Thanks to the support of the BUGCommunity, our BUG4Good project proposal has been selected as a top 10 finalist in the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center Mobile Challenge! The initiative, spearheaded by the UC Berkeley HRC and facilitated by NetSquared, is aimed at encouraging individuals and organizations to imagine uses of mobile technologies, such as cell phones, GPS devices and cameras (or a BUGbase and BUGmodules), to assist human rights supporters in collecting, analyzing and disseminating data in the field.

In short, BUG4Good is a BUG application targeted at journalists and researchers in need of a secure mobile device to gather, store and encrypt information such as audio, photos, video, sensor data and more. The challenges faced by many practitioners in the field is not so much the acquisition of this data, but ensuring that it “survives” the various challenges in areas of conflict, such as repressive authorities and the limitations of carrying several devices at once.

Bug Labs will present BUG4Good alongside nine other finalists in “The Soul of the New Machine: Human Rights, Technology, and New Media,” at UC Berkeley on May 4 and 5. There, a panel of judges will select three winners to implement their ideas. Over the next month, we look forward to working with the BUGcommunity to further flesh out this idea, and hopefully we’ll get to see BUG4Good come to fruition on May 5!

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).

Next week, I’ll be heading to San Jose for O’Reilly’s ETech 09, marking Bug Labs’ second year as both attendee and speaker. The theme of this year’s conference is “Living, Reinvented,” with several sessions focusing on the increasingly relevant issue of resource constraints and the technology and policies we will invent to solve these challenges.

On Tuesday at 11:55am, I’ll be presenting Open Source Hardware: Is It Good for Business?. I’ll be discussing how the success of FOSS has created opportunities for open source hardware to help businesses drive new product innovation.

As always, feel free to drop a line to peter[at]buglabs[dot]net if you want to meet up. Hope to see you there.