Discussions regarding how to make money with an open source business model pop up with increasing regularity and that’s good because it’s a topic that needs debate.  But I would bet that we’re going to see more and more articles like this one, that basically start to point out the real costs of being a "closed source" business model.  If your users are sophisticated enough to hack your product to get what they’re looking for, is it more economic to just design it so they can get it easily or to continually try to fend them off with counter measures?  I personally think the answer is obvious.  Just look at the state of the music biz.  Users will get what they want one way or another.  The advantages of being open outweigh the costs of being closed.

UPDATE – another good article.

Attention gadget-developing community of Boston.  We are comin’ to town!  Tuesday, October 9th, team Bug Labs is hosting drinks at Middlesex Lounge in Cambridge, from 6-9pm.  No RSVPs required (although you are welcome to comment!), no special guest list, no hidden links.  All are welcome, and we look forward to seeing you there.

Whilst we arest therest, Peter Semmelhack is giving a presentation during the 2007 World Conference on Mass Customization and Personalization.  His talk occurs during the session "4.5  Enabling Open Innovation & Customization in Consumer Electronics" and is entitled "Exploring the Long Tail of Devices: How an open web services and
hardware platform can enable the creation of truly personal consumer
electronics".  It occurs at 3:50pm on Tuesday the 9th, in room 32-123.  This is my first time at the MCPC and it looks like a really interesting event.  If you are in the Boston area (say, to attend BUG+Boston?), you might want to register and attend the show!

In addition to the MCPC presentation, Peter was just selected to participate in the Defrag conference in Denver this November.  Peter will speak on "Defragging Gadgets: Community-driven Electronics" at 2pm on Monday, November 5th.  Also a new show for me, but checking out the agenda puts this squarely on the "way more interesting than most" list of conferences!  Anyone in the Denver area up for a BUG+ in a couple of months?  Let us know by commenting here…

As we like to emphasize here at Bug Labs, community is the foundation of the BUG experience, and the term "community electronics" is part of our grand vision in creating a new standard for personal devices. It’s with you­ the developer, the hobbyist, the user­ for whom we rely on to use the BUG platform and create innovative devices and applications. And after receiving hundreds of requests to participate in the BUG+Beta program, we’re excited to see so many people interested in sharing in this experience.

That said, Peter has been selected as a potential speaker at the 2008 South By Southwest Interactive Festival (or SXSW, if you prefer) to wax poetic on "Hardware Mashups: Introducing the Long Tail of Gadgets." If you are unfamiliar with SXSW, it’s a collective of music, film, technology and interactive events spanning several days in March in Austin, Texas. For the tech crowd, it¹s a gathering of innovators and influencers, introducing new, exciting ideas and services via a series of interactive sessions. Sounds like a great fit for Bug Labs!

In an excellent "twist", the community-at-large is responsible for voting in speakers via the SXSW Interactive PanelPicker. So far, well over 700 panel ideas (wow) have been submitted, ranging from the philosophical (The Web That Wasn’t) to the technical (God (and Design) is in the Detail) to the… uh… hmm… other? (Pink Ghetto Blasters: Destigmatizing Sex via Online Community Building).

So we’re relying on you, the community, to help send Peter to Austin (don’t worry, we’ll pick up the tab for the airfare) and share his thoughts on community, electronics, and community electronics!

If you like what you’ve heard so far, head on over to PanelPicker, sign up and vote, and help spread the word. We look forward to seeing you in Austin, Texas (where we’ll pre-commit to a BUG+Austin)! Registration takes about 45 seconds, and voting ends this Friday September 21.

We took a big step forward today.  We selected our first wave of 50 beta testers and I couldn’t be more excited.  Thanks(!) to everyone for taking the time to apply for a slot.  We were blown away by the quality of the submissions.  If you were not chosen for this wave please don’t lose patience.  The beta test program will continue to grow each month.  So just because you were not selected this time does not mean there isn’t room for you.   We just need to do it in stages.

Personally, this is a moment I’ve anticipated now for over a year.  It’s enormously gratifying to see all the hard work finally reaching a stage where we can share it and get your insights  We take this beta program very seriously.  Our beta testers are really an extension of our development team and their input is invaluable.   As such, the whole company (including me) will be actively involved and interested in the discussions.

Congratulations to the first wave of testers.  We’re really looking forward to getting to know you, hearing your feedback, and building this vision of community electronics together.

While proofreading and adding to a technical paper earlier today, I was struck by a general difference between human language and computer language: works based on human languages are much easier to critique and modify than machine languages.  In software, writing something from scratch is usually easier and more effective than modifying some other software written by someone else for your purpose.  (An exception would be frameworks, which exist only to be extended and modified.  Also Vista.)  Why is this the case?  What makes human languages so much easier to modify than machine languages?  Part of the answer I think lies in Context.  (I love context.  I often find myself stumbling around in the context of Context.)  In human language, it’s simple and often pleasurable to let someone else wrap you in context, and once there, modification and extension of that work can be natural and straightforward.  In machine language, just getting to that state of contextualization is at best painful and usually impossible.  Machine languages do not lend themselves to climbing from the page or screen into your head like a good book does.  And without being immersed in the context of a system, the work required to modify and extend becomes haphazard and risky.  You start wanting things like contracts, components, and test suites.
Can I please just have a skulljack instead?  These JUnits are getting
tedious.  It seems that latter day computer languages assume that this greater contextualization of a digital system is impossible, and gains are made by reducing the risks to minimal or partial contextualization.  In fact, some technologies even classify this minimizing of contextualization as a feature. Where would we be in software today if we’d taken the path of focusing on tools and techniques to let the human contextualize more or all of a program, rather than assuming they can’t and hope for the best?   blonde, brunette, red-head…

A few of us at Bug Labs are avid cyclists.  We brave the traffic every morning and every evening as we commute to and from work.  To us, biking in this city is a joy.  We wanted to share our joy and experience with other riders and potential commuters and so we signed up to be marshals for this year’s NYC Century Bike Tour.

