A couple weeks ago at JavaOne 2009, we announced the upcoming availability of BUGbee, our 802.15.4 low-power radio module. Today, we’re excited to announce that you can now purchase BUGbee from our store for $79 and get it delivered to you by next week.

What can you do with BUGbee, you ask? Well, BUGbee is a low-power, low-bandwidth radio module. It operates using the 802.15.4 protocol, which transmits data in smaller packets than 802.11 devices. BUGbee also offers the same, if not greater, transmission range of wi-fi (theoretically up to 1,200 meters). And since it consumes far less power than wi-fi, it’s perfect for battery-powered sensor applications.

Furthermore, as over 64,000 devices can reside on the same BUGbee grid (unlike 32 with wi-fi), you can build larger-scale intelligent grid networks with BUGbee. This makes it suitable for home automation, energy monitoring, industrial machine-to-machine (M2M), supply-chain logistics and more.

At JavaOne, we demonstrated BUGbeeChat, a peer-to-peer IM client that lets two BUGs chat with each other without a 802.11 wi-fi connection. We also have several applications currently in development by our customers that we look forward to sharing with you soon. For now, hop into the forums or IRC (#buglabs on irc.freenode.net) and let us know what you plan on building with your BUGbee.

On Monday, we were lucky to have the NY Java Meetup host their monthly meeting here at Bug Labs HQ. In addition to eating lots of pizza and drinking lots of beer (and playing lots of COD2 afterward), we managed to actually talk a thing or two about Java. Our friend Timothy Fagan gave a great detailed review of JavaOne 2009 (check out some of the slides here), and we tried a few Java Puzzlers from one of the sessions presented at the show. We even gave away a few cool door prizes, like a copy of IntelliJ.

The BUG team got plenty of inquiries from the attendees, and it seems like more and more software folks want to be hardware folks these days. That got us thinking of starting our very own meetup very soon, kinda like a BUG User Group (B.U.G. anyone?). Anyway, it was a great time and we hope to have the Java Meetup back again very soon.

This week, we’re at JavaOne 2009 in San Francisco, showcasing some of our new enterprise solutions. Yesterday, we unveiled some exciting news that we’d like to share with you here.

To date, we’ve seen some great applications built by individual developers, and BUG has proved to be a great platform for building customized devices for personal needs. At JavaOne, we’re showing our more “serious” side, demonstrating several new enterprise-focused applications and modules, some by our partners and customers, including:

• a mobile services platform for next generation field applications, from fleet management (e.g. vehicle tracking, in-car telemetry) to telemedicine (e.g. remote health monitoring),
• a messaging and middleware application developed by Antenna Software,
• a document management and analysis platform developed by startup LivingAnalytics,
• BUGnose (pictured above next to BUGview), an upcoming olfactory sensor module, and the first 3rd party BUGmodule, developed by JLM Innovation of Germany,
• BUGbee, our 802.15.4 low-power radio for PANs and sensor networks, will be available in our online store within the next two weeks.

Also, we will be shipping internationally by the end of Q3′09 to select European and Asian countries, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and more, with a full list to be announced within the next month.

Finally, we’re excited to announce that we’re a partner in Axeda’s Smartlink Platform of wireless devices, as one of the preferred edge devices to power the company’s intelligent asset management solutions. More details of this announcement can be found here.

This is just the first wave of news we have for our enterprise solutions, and we have more planned over the coming weeks. And we’ll also have more details of the above applications posted soon over in BUGcommunity, but for more details of yesterday’s news, check out the release here.

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.