Bug Labs Platform

[ music ] ^M00:00:04 [ background music ] >> Hey, I'm Tom Merritt, here at CES 2008. And we have got one of the coolest products I've seen, because it's about six hundred products. Now I've got this thing here right, the old iPhone. If I want to mess around with it, I can jailbreak it, try to put some third party apps on it, but I can't open it up, I can't change it. This is totally different. What they've got here from Bug [assumed spelling] Labs, this is the Bug base, this is actually a computer with one hundred twenty eight megabytes of RAM, it's got an ARM CPU inside, Wi-Fi, USB, little mini LCD on the front here. But that's not the end of it. So you buy this, this gives you a pretty functional mini computer. And then you want a bigger screen than that LCD? You buy a module, buy this LCD module, plug it in, and now you've got a little bit of a bigger screen. You can also plug in a USB keyboard and a USB slot right there. Has an open source MMC card slot here as well, and that reminds me. This whole thing is GPL, not just the Bug Labs SDK is GPL, where you can create your own software for it, but the hardware is GPL'd as well. So you can create your own modules. They're gonna have four modules at launch, course we have the LCD screen here. You can also put in a camera, this is a five megapixel camera that you can plug in. And the other two are a motion detector and accelerometer. Plugs in on the back just like all of them, and a GPS device. Even has a little external antenna, so if you want to plug in a car antenna or something like that. So now you can mix and match. You've got GPS, you've got a camera, in fact one of the first pieces of software written with the Bug Labs SDK is an auto locator. So I can take a picture, the GPS tells me where I am, and it uploads it through the Wi-Fi to Flicker. I know where I am, I've got the Geo tagging all in one piece. Of course there are almost an unlimited amount of things that you can do with this, because not only are there the modules that they sell, but because it's open source you can build your own modules if you want. Now here's the pricing structure. I'm gonna have to cheat to look at this. They're doing something called an early adopters discount. So instead of charging you more at the beginning and then punishing you for buying early, they're charging you less at the beginning. For the first sixty days the base will go for two hundred ninety nine dollars, and then after sixty days it goes up to three hundred forty nine dollars. LCD module runs you ninety nine dollars, then up to one nineteen, GPS, camera, and the motion and acceleromator [assumed spelling] are a little less. There's also BugLabs.net if you want to get involved with writing. You can download the software today, you can download the SDK and get started writing apps for this. [ background music ] It's really too much to talk about in the time we have today. So go check it out at BugLabs.net. This is the Bug Labs platform at CES 2008. I'm Tom Merritt. ^M00:02:49 [ music ]