The iPhone is a direct descendant of the Model T Ford -- you can get one in any color you want, so long as it's black (or white).
That's the viewpoint of Peter Semmelhack, founder and CEO of Bug Labs, whose modular, open source hardware company aims to fix that shortcoming by making it easier for people and companies to create their own electronics products using a Linux processor module, a camera module, a touchscreen LCD module and so on.
Bug Labs made a big splash a couple years ago as the tech media slavered over the possibilities of it bringing us products that Apple or Sony would never make, like the Bug Labs-powered device that detects when Semmelhack's sailboat is rocking too much, and sends him a text message so he can alert the marina owner to tie it down more securely. Or the one he made for his diabetic sister that wakes up her family if her heart rate increases too much, indicating dangerously low blood sugar.
Or the one an 11-year-old friend of the company wants to build, which would snap a photo every time someone opened the door to his room so he could tell when his brother was snooping around in there (not cool), as opposed to his mother (cool).
But so far, Semmelhack's vision of enabling long-tail electronics for niche markets hasn't totally materialized.
Some progress has been made -- one particularly powerful example being Bug4Good, a "tamper-proof evidence-gathering device" designed to support human rights. To document infringement of those rights, witnesses can use it to take photos, shoot video and record audio, automatically encrypt them with hardware, upload them to the cloud and delete them from the device automatically.
In Bug's view, just as software is opening up new possibilities for everyone -- consumers, developers, businesses and so on (when else in history could you buy an Ocarina for the price of a candy bar?) -- the hardware market is increasingly dominated by only a few huge companies with the scale to churn out mass-market products with millions of potential buyers because that's the only way to keep costs down.
Semmelhack still believes that within the next 10 years, there will be an explosion of niche devices, as open source hardware like his democratizes hardware design and manufacturing. The key, he says, will be content companies building their own gadgets.
"There is so much content -- there are websites for every possible interest," said Semmelhack. "The flip side of that is that we're all accessing that content through the same thing we have been for 10 years, which is the browser, and that's going to change -- the question is how."
For the most part, by "content companies," he does not necessarily mean those like Wired.com parent Conde Nast, which is developing content for the iPad, rather than trying to manufacture a device to compete with it. He's mostly talking about other types of content -- medical records, the medical expertise of doctors, car insurance companies' information on their drivers, and so on.
"Hospitals compete on different levels -- best doctors, best services -- but what if a hospital could demonstrate that they have a set of proprietary devices they've come up with that help you take better care of your aging grandmother?" asked Semmelhack. "They have an enormous amount of content -- expertise, history, experience -- and if they can distill it down to a device that gives 25 percent better care at 30 percent lower cost, first of all, all of the insurance companies would shovel all the business to them because they have a lower cost, and second, you as a consumer might take your grandmother there because you've heard about this. It's not an extreme example [but] it's provocative, because you wouldn't necessarily think of a hospital coming up with its own hardware."
Another example: Car insurance companies could offer to install a free device that would monitor sudden acceleration or deceleration, offering discounts to safe drivers by mashing data gathered from the device against their actuarial data.
The typical scenario, he said, would be that one of these companies would use Bug Labs to create awkward-looking devices for a limited test run using the standard Bug setup, which costs $700 for a processor and four modules. If that works, Bug offers an upgrade path that drops all nonessential aspects of the modules and allows their design to be changed before they go into production.
"We have processes that will de-modularize it, integrate it, cost-reduce it and bring it to market -- not at the same cost as a mass-market device, but certainly much lower than a custom device," said Semmelhack.
Because the hardware is open source, the car insurance company, hospital or other "content" company would be able to use the resulting technology without paying Bug Labs, which instead charges for services grabbing instant messages from cars, upgrading the Linux kernel or using the company's software to access devices through the web.
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