Roland Tanglao's Weblog

My Bug Bundle has been delayed until September. Bug is switching to Poky Linux and they closed a 3rd round of funding. I am still very enthusiastic about The Bug but it's hard to be an enthusiast when you are itching to experiment and shipment is delayed by 3 months. And as I have said before I don't really like simulators. Oh well, perhaps I'll activate one of my dormant iPhone application ideas!

Herewith my Grassroots Open Mobile Web presentation (original PDF) that I presented Monday April 14, 2008 at the Open Web Vancouver conference.

Presentation Links:

• Chumby
• Bug Labs
• How a Bug could save the US Government 100s of millions of dollars
• Bunnie's Blog about awesome Chumby hacks
• OSGI Java components whitepaper (used on the Bug)

The presentation was a lot of fun to put together and present. Next year, I hope to present a followup with my musings on the actual real Bug and any OSGI Java components that I manage to get working.

I want the entire suite of Bug Modules but I live in Canada. I tried to order with my Canadian Credit Card with a US Shipping Address but as I suspected, it didn't work. Thanks to the fine folks at Bug Labs for their patience in dealing with my multiple emails on this subject! It's not the end of the world but it's a bit disconcerting to see that despite "free trade" and "globalization", things haven't progressed since I was a kid ordering software and other gadgets from the USA in the 1970s and 80s, i.e. it's still ludicrously difficult to get gadgets over the border. Can we have a Schengen like zone between Canada and the USA please?

My First SXSW08 session is Peter Semmelhack CEO of Bug Labs on Hardware Mashups - The Long Tail of Gadgets

- the Pizza Tail of consumer electronics

- pepperoni is hard, long tail is the cheese

- cheese == every device you have ever wanted but couldn't find

- Bug Labs inspired by Lego

- e.g. after 9/11 living in Manhattan, he wanted device that woke up ever 5 minutes and posted GPS position on a map, couldn't find it at best buy

- reason? economics

- need to sell lots of them, hits based business, no hits, out of a job

- margins are decreasing: China, Walmart

- have to: 1. come up with hit which is hard, 70% of time wrong about hits

- Nokia 30% of 2007 revenue came from products introduced in Q4, very few companies can do this, go Nokia go!

- consumers want control e.g. Tivo can control TV and pause it

- model is old i.e. throw it away and buy a device i want

- what if we could build what we wanted?

- should be able to get it and go build what you want

- how do we make 'world of atoms' behave like 'world of bits'?

- open source and open models are powerful ways to enable consumers to innovate

- with software can easily combine and innovate

- with hardware it's much more difficult: 1. electrical engineer, industrial designer, logistics genius, need to be all of these things 2. manufacturing 3. inventory 4. distribution

- hard to innovate in all these ways

- software idea is relatively frictionless, just distribute it on internet

- for hardware, need a company unlike software

- e.g. Lego Mindstorms has provided platform for me to build a robot

- buy gadget not for physical form factor but for a reason e.g. sweep floor

- looks like software i.e. standard platform to build on top of

- platform is way to innovate in physical space

- being cheese will be profitable

- Bug Labs modules have braille! some blind folks loved that, great story

- great example of GPS tracker for $2k replaced by 2 bug labs modules for $200

- can fill niche of 1000 or 10000 with Bug Labs device with software provided by community

- aggregate these niches in a way that makes sense economically

- 1000 entrepreneurs selling devices built on top of platform = millions of bucks

- future is connected = gadget nets = network of devices 'facebook of gadgets'

- will happen in 5-10 years, based on physical platform

- will be bottom up approach

- Q: could bluetooth and network take the place of hardware glue? A: application has to talk to hardware, we can innovate ourselves bottom up or wait for 'big guys'. Proprietary companies can't compete with open models.Hard to start a Microsoft type company today. Model is MySQL which was bought for 1 billion; Sun realized community is more valuable

- Q: how do you make a profit A: radical openness == want to be different, every thing is different, everything is open source on their site on March 17th when they launch, give people the appropriate tools and they will create awesome things, believe in power of community, will get more out then they put in; no licensing fee

- Q: Is early adopter market big enough? A: it's 2-3 billion market just for early adopters worldwide. look at pcs? without early adopters no innovations visicalc. trying to find a way to provide a hardware platform to build what they want! bugnet community = repository of apps 1. innovator comes up with cool device 2. somebody "consumes" it 3. can make single function device out of what i design i.e. rapid prototyping platform 4. no hard lock in to their platform can move java program to another device e.g. can't move nokia app to apple or vice versa, that's old model

- will provide service to make beautiful device after you prototyped it on the bug - they don't become orphaned still part of the community

- balance between optimization and customizability today we only have "optimized obsolete in 6 months market", there is room for another model

- Q: green framework for consumer innovation? A: cellphone with lithium batteries is a disaster. modular devices can become other devices, plastic is recyclable, no toxic paint used. is there a cost? yes, won't look like an iPhone!

