The NY Times has an article up today that mentions a survey done by AeA which states that NYC has the most high-tech jobs in the nation. There is the occasional online debate about the best location for a high-tech start up. From experience, I’ve always known the Big Apple was a great location for it. It’s nice to see a report that validates a critical point – there is a large and experienced talent pool here.

We have released yet another production release of the Eclipse Dragonfly SDK – #6! More information is available here and you can download it here.

Aside from fixing some defects that magically got into the code, we added some important features as well (http://bugcommunity.com/wiki/index.php/SDK_New_and_Noteworthy_Features). One of these improvement makes integration with BUGnet work to the user’s advantage in the SDK. As BUGnet grows in the number of applications that are available to download and explore there is a need to sort out and present this information, after all this what we all are looking for – relevant information, isn’t this is why we love Google? This new feature is called ‘Applications by Modules’ and the idea is that once you connect your physical BUG or launch Virtual BUG a new section in BUGnet view will show relevant applications. The list of relevant applications is dynamic – so when modules are removed from or added to the BUGbase the application list will reflect that change.

Hope you are as excited about this and other improvement as we are! If you have other ideas – we are listening.

Please come by the Eclipse DemoCamp:

June 30th, at 7:00 pm
Spitzer’s
101 Rivington St (Map)

We’ll have Dragonfly SDK demo, some Bug Lab folks will be on hand, and we’d love to see you. Also, as always, you can share your ideas at our forums (http://bugcommunity.com/forums) or drop by our IRC channel #buglabs at FreeNode.

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

We’ve spent a lot of time watching the discussions on our forums, and have seen some wonderful conversations about future BUGmodules (like here and here). We really want to capture all this data in a way to be (1) useful for our planning purposes, and (2) engaging to you, our community. It’s our feeling that while the forums here are great for in-depth conversations, Q&A, and quick polling, it’s not the ideal setup for what we want to accomplish.

Our goal is to have the voice of the community at large play a loud part in our product planning. This means we’d like to know how the ideas you are all sharing really rank with each other. One person’s all-important laser range finder module is another person’s worst. idea. ever. And the forums don’t really let you express that very easily. Enter IdeaScale.

IdeaScale is similar to the Starbucks and Dell “idea crowdsourcing” systems. Basically anyone can come to the site, and vote or comment on existing ideas, or create their own suggestion. We’ve organized the site to have 4 categories for your feedback:

1. BUGmodules – suggest a module for us to build
2. BUGbase – suggest a technology or other aspect of how you’d like to see a future BUGbase be configured
3. BUG+ – suggest a location for us to come have an event
4. BUG+EDU – suggest a school or program to do with an educational facility

Please come check out the site. At present, no registration is required for basic participation (voting), and we are hoping to create a single-signon process so your BUGnet or forums ID will work across both sites in the future. Also, please feel free to use the forums (here) to give any feedback on IdeaScale itself, how it could be improved, if there are other categories we should add, etc.

A few Bug Labs team members have gotten the ball rolling (myself included), but really this is about the community. Hoping to see you there soon, the very future of the world might just depend on it. Well, that may be a bit of a stretch.

I’m very happy to say that we’ve moved the blog to the Wordpress platform. I’ve been a big fan of WP since I first started my own blog there years ago (after a short-lived stay at the earliest version of blogger.com). In context to Bug Labs, I think it’s a very “fitting” choice. Here’s why:

1. Both are built using open source technologies and ideals
2. Both use the GPL
3. Both start good but get tremendously better with a developer community
4. Both are fully extensible, with practically no limitations to the final product (Guy Kawasaki launched a business, Truemors, purely by customizing wordpress!)
5. Both are “blank canvases” for creation, which could result in a motion-controllable slideshow playback device or… pictures of cats with bizarre captions

We’re working the kinks out of the system now, so you may see an oddity here or there (if so, please do leave a comment on this post!).

Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures (an investor in Bug Labs) just posted an interesting piece on their blog about the “weird economics of information”. Specifically, he’s talking about ideas and how entrepreneurs who share their concepts and plans with others tend to fair better than those that don’t (based on his 15 yr experience as a VC).

I believe that ideas, like genes, have certain inherent characteristics that, when sent out into the world, help determine their chances of success. No idea exists in a vacuum. Ideas are social. The worst punishment for any idea, just like a human, is solitary confinement. Every seed needs a garden. The real trick is trying to figure out, ahead of time, and in a systematic way, which memes will be successful. As Brad suggests, the best way I know how to do that is to take raw ideas out into the open and see how they fare. It can be scary but I’m always emboldened by Marshall McLuhan’s famous quote – “Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.”

Is there a Grand Unification Theory of ideas and their behavior? Unlikely. But that shouldn’t stop us from thinking hard about ways to better understand them. Richard Dawkins’ book “The Selfish Gene”, which introduced me to the concept of memetics, presents some interesting arguments. But it’s no where near the final word on the topic.