Bug Labs is excited to announce the Open Hardware Summit in conjunction with MAKE, and Creative Commons, and a little help from our friends at NYSCI, littleBits and Eyebeam!

The Open Hardware Summit will be a venue to present, promote and discuss the undergoing open source hardware movement. The summit will focus on hardware as a system, involving conversations on software, manufacturing, legal, and other factors surrounding open source hardware. It is taking place on September 23rd, at the New York Hall of Science – right before Maker Faire.

Open source hardware has a growing community around it – enough that we figured would fill a moderately-sized lecture hall. Together we are revolutionizing the method, processes and means in which electronics are made, and a lot of us have been doing this for several years now.  Mentoring and sharing are always an important piece to any open source project, so our goal is to have an entire day filled with mentoring and sharing of knowledge about the open hardware industry, how we aim to license open source hardware, and why it is an important charge to lead.

For more information on the Summit, please visit openharewaresummit.org.

I’d like to thank Ayah Bdeir for co-chairing the event with me, we both hope to see you there!

Seems the SEC spilled the beans (nothing we could do!).  But yes, Bug Labs has raised some fresh capital – $3M to be exact – just in time for some exciting announcements we have planned for the coming months.   I know we’ve been quiet lately on the blog front (though if you follow me on Twitter (psemme) I’m not so silent J).  The reason is much of what we’ve been working on has been for corporate and government customers who have prohibited us from discussing our joint work.  But that is about to change as we start rolling into new phases of development.  So stay tuned for some interesting updates.

Also – we announced our BUG 2.0 version earlier this year and we’re readying a number of exciting updates on that front as well.   And for those of you who don’t know, there is always interesting stuff going on over on our “other” blog” – community.buglabs.net.  Be sure to check it out.

More soon!!

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.

Looking back on 2009, the first word that comes instantly to mind is “thanks”.  I feel grateful to so many people, organizations and, plain ol’ good fortune.  From our customers and partners to our community, team members and financial backers, I feel fortunate to have worked with them all over the past year.

It was a demanding year.  We re-oriented our solutions to more of an “enterprise” focus.  We introduced the BUGbase WiFi and two new BUGmodules (BUGbee and BUGsound) and worked with our customers and partners on a bunch of challenging projects.  Our fourth quarter is looking strong and 2010 holds great promise.  We’re looking forward to making some big announcements in the first quarter so stay tuned.

I’ve included a couple pictures of the Bug Labs crew – one of them depicts how we normally behave – I’ll let you choose which one   Happy Holidays from us all to you and yours.  And here’s to a peaceful, happy and healthy New Year.

These pictures were taken last week at the University of Valparaiso – Biomedical Engineering Department, Science Faculty – in Chile.  And yes, the gadgets you see on their desks are BUGs.  As far as we know, this is the first ever college level course made available in South America.  Needless to say, we are thrilled.  You’ll be hearing more about this program in the near future.

Seeing BUGs in the classroom puts a huge smile on my face.  One of our whole reasons for existing is to make technology more accessible and easy-to-use.  Getting feedback from schools and students using BUGs to do real-world, useful things is invaluable.  And as we’re learning, this audience is great a telling us what they think.  We couldn’t be happier working with them.

The University of Valparaiso joins a growing list of top universities using the BUG platform for pedagogical and other innovative purposes.  We wholeheartedly encourage this direction and offer discounts to students and educational organizations to help spur it on.  Please let us know if you are interested in using BUGs in an educational setting and we’ll do our best to support you.  We’ve been working on programs now for over a year so we have a good feel for what’s working and what is less optimal.  We’d be happy to share it all.  Contact Alicia Gibb here for more info.

Just over two years ago when we first announced BUG, our goal was to shake up the consumer electronics landscape by releasing something new, something groundbreaking, something needed – the first modular, open source device platform.   A few months and sleepless nights later, we began shipping our first units, albeit with some changes to the original plan. We would only ship domestically to the U.S. (due to certification requirements) and without WiFi in the BUGbase (due to open source licensing issues).  Since then we have heard, loud and clear, that we needed to address these shortfalls.  And we’ve worked hard to make it happen.

Today, I am happy to say, we’re announcing the availability of BUGbase WiFi.  In addition to integrated WiFi *and* Bluetooth, BUGbase WiFi is RoHS and CE compliant, allowing us to ship BUG to the 29 countries in the European Union. Other improvements include a friction-fit docking connector and improved power management, along with a few other under-the-hood enhancements. If you currently own a BUGbase, we haven’t forgotten about you – we’ll be releasing a special BUGWiFi module in the coming weeks. As you’d expect from us here at Bug, all of our modules are compatible with either base.

We’re especially thrilled to begin shipping internationally, given the great reception we’ve received from Europe since day one. In traveling to events like FOSDEM and meeting with customers in Italy, France and other EU nations, I’ve noticed the European market has a terrific appreciation for open source approaches and community-driven innovation models.  So it’s safe to say, we expect to see many interesting new BUG-powered applications in the near future.   In addition, our team is working hard getting BUG ready for the 200 or so other countries in the world.

We will have some more exciting product and partnership news to share in the coming weeks so please stay tuned.  In the meantime, go download Dragonfly (our free SDK), play around with the environment and if you like what you see, head on over to our store!

BusinessWeek recently published an article entitiled “Accenture Goes the Tailor-Made Route” by Damian Joseph.   It describes how Accenture is working with Bug Labs to develop a number of compelling hardware + service offerings that they believe will drive significant interest from their customers and prospects.  In fact, Accenture’s Andy Zimmerman was already thinking about how this could work last year when he posted “Build your own Tridget” on his Accenture blog.  We are thrilled to be working with them and appreciate the media attention.

But one thing that gets a little lost in the excitement is the fact that Accenture is now a proponent of the Open Source Hardware (OSH) movement.   This doesn’t mean that they will suddenly create and publish a slew of new hardware designs.  That will happen gradually, and will focus on the verticals they identify in the article.  More importantly, it signals an acceptance of a nascent business model that could help point the way for future OSH projects.  It’s similar in form and spirit to Red Hat’s revenue model in that it’s based on services not product per se.

Bug Labs makes money selling hardware and complimentary services that help our customers get the most out of their BUG investment.  Where we see higher, longer term value though is in offering core services around the software stack that makes it all work together.  These services, ranging from OS level to application level certification and verification offerings, come in the form of annual subscriptions; very much like Red Hat.   This makes sense to many companies building new devices because they don’t want to be in the business of managing the unlying software infrastruture.  And if Red Hat can do $600+ M (2008) in revenue using that model, then I feel relatively safe in saying it works.  Of course, Bug Labs is not Red Hat.  We have a long way to go to earn that level of distinction, but then it’s always good to have a goal

This business model works for us because the devices we are building all require complex OSs and frameworks.  It doesn’t really work for less complex, non-network-connected approaches.   But we feel that, over time, as Moore’s Law continues to work its magic, it will become common to have sophisticated software foundations in cheaper and cheaper devices, with the attendant necessity to maintain them.

Open source hardware is a huge economic category.  It’s not as simple to grok as open source software.  As a result, finding a one-size-fits-all business model is impossible.  But as this example suggests, when companies start using OSH to address real business problems, solutions can be found.