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by Joanna Stern on April 16, 2008
Bug Labs COMPANY PROFILE
Established: 2006
Home Base: New York City
Employees: 20
Funding: Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital
Why You Should Care
Surely you have a gadget—a digital camera or a GPS device—that you wish did more. Or a gadget idea that would be too hard to create on your own and probably wouldn’t be of interest to an electronics manufacturer. Bug Labs feels your pain. “We go to stores and we look at what gadget best fits our needs. And a lot of the time we compromise what we want,” said Peter Semmelhack, founder and CEO of Bug Labs. “An alternative approach is to allow people to decide what they want.”
Enter Bug Labs’ hardware platform, which lets people snap together modules to create the exact gadget they have in mind. The company’s BUGbase, a Linux computer, is the starter kit. Then, like putting together a piece of IKEA furniture, you add the Bugs or modules. The BUGview module adds a high resolution touchscreen, and the BUGcam is a 2-megapixel camera. Other modules include mobile broadband connectivity and a GPS locator.
Snapping the pieces together is the easy part. The hard part: getting your visionary device to function using software. “When Apple first came out with their microcomputer there were no applications written for those machines,” Semmelhack said. “Then Dan Bricklin wrote VisiCalc—the first spreadsheet software—and then you just had to buy the computer and the application. That is how we see Bug Labs working for everyone.”
Bug Labs currently has hundreds of early adopters working on applications that will be useful for the configured Bugs. Not a programmer? Others will be able to download the software and drag files directly to their Bug components.
Why the Competition Should Care
A traveling salesman was looking for a GPS unit that could record the mileage of his yearly business travels so that when tax time came he could have a record for the IRS of the places he traveled for work. GPS makers Garmin and TomTom didn’t have this feature, but with a BugLab GPS module and the writable software he found a solution.
“We want to give any person the chance to create products that might be useful to themselves and not have to rely on the big-company offering,” Semmelhack said. In other words, consumers can satisfy niche market needs before established players even realize they exist.
Putting its open-source platform into the hands of the public is a double-edged sword for Bug Labs. On the one hand, it’s like R&D in turbo mode, and the company’s unique approach gives it an advantage over slower-moving consumer electronics giants. But when asked what he sees as Bug Labs’ biggest threat, Semmelhack immediately answered with one word: inertia. “A resistance to new things will be our biggest barricade. The push-back will be from the people that say, ‘I don’t need anything. What else could I need?’”
Chance of Success
JupiterResearch analyst Michael Gartenberg is confident that Bug Labs will be around in five years. “These guys are doing interesting stuff in the sense that one size doesn’t fit all. The challenge they have is providing solid building blocks for the developers to create useful applications for the hardware,” he said.
What will make Bug Labs appeal to the mass market? Success in developing intuitive software that a reasonably sophisticated—but not super technical—user can use to build his own dream gadget via simple drag-and-drops.
“The microcomputer hardware itself didn’t take off at first, but when the programs got released they doubled or tripled sales,” Semmelhack said. “We expect the same effect when the modules start shipping and when we have software that makes people’s visions work.”
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