Bug Labs shows off its larvae

I'm so late with this post because I had to do some template editing to get rid of the old Kanoodle code that was gumming up publishing TypePad postings.  But the delay also has let me update this post with comments on Peter's latest posting.  I have a 12 year old daughter that is so far having fun building electronics kits with me, (we'll see how long that golden time lasts... ) and I'm hoping that she will share the same interest in building Bugs that Gavin has.  One of the greatest things about being an entrepreneur is that you can create an environment where moments like Peter had can happen.  That's so much harder to do in a large company, and thrilling when you can make it happen in your own.

On the first really wicked cold night of the winter here in NYC, Bug Labs had its second local public shindig to show off its progress.  If the wood blocks were eggs, they've hatched and begun to develop.  Monday night, we got to see a working Bug with two touch screens and a development environment, seen in the awful picture that accompanies this post ( the two bright squares in the center of the picture ).   Bug Labs seems to be taking a similar path to Control 4 in its approach to building the ecosystem for the product and developers.  They have an Eclipse based dev environment, and a library of apps that you can contribute to the community and use in your projects.  It's not ready for primetime yet, but they've made a huge amount of progress since the last event.   There's working hardware and software, modules are coming along.  The bug base as a platform appears to have the same horsepower of a mid-range PDA, so  the raw lifting power it has is somewhat limited, but it appears to be sized right for its design goals.  I only stayed for a very early part of the soiree, so I got to see some of the demo setup headaches, but didn't get to see an actual dog and pony show with the device that is pictured.  If somebody attended, read this and saw something better than I did, please let me know in the comments.  I still think that this is a development platform for systems integrators to innovate by creating new networks of networked appliances rather than a mass market phenomenon.  The market for the Bug will be somewhat larger than the X10 ecosystem, but still in that geek niche.   Perhaps as it gets closer to birth, my opinion will change.

The approach so far seems to me still out of reach for the masses or that the average computer user.  The closest product out on the market seems to be Control 4's home theater/automation setup, where there is a two tiered development environment, one for the dealer to do systems integration, and another, lower privileged enviroment, where the end user can control the content and some aspects of how the system behaves, but not how the total system is configured.  When I last touched a C4 system, back in the summer time, they had made some more progress towards reliability and robustness, but the system still seemed very brittle and configuration intensive.  I see the same pitfalls in the path of Bug Labs, but the openness of the system may help them.  The closed nature of C4's system helps C4 debug and troubleshoot these "lots of moving parts" issues and keep the development stream headed toward producing the kind of user configurable consumer electronics that behave like consumer electronics.  i.e. turn it on and it works.  If it doesn't work, turn it off and turn it on again, and it should work then.  It also closes off the ecosystem to independent development, which reduces the potential for innovation.

Somebody outside of Bug Labs could create an I/O module or other module that becomes the killer app which will drive sales of the core Bug product. That, to me, has a much higher upside sales potential than a closed system like C4.  I'm very excited to see more from the colony of Bug breeders.