Richard said I have until January 15 :-) so here goes some randomly ordered predictions which are worth what you paid for them!

1. Social Media microniching and microcontent-fication continues to grow rapidly. Twitter and Seesmic are just the beginning. Old skool bloggers like myself continue to blog and to write large pieces but even for us it's the exception rather than the rule.
2. Drupal fervent, creativity, acquisition and expansion continues because Drupal 6 will unleash the creativity of the world. Go Acquia go! Go Raincity go!
3. Apple introduces 3G iPhone not at Macworld but in the spring. Rogers finally brings the iPhone to Canada in time for Christmas 2008. They won't be onboard for the Apple Spring announcement because they still don't "get it" , but they will have no choice for Christmas 2008 since all of the 3G handsets Rogers sells s*ck and nobody will buy them since unlike the iPhone they are unusable and no better than non 3G sets feature wise. [Hope I am wrong about Rogers!]
4. Speaking of "get"-ting it. Translink (or whatever they are called now), start to get it. True feedback comes from BOTH their old very slow 20th century skool approach (e.g. Translink Listens is a farce for the Internet Generation because you a) never see the results or b) know anything about the people behind the very vague and not useful polls but ok for the old fogeys) AND from social media like an official blog, a flickr account and facebook (heck maybe even twitter and Seesmic: e.g. twitter-ing system outages and delays or facebook statusing them would be a lot better than their current very slow 20th century haphazard way of telling us the SkyTrain is down or buses are delayed). The unofficial Translink Attendance at Transit Camp was very encouraging; I'm predicting this type of stuff will become officially supported in 2008.
5. Apple sub MacBook. It won't be the return of the Newton and it won't be a big iPhone, it'll be cool (small, instant on and useful) and again it won't be introduced at MacWorld. [Again hope I am wrong here! Hope it comes sooner]
6. The era of dumb non presence aware "high ceremony" audio and video is over. Go SightSpeed, go Lypp, go Iotum! All three will prosper in 2008. Skype will too since they are ubiquitous for both.
7. Nokia will continue to have the best hardware for mobile devices but unfortunately not the best software. An awesome N93 video cameraphone successor will be introduced that again only early adopters will use and find usable.
8. No usable mobile interface that is nearly as usable as Apple's touch interface emerges in 2008. Fingers crossed for 2009 [hope i am wrong about this one too]
9. Truly Open Hardware combined with truly Open Software - the trend started by Open Moko, Chumby (I've bought a chumby and am mulling some fun but extremely bogus hacks for it :-) !) and Bug Labs continues. Hopefully someone will introduce something like The Bug that is less clunky and uses a more malleable dynamic language like Ruby or Python (I am sure somebody will hack The Bug to use Ruby or Python or some such but it's not the same as having something designed from the ground up to use Ruby or Python as its development environment rather than clunky, "strait-jacketed by typing" and verbose Java). [and yes even though it's "clunky" and Java, I am saving my pennies for my own Bug! ]
10. Canon introduces an ISO 25600 camera to compete with the Nikon D3 and a 5D replacement with sensor cleaning and clean, usable ISO 6400. I'm saving my pennies (coz I'll never like flash photography although I love the Strobist).
11. Nokia or somebody smart buys ShoZu. The rest of the world will start to see the advantage of a "straight to the web from the camera" workflow that ShoZu pioneered (Eye-Fi is inferior to ShoZu because it doesn't suspend/resume upon connectivity interruption/resumption but it's good enough and it works everywhere and I am getting one of their cards pronto! See my earlier Eye-Fi plug). Why not build ShoZu into micro SD cards ? Just a thought :-) !
12. 3G and WiFi are now mature enough for a "straight to the web from the camera" workflow for video too. Why should you have to wait? Why can't video be uploaded directly to the web from your camera like you can with photos with ShoZu and Eye-Fi? There really is no reason other than file size and early adopters will start doing that in 2008.