The Latest From Bug

Our portfolio company Bug Labs continues to build out its family of modular open source hardware products. This is not a sexy market space like social media or mobile. But it is an important market space. Because as hardware becomes more open and more "hackable", we'll be able to do more things with web services.

A good example of what I am talking about is the La Montre Verte (green watch) service in Paris. They have networked together environmental sensors all over Paris and the data is broadcast via a mobile phone to a open platform called Citypulse which makes all the data available via a web service.

Bug is a platform to enable exactly these kind of open source projects. Not everything can be done in software and most hardware is too closed to make it useful for applications it was not intended for. That is where Bug comes in. You can snap a few sensor modules onto a Bug base and you've got a custom piece of hardware that can collect data and power a web service.

And the latest news from Bug is that the Bugbase module is now wifi enabled. This was not an easy task because Bug was committed to putting an open source wifi solution into the market and that was a hard problem to solve. But they have solved it and Bug based devices can now communicate over the wifi channel.

If you have a project like La Montre Verte that you want to get up and running, you should look at the Bug platform. It's perfect for that sort of application.