The wraps have started to come off of Bug Labs. Their site is now up and they have begun an active dialogue with enthusiasts that is shaping their design and their development priorities. We invested in Bug Labs because everything we have learned over the past ten years investing in and around the net has convinced us that decentralized, user centric, innovation is a very potent force that will have a huge impact on economic growth for the foreseeable future.
Eric von Hippel, a professor at MIT, and the author of Democratizing Innovation, has been talking about the importance of this phenomenon for over a decade. In this BBC interview he points out that large enterprises are optimized for efficiency at scale and that because consumers do not adopt innovations all at once, the early market for any innovation is, by definition, small. Eric cites several examples where users have begged manufacturers for a product only to be told that they are freaks, that there is no market for what they want, and the manufacturer has no intention of creating the thing they want. The users then do what users have always done, they figure out how to build it themselves.
The net has changed this dynamic. By lowering the cost to innovate and to reach consumers, it has unleashed a torrent of user centered innovation. Many of the most interesting things we have invested in have been born of a users desire to solve a problem they have. Del.icio.us, for instance, was created by Joshua Schachter initially to help him remember stuff he had seen on the web. By using open source tools, Joshua was able to create the functionality of del.icio.us on his own. With a small personal investment in servers and bandwidth, he was able to make that innovation available to anyone on the web.
Innovation on the web is flourishing, but most of us still split our time between the virtual and the physical worlds. In the physical world, it is very costly to create new products and to get them to market. Nowhere is this more true than in the world of consumer electronics.
Peter Semmelhack’s key insight was that the structure of the consumer electronics market was not determined by the laws of physics. Rather, it was an artifact of the way the industry had evolved and that it would be possible to fundamentally change the structure of that enormous market if one could lower the cost of creating new devices and of getting those devices to consumers. So Bug Labs is a both a platform for innovation and community that facilitates the sharing of those innovations.
With that background, I’d like to describe, the Bug application I want. Not only am I an investor; I plan to be a customer (does that sound too much like Hair Club For Men?)
As I describe the application I want, you will likely think there is no market for that combination of components and services, that it is a corner case, or even that I am a nut (Peter thinks so), but this is the whole point. I do not care what you think. I want this application. I do not need to convince you that it makes sense. I do not even need to convince Peter that it make sense, and I certainly do not need to convince a consumer electronics company. I want it, and Bug Labs is going to give me the platform to build it.
Since I first moved to New York many years ago, I have been riding a bike around the city, not just around the loop in central park but all through the city. It was a way for me to come to grips with the scale and diversity of New York. On those bike rides, I have seen a lot of interesting things. I have looked through a screen door into a laundry in Brooklyn on a hot summer night to see thin asian men in sleeveless tee shirts ironing and folding dress shirts with uncanny efficiency, all the while talking with a cigarette hanging out of their mouth: an ash growing precariously at the end, but somehow never dropping on the shirt. Another night, a screech owl dive bombed me in Inman Heights Park to draw my attention away from its three chicks perched across the path and experimenting for the first time with their wings. I have also seen things that you might more typically expect in New York like a burglary in progress in Bedford Stuyvesant, or a delivery boy killed on Broadway when he ran into traffic from between two parked cars.
I carry these images around in my head. Perhaps that is the best place for them, but I wish I had recorded them and could now share them with others. So I would like a very small, light weight, helmet mounted video camera. I would like to be able to control that camera with voice commands through a tiny helmet mounted boom mike. I would like the camera to be always recording in to flash memory and recording over previous images when it runs out of room. But I would also like to be able to say “save last 30” or last 60 or whatever, because I never know in advance what I am going to see. Essentially I want the video equivalent of an airliners black box, so that I will always s be able to get at the last few minutes of video.
If you live in the world of gadgets or video you might say, you can get most or all of this today, off the shelf, for a price. I have not seen a helmet mounted camera that can be controlled by voice commands. If you can point me to one, please do. But even if this device can be found, it does nothing to shake my faith in the opportunity for Bug Labs or the inevitability of an open source consumer electronics platform.
The problem is not the components. It is the integration of those components, and the services they connect to. I know that I could find the camera, the mike, a pocket pc or some other controller and the voice recognition software to drive it. There is even a chance that one of you is going to point me to an integration of all these components put out by a specialty video company, but a voice controlled, helmet mounted video camera is just a piece of the application I want.
I like being out in the weather, so I often ride in less than perfect weather. I would like to add a heads up display to the configuration above. It would make it much easier to control the video because I could get visual feedback from my voice prompts to make sure that wind noise or some other problem did not prevent me from “saving last 30”. It would also make it possible to overlay weather maps and radar images that were centered on my location as provided by a GPS chip so that I could decide whether or not to duck into the rib place in Harlem to wait out the thunder shower. If I were to add a compass to this configuration, the controller (or processor) would know where I was looking making it possible to display virtual street signs so that I would not miss the turn to catch the greenway along the Harlem River Drive.
And it would be great if, every time I passed though a Muni Wifi cloud, the device would automatically upload the saved video to my tumblelog on Tumblr.
Then there is communication. Sure I can get a cell phone with a blue tooth head set that will dial home with a voice command. But I often ride while listening to a bootleg Grateful Dead concert MP3 on my iPod (it helps to keep the pace up). Today, if I am going to be late for dinner, I have to get off the bike take out the earbuds, and pull out my phone. Someday, I’d like too add an accelerometer to the mix. With that I could configure my device to send a SMS to my wife to let her know that my ride had come to a sudden stop. With GPRS or Wifi connectivity, it could also send her a link to the last 30 seconds of video and my GPS location so that if I had been dumb enough to get myself knocked down by a cab, she would know where I was. If I was wearing a heart monitor for endurance training (unlikely), she could get a pretty good idea of how serious the fall was.
I could keep going, but I think you get the idea. I may be the only person in the world that wants this crazy collection of components and services, but do want it, and there is no reason, other than the current structure of the consumer electronics industry that I can not have it at a reasonable price. Bug labs is on a mission to change that and if nothing else, they have already made my quirky highly personal application plausible.
So now that I have gone first… What application do you want?
And yes, for those of you who are wondering – I have read Snow Crash and no, I do not want to be a gargoyle, at least not a full time gargoyle.