The 2010 Mobile World Congress ended today.  It was the first time I attended and I leave feeling gratified for a couple reasons.  The first is best illustrated by the photo at left.  As you can see it’s an Accenture booth within the GSMA’s (organizer of the MWC event) Embedded Mobile Zone section of the conference.  What’s not obvious from the picture is that every demo in that booth is tied to a BUG.  BUGs as edge devices determining air quality, BUGs as real-time vehicle tracking devices, BUGs as mobile medical information servers, BUGs as gateways to back-end cloud computing systems (Accenture’s Mobility Operated Services) and BUGs as hardware-crypto security devices.  All the demos were not only using BUGs but were great use cases for BUGs.

The second reason I felt gratified is exemplified by the next picture, again from the Accenture booth.  If you look closely you’ll see the Pitney Bowes name on the screen.  This is another Fortune 500 company successfully using BUGs to innovate in new ways and talking about it publicly.  In this case, we’ve helped them build a BUGmodule that incorporates a new hardware-based, cryptographic engine that creates an incredibly secure foundation for applications that require it – financial, pharmaceutical, and medical are good examples.   The response they received was awesome.  And they’re happy to tell anyone that asks, their BUGs made all the difference in getting the project done and applications written quickly and cost effectively.

I met a bunch of great people here.  I made a lot of great business contacts and collected many business cards.  But at the end of it all, what I’m most proud of is that we were able to show visitors how we help our customers innovate faster and more economically in hardware.   I’m looking forward to an even more impressive show next year.  Thanks to Accenture, Pitney Bowes and the Bug Labs crew for making this event so memorable.

Great post from Chris over at Engadget, who managed to catch up with Peter at the MWC Accenture Developer Bar in Barcelona. An excerpt is below and you can read the full article here:

“We sat down with CEO Peter Semmelhack today on the hustling, bustling floor of MWC to get the straight dope on what makes the BUGbase 2.0 a superior product. First of all, you can’t overlook the fact that they’ve moved to a Cortex A8-based OMAP3530, an appreciable boost from the ARM11 core it replaces, but it turns out there are a whole bunch of subtler changes too, like the inclusion of on-board audio out (pictured above toward the left of the base), HD video out capability through a module, and a second microSD slot…”

We’re really excited here about yesterday’s announcement of Bug 2.0. As it turns out, we are far from the only ones. Check out the great coverage below:

• Engadget
• Bloomberg
• CrunchGear
• ZDNet
• Gizmodo
• BusinessWeek
• WebProNews
• Techstartups
• BNet
• PSFK
• Geek.com
• SmallBizLabs
• Slashgear

We’ll keep you updated with all the great stuff going on in Barcelona soon!

Today’s a big day for the BUG team. We are reporting to you from the 2010 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain with some really exciting news and some really incredible demos (be sure to check back for updates as they come in). If you have not yet heard the big news, we announced this morning a new addition to the BUG family of products – BUG 2.0. The second generation BUG will be a big leap forward for our little rapid prototyping device. We will be releasing plenty of details in the coming months on all of the planned enhancements, but right now all we can tell you is that the new BUG will have support for Android development and will be based on the Texas Instruments OMAP3 platform, allowing for full BeagleBoard compatibility. We are always looking to bring the open hardware movement to larger and larger communities of developers, and BUG 2.0 will meet that goal in a very big way. If you would like more info, be sure to check out the full press release HERE.

We will have many more updates coming out of Barcelona from Monday to Thursday. Be sure to check back often for the latest from Peter, the BUG team, and some of the incredible businesses we are working with on the ground here at the conference.