Over the past few weeks, we here at Bug Labs have been preparing for JavaOne 2009, the world’s annual gathering of Java developers taking place this week in San Francisco. JavaOne makes for a perfect venue to showcase BUG – a modular device development platform that anyone with Java chops can use to bring their ideas to life. And with over 6.5 million Java developers worldwide, that’s a lot of possibilities.

We have a series of announcements lined up for the show which will shine some light on what we’ve been up to. But you can track all the updates via this blog and our Twitter stream. And if you’re in San Francisco this week, stop by the Bug Labs booth (#708) or the Java Utopia area to say hey, or attend our Birds of a Feather session on Thursday at 8:30 in the Esplanade, rooms 307-310. Just look for anyone in the red or white BUG shirts.

Bug Labs Open House (add to calendar)
Wednesday April 29
6:00pm – 9:00pm

598 Broadway (@ Houston) (map)
4th Floor
New York, NY 10012

Hope to see you there!

Held in an old power plant on the Aarhus harbor (see photo above), the weekend brought together a fascinating cross section of artists, writers, geeks, business folks and government-types – all of them focused on promoting really exciting future-based technology. The BUG presentation was well-received and I had some great discussions afterward – I was still gabbing with attendees at 2AM over beers and at local concerts! In the end, that’s why I attend these events – the people and the endless, engaging flow of ideas.

The conference organizers did a superb job – everything ran like a Swiss Danish watch – and I’m sure they could make good money just consulting others on how to run a great event. I expect the presentations to be made available on their site and I would recommend checking them all out. Already looking forward to next year!

Ken and I had a great time at FOSDEM in February, and I’m excited to return to Europe and present BUG in the company of a distinguished roster of visionaries and thought-leaders. If you’re attending NEXT this year, I’ll be presenting the potential of customizable hardware in my MAKE YOUR OWN! talk on Friday at 1:40pm local time.

Expect a blog post or two from me at the show, in addition to a few tweets and photos throughout. And if there are any Danish fans of BUG that want to sync up, let me know by e-mailing peter [a] buglabs [d] net!

In a few hours, Bug Labs’ very own Peter and Ken will cross the Atlantic as they head to Brussels for FOSDEM ‘09, the Free and Open Source Software Development European Meeting. This is our first time at the event, but by no means does that mean we’ll be sitting back and drinking glass after glass of tasty Belgian beer all weekend. Ken is scheduled to give not just one, but two, presentations: one, a lightning talk on “An Introduction to BUG,” and the other, an hour-long session on “Hacking with Modular Hardware.”

So if you’re in Brussels, swing by the BUG sessions to say ‘hey,’ and you’ll have a chance to take home one of several BUGbundles we’re giving away at the event. And stop by the Delirium Cafe on Friday to tip a few jars with the guys during Beer Distribution 3.1. Hope to see you there!

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

Let us know by leaving a comment below, sending a self addressed stamped envelope, or pinging us on Twitter or Jaiku. If we get enough responses by this Thursday morning, we’ll pick a place and time and let you know by later this week.

Regardless, if you see us among the rabble, feel free to stop us and say hey.

Our booth is #IP256, in the Innovations Pavilion at the Sands Expo Center inside the Venetian Hotel in the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, etc… If you are using the official CES planner, here’s a link, if not, here’s a picture of the map/show floor:

We’ll be there from mornin’ til’ evenin’ all next week, so please drop by and say hello (first-time CES attendees might want to read my tips for the show).  Also, for media who are attending CES, we’ll be at table #96 during the Showstoppers event Monday night, and we’ll be dropping by the BlogHaus (we think on Tuesday) to say hi to the bloggers there. 

If you can’t make it, hopefully you’ll get to read about it and see pix (we’ll take a bunch, as always) while we’re there (or you can follow us, 140 characters at a time, from Twitter or Jaiku). We’ll also be on the Donny Deutsch show one more time, reviewing our progress on the road to CES.

Oh yeah, expect lots of updates from us tomorrow!

What’s going here? If you take a look at all the battery charging accessories your consumer electronic devices require, they probably take up as much space/weight as the devices themselves, yet they all perform the exact same function: converting AC current to DC. Why do we need all these things? Can’t we just have one that works with everything? If we can standardize on one wall socket type, why not on one AC/DC converter type? Well, the problem seems to be (boringly) hard. Different devices have different power needs. DC is not an efficient way of moving energy. But these problems can be solved.

Of course, none of this is really much of an issue until you need to take a trip. Then your bag is jammed full of these little buggers. They are typically heavy, and poorly designed. They don’t fold up, and they don’t stack. But an added feature of many wall warts is that the consume power even when they don’t necessarily need to. What?! It turns out that manufacturers go with the lowest possible cost adapters they can get. Those adapters are not designed with energy efficiency in mind. This is a big problem, and the EPA has taken notice and created an ENERGY STAR certification program.

So what are some answers? There are alot of good ideas out there: A new DC power standard for the home and office. A standard connector with a physical energy descriptor that could be read by a universal DC power provider. Apple’s magnetic connector is great, and they do a good job of making the wall warts egronomic and easy to pack.

Getting back to my backpack, why doesn’t the iPod need a charger? All I need is that firewire cable and I hook into my mac and it charges through the data cable. Clever. Why can’t my other units do that? They all have data cables…

I think the problem can be taken in steps. The first step, as Brad Templeton suggests, is that for devices that connect to computers via USB, use that juice. Please. Even if it takes longer to charge, I’d prefer that over a dead device. The second step is connector and power standardization. A manufacturer has no incentive to do this, at least not in an open way. Perhaps the EPA can come up with something. Other countries (Chinese and South Korea) have implemented similiar standards. Such a standard would be good for consumers (less wasted power, fewer devices) and good for manufacturers (less to build, less to ship). Once a standard connector and voltage standard is in place, airports, resturants, cafes, hotels, and the like could provide power as additional convienence for customers.

Or, I could just get an iPhone and be done with it.