spots at 76 and Amsterdam.

Perhaps even more interesting is what if I have hyper sensory inputs
from other devices that I can assimilate into the Peter app?  For
example, maybe I have a geiger counter with me that I can use to stream
radioactive data.

In this model, every person becomes a node in a
vast, distributed application running off the database known as real
life. And like other distributed apps, all nodes become more powerful
and resilient as their connectivity increases.  Through sharing, the
community grows, its resources increase, its efficiency improves.
Pretty cool.

It’s ok, they hate me too.  I can tell that marketers hate us because
they are constantly attempting to distill whatever demographic we
belong to into simple slogans, product lines, and ad campaigns.  To
them we are merely consumers: giant wallets with tiny brains and no
free will; sheep, to be herded into groups and manipulated en masse.

Case in point is Calvin Klein’s new fragrance for hip twenty-year-olds called CK in2u, which I read about in the New York Times
last week.  CK in2u is the successor to the wildly successful CK-1
which was popular in the mid 90’s.  Calvin Klein is courting a
demographic they call the technosexual.  It’s a self-serving label.
Sex is easy to wrap up and sell.  Calvin Klein has access to beautiful
models and can capitalize on the implicit promise that if you use CK
in2u, you’ll get some.
According to the New York Times, "A typical line from the press
materials for CK in2u goes like this: ‘She likes how he blogs, her
texts turn him on. It’s intense. For right
now.’"  This is fantasy and the DIY generation, the "technosexuals",
won’t buy it.

Technically
savvy twenty-somethings are just too well informed for such an obvious
and insulting ad campaign.  They can learn about Neil Postman with a
quick search of Wikipedia and corporate viral ad
campaigns are old news.  They will not have their consent manufactured by ads
featuring gaunt teenage models.  They want to think, not to be thought
for.

Mostly, though, they want control–control over the
product, the style, and the message.  This is something that we will
talk a lot about in this blog.  The technically savvy are all about
control.  It’s not about group or demographic ownership, but personal
ownership.  They blog because they want to get their voice out there.
They think they are unique.  Their community participation is bottom-up
whereas ad campaigns like that of CK in2u are top-down.

How you
open up a fragrance line, I don’t know.  I write software and in
software it’s easy (open source and public API’s for example).
However, one way to get started in both product categories is to be
less hostile towards the purchaser.  Treat them more like producers
than consumers.  Don’t distill their motivations into sex and only
sex.  Let them create their own real groups instead of joining some
make-believe idealized club.  Finally, don’t hate the people who you
want buying your products.  They know all the tricks and they can smell
the hatred a mile away.

In the February 19, 1996 issue of Newsweek Steve Wozniak is quoted as saying:

" Our first computers were born not out of greed or ego but in the revolutionary spirit of helping common people rise above the most powerful institutions"

Great stuff.  And who were those "most powerful institutions"?  They were the mainframe and mini-computers vendors of the day – IBM, HP, Digital, Prime, Wang, Data General, Control Data, etc.  Most people don’t remember those days too well because the micro-computer (or PC as it came to be known) has insinuated itself into just about every part of our lives.  And in the same way, it’s hard to imagine a world bereft of all the innovation the PC-revolution sparked.  For example, can you really remember a world without spreadsheet applications or the browser?  All of which points to something I think about all the time.  Ten years from now, what will we look back on and say "how on Earth could we have lived without…[fill in appropriate invention here]"?  Revolutionary possibilities are all around us.  There are many "powerful institutions" that are holding up innovation.  The key is finding those most vulnerable and then doing something about it.  I think the spirit Wozniak describes is alive and well and there are plenty more revolutions to be had.

Umair Haque writes for an awesome blog called Bubblegeneration.   I am a huge believer in bottom-up thinking/acting and am in violent agreement with Umair’s line of reasoning.  In essence, he believes that in order to compete effectively in today’s markets, you need to capture and leverage all the activity that’s happening with your product/service out on the edges, in the field, where users really make it their own.  Top down approaches where the uber-corporation knows best are obsolete and suffer, as a result, from what he calls "strategy decay" and he lists many examples.  Here’s a quote from a recent post called "
Core vs Edge, Pt 18849" (no permalink available – come’on Umair!) that captures what I’m talking about.

What happens at the intersection of global hypercompetition, maturity, and shifting consumer needs?

If you’re pursuing a core strategy, you consolidate.

Of
course, this is a strategy which is utterly out of sync with exactly
the economic pressures listed above in the first place. It’s a strategy
which dominates the industrial economics of scale and scope in mass
production.

What Detroit needs are edge strategies, focused
around deconstructing value chains, achieving hyperefficiency (vs
simple cost-sharing), and shifting control to customers.

Think how the most simple shift to decentralization – kaizen – revolutionized autos in the 80s/90s.

Eric von Hippel also has a web site that provides great analysis on how individual consumers can (and do) radically change the basis of competition and turn upside down our normal thinking on how products can/should come to market.  You’ll never equate DIY with home improvement and handymen ever again.

I highly recommend reading everything these guys write if you’re at all interested in how and why market power is moving inexorably into the hands of the customer.