Bug Labs was at the Austin Maker Faire this weekend, where we won a Editor’s Choice award from Make! We were really honored to be part of Maker Faire and excited to show everyone our product!

Just before Maker Faire, at our Open House, we got our breakout board module (The Von Hippel) talking to an Arduino mini! It was a collaborative effort with help from NYC Resistor, who brought us a much needed R232 to TTY chip at a moment’s notice.

The folks at Maker Faire enjoyed clipping together modules together and coming up with new module ideas we should consider for the future, such as the Jelly Bean module and a Robot Wheels module (pictured below).

Hope everyone enjoyed seeing demos of the Bug! If we took your picture with the DrawPad app, check for it on Bugnet!  View more pictures of Bug Labs at Maker Faire here!

We did it! We moved to our bigger space in SoHo and are getting settled in. We love the neighborhood – it’s super active, colorful and lots of good eats – Kelly and Ping and Cafe Habana are all right around the corner (not sure if it’s a pro or a con, but Riba saw Lindsay Lohan eating at Habana).

In the office, work is under way for our Test Kitchen – an in-house lab for getting dirty with electronics and trying out apps. More importantly, at least for the purposes of this post, we have added desks and want to fill them.

We are actively interviewing for folks that can write linux device drivers, help with marketing and outreach (like our .edu program), or help write technical documentation. You can see more details for each of these jobs at www.buglabs.net/jobs.

We are also keeping our eyes open for a controller, biz dev, and ops person with loads of experience with start-ups, CE, light manufacturing, the works.

If this is you, or someone you know, let me know at matthew[at]buglabs.net

I’m no history expert, but to draw a gross analogy, it would seem that when governments start to treat their citizens as the enemy it doesn’t take too long before a revolution erupts.

And revolutions are funny things.  They bring out the best in people with the most to gain and the absolute worst in those with everything to lose.  I truly hope the battle is never seriously joined.  It’s not hard to imagine a Patent Dark Ages, which would be a disaster for everyone, especially customers. 

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.