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.