Yesterday Ken, Melinda, Matt, his wife Cindy, their one year old son, and I made our way up to the top of Central Park at 7:30 in the morning and rode with groups of riders across New York.  We were given red vests and our job was to lead groups of people along the ride and to help anyone who was having trouble.  Most of the time moral support was all we needed to give.  I spoke to a few people during the ride who were on their bikes for the first time in years, or had never been to Brooklyn before, or had never ridden on the streets of Manhattan.

Transportation is an important issue to all Americans.  Our "car culture" is fueled, from a historical perspective, by frontierism and a sense of rugged individualism, and, from a contemporary perspective, by cheap oil, war, the automobile lobby, and habit. In a dense city like New York, transportation is an especially important issue.  Cars are not sustainable or practical, and, in fact, most city dwellers don’t use cars on a daily basis.  We are forced to find alternative forms of transportation.

There is an advocacy group here in the city that strives to raise awareness and change the laws to undo the destructive force of a culture dependent on automobiles.  The organization is suitably named Transportation Alternatives.  Transportation Alternatives runs countless events every year, but one of the city’s favorites is the annual NYC Century Bike Tour.  This bike tour takes place every September and offers a number of rides for people of all abilities. It gives both out-of-towners and New Yorkers a chance to see the city in the best way many of us can imagine–from a bike.  The annual ride also creates awareness among those who don’t participate.  Taxi drivers, delivery people, and pedestrians out for a Sunday morning stroll all notice the seemingly endless stream of happy faces rolling by on bikes the day of the ride.

At one point in the ride I was at an intersection in Brooklyn, one very near where I live, with a group of riders.  When the light turned green I started heading straight, taking the route I normally take on my commute as if I was on auto-pilot.  A couple of riders behind me were confused.  On the turn-sheet, it indicated that I should have taken a left.  We went back to the turn to stay with the turn-sheet, but the moment reminded me that I was sharing something familiar with people for whom it was brand new.  Taking a short-cut was not the point.  Showing this group how awesome Brooklyn is from a bike was the point.  Helping out on the ride was perhaps a tiny, localized step, but it was also part of the greater strides Transportation Alternatives makes with events like the NYC Century Bike Tour.

Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures (an investor in Bug Labs) has a great post on their blog about BUG and the device he would like to build.  It’s interesting because it provides the narrative behind his motivations for wanting it.  Stories are a great way to understand how/why new gadgets get invented.

This is a big step in the right direction.  The whole copyright and patent process in this country is in dire need of revision.  But the process is so daunting that I was beginning to lose hope that we had the ability to address it.  This case, described very well by Prof. Larry Lessig here, is a great confidence booster.  Lessig’s awesome book, Free Culture, is a good primer on the whole subject too.  It’s a shame the copyright issue is wrapped up in such legalese.  I’m convinced that if more people just understood the basic freedoms that were at stake we’d all be making much more noise about it.

Last year, Eric Chan, our lead designer, came up with this diagram (left) to help visualize what the market opportunity was for Bug Labs.  We loved it so much it’s now part of almost any discussion we have on the topic.  While I didn’t realize it at the time, it’s really a reinterpretation of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail graph.  But being New Yorkers we were more comfortable with it looking like a pizza.

What does it depict?  What sort of things are actually in that shaded area?  Basically, it’s everything you can’t buy in your neighborhood BestBuy, Circuit City or Radio Shack.  It’s all the devices that have never been built because the potential market can not be measured in hundreds of thousands or millions.  It’s all the devices that currently cost thousands of dollars because their target market is so small (or choice is limited, e.g. medical, education, government).  It’s all the devices that are over-priced because they’re built on closed, proprietary architectures.  In essence, it’s pure potential.

I admit that this diagram is (shamelessly) self-serving in that it equates ALL the shaded area to BUG but of course that’s not the case.  All sorts of companies, organizations and individuals will (and do) live in that area.  The whole DIY movement resides there and we are proud to consider ourselves part of it.  And it’s growing!  Eric Von Hippel, whose book "Democratizing Innovation", which I can’t recommend highly enough, gives a terrific interview on the BBC where he discusses his thoughts on it all.

Home Depot became what it is now ($81 billion in sales – yes, that’s billions) by actually living its tag line "You can do it.  We can help", everyday.  In essence, HD is a platform for home improvement.  And platforms are great because they have such huge leverage.  People can use them to do all sorts of things.  I love the HD tag line (and their stores) because it represents what I believe is an attitude that is filtering into all walks of life.  DIY, which for many years has been caged in what feels like an old-fashioned, homespun aura, is reemerging as a true democratic movement.  Power to the people is sounding tres chic.