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…

Last week, Mike Riley at Dr. Dobb’s posted an update on BUG, in which he reviews BUG 1.4 and the BUGvonHippel and BUGsound modules. Overall, a very good piece offering a thorough and objective look at our latest releases, with a few nice photos to boot! This follows Dr. Dobb’s original review of BUG from last August.

Head on over to Dr. Dobbs and take a look, and check out some of our other press while you’re at it!

Last week, Brian C. posted details to BUGcommunity about BUG R1.4, the new production build of the BUG kernel and filesystem. After what seemed like an eternity to most of us here at BUG HQ, R1.4 is the most significant build to date, addressing many of the functionality issues BUG users have been facing since 1.0. In addition to providing software support for BUGsound, R1.4 contains several major and minor changes to APIs for existing BUGmodules, as well as U-boot and ipkg support.

The kernel and FS are available for download now, as is a new build of Dragonfly, the BUG SDK, v1.2.8.1, which is required for the upgrade.

If you have any questions, feel free to let us know via e-mail (support [a] buglabs [d] net) or on IRC (#buglabs on freenode).

It’s been a long time coming but we’re thrilled to announce the arrival of the BUGvonHippel module. Named after MIT professor Eric von Hippel (because he thought of it!) and author of “Democratizing Innovation”, one of our favorite books, the module allows you to connect just about anything electronic to the BUG. In essence, it’s a way to create your own module. It was Eric’s belief that you can’t really call yourself an open platform for innovation unless you truly let people innovate on their own. We hope this module helps us continue to fulfill that promise.

Check out the video above with Alicia Gibb, Bug’s head Gadget Wrangler, and Eric talking in his office at MIT.

The BUGvonHippel module is available right now in the Bug Labs store for $79. If you’ve been waiting for a good way to hook up your car, microwave oven, personal area radar or left-handed wingnut to your BUG now’s your chance! And if you do, please visit us at our community site and let us know!

As promised, I would like to give you an update on our manufacturing progress. In my last post, I let you know that our previous contract manufacturer had run into credit problems which forced us to quickly find a new production partner. Yes, it was painful, but I’m happy to say we’ve made great progress.

The picture below shows the new facilities. And the handsome guy at the left, Kevin Cahill, has been doing an awesome job in making it all happen. I mentioned a four week postponement and it looks like we are tracking to that pretty well. Our goal is to resume shipments the first week of November. I will keep you in the loop as we make progress towards that goal.

Please let me know if you have any questions – peter [a] buglabs dot net. Thanks!

Over the past couple of months I’ve been reading with great interest all the postings on how the current economic crisis can/can’t, will/won’t effect the start up world. Having lived through the 2001 – 2003 nuclear winter, I feel strongly that no one will be spared, irrespective of how big your company is.

This reality scored a direct hit last week when we got a call from the CEO of our contract manufacturer (domestic, not overseas). Their credit lines were pulled by their bank (one of the big ones) because they had violated some terms of their loan agreement. While in the past, this type of thing was met with a “let’s work it out” type of attitude from the bank, instead given the credit crisis, that attitude disappeared. Consequently, they closed the facility where our product was being built.

As a result, we needed to immediately pull all our inventory, test fixtures, and packaging out of their facilities. To say the timing was terrible is a grave understatement. Our products were literally on their assembly lines, on schedule for our early October shipping deadlines.

It’s hard to describe the feelings this sudden crisis created. First there was the enormous frustration of having to cope with another manufacturing delay. Closely coupled was the harsh realization we now risked losing the confidence of our loyal customers that we’d ever get these units out the door. To that end, let me describe what we’ve done and are doing to make sure this setback has minimal impact.

Our product team, having gone through the process of spinning up a new contract manufacturer (CM) not too long ago, is well prepared to make this next move happen quickly and smoothly. We have already identified, contracted and engaged a new CM who has committed to hitting the ground running. This CM is a family run business, a bit smaller than the one we’d been using, is debt-free with strong financials. While of course there are no guarantees, I feel strongly that they are the right fit for the job we need to get done right away. They know the stress we’re under and have signed up to the task of helping us move rapidly.

This switch will create a four week delay in our shipping schedule. Not good news, but hopefully not terminally bad either. Many of you who are reading this have been waiting for a long time for your BUGs and I can only say everyone here at Bug Labs is working like mad to get them to you. We all deeply appreciate your patience. We will get through this setback.

I will continue to blog about our progress to make sure you stay informed. If you have any questions, concerns, frustrations or suggestions I would love to hear from you. You can email me at peter (a) buglabs dot net.

As CNET reported last night we’re proud to say that Court Square Ventures has led a third round of funding for Bug Labs, and our prior investors (which include Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital) participated as well. We don’t typically like to make a lot of hoopla about fundraising or related efforts, but we thought an update was in order.

This is exciting news for us, as this financing lets us execute upon our business plan to expand and add resources to the company. As you may have noticed on our blog recently we’ve ramped up our manufacturing to handle a larger volume of orders, and we’re also staffing up the team. We’re currently planning our international sales efforts, which we hope to have in place by the end of the year. We’ll also use the money to enhance our marketing efforts, with numerous programs to get the word out to many more programmers, coders, developers, hackers, tinkerers, inventors, makers, entrepreneurs, and hackers (you said hackers twice! we know, we like hackers).

Thanks go out to our investors for their continued support!
-Team Bug

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 can’t imagine we have all that many people reading this blog who aren’t aware, but just in case… LinuxWorld 2008 begins tomorrow (Tuesday) at the Moscone Center in San Francisco!

This is our first year exhibiting at the show, and we’re located in the Linux Garage area (as you walk in to the Exhibit Hall, go straight until the back area, then take a right – you can’t miss it).  Our booth is #1234, and, much like CES, it’s a “pod” so we’re going to make the most of our space.

We walked by the area this afternoon, but the showfloor was still quite the mess, and they haven’t finished setting up our area.  Not a big deal for us, since we’re bringing the most important assets: our team and our BUGs.  Please stop by and say hi to Angel, Brian, and Ken (from NYC), and I’ll be there with Andrew (from SF).  As always, during any downtime we’ll be writing new applications and building some gadgets.  If you want to hack around with us, just bring a laptop and maybe an extra Red Bull if you have one.

For the past few months we’ve had continuous delays in producing sufficient units to meet/exceed demand. From the emails we’ve received we know this is frustrating to our current (and likely future) customers, and it’s mighty frustrating to us as well. This update has been in the works for a few months, but we wanted to make sure we had a good handle on all the issues before we just kept saying “one more delay” (if you’ve ever seen The Money Pit, it’s reminiscent of the contractor saying “about two weeks”).

Some brief backstory is important. As a small developer of electronic hardware, one of the biggest bets you make is your choice of contract manufacturer (CM). We had initially chosen a well-respected, domestic CM and everything was lined up to go. To make a long story short, they left us at the altar. I’m still not sure why, other than the fact that what we’re doing is completely new and did not fit neatly into any of their existing product categories. So we scrambled to find another one. Luckily we came up with a good alternative quickly. But we then had to start the long process of getting them geared up for production. This took longer than it should but we got it done.

As the new CM got up to speed, a few other minor setbacks occurred. We had quality issues with some of the plastic molds and the snap-on feature for our modules was not working as advertised. Any of these issue by themselves would not have added up to much of a delay but when added together they complicated the delivery schedule. By the time we cleared these up, we had already missed our original target ship date (w (more…)