the Onda

I attended one of Scott's Nantucket Conference dinners last night to chat on a panel about how Boston tech companies can get better at going after the consumer and thoroughly enjoyed the distinctively hardware-focused crowd that Scott assembled (present company excluded).

As the web becomes more pervasive in everyone's lives, it is hard to imagine that our main interface to it will be governed by laptops and mobile phones, which is why there are a small group of us who've grown up on the web who believe that the next generation of successful consumer startups will be forged at the intersection of hardware, software, and services. Of course this statement is anathema to today's VCs who hear the word hardware and think of the millions of dollars that they would have to invest to get a product with the fit and finish of an iPhone. In reality though, looking at it from this perspective is like looking at the enterprise storage startups with EMC as the yardstick, or the semantic search startups from the perspective of Google. Every jungle has its own 800lb gorilla and it's important not to assume that just because you've got hardware involved you can't be a small nimble monkey.

Witness Bug Labs. Or even the Arduino community effort. On the panel last night, the highlight for me was Carl Yankowski, CEO of Ambient Devices and former senior exec from just about every company that's ever wrapped plastic around a chip. When I asked the panel how being in the hardware business with its relatively long product lead times, they could ever hope to achieve the same tight feedback loop that you get in building webapps, he told me that in his view hardware and software development had gotten to parity in terms of time-to-market, capital investment, etc.

While this may be hard to believe in products as complex as the iPhone, with Carl's current products at Ambient, this fast pace can be a reality. In the picture, he is holding an umbrella whose flashing LEDs communicate Accuweather information about the chance of likely precipitation (you can't see it from the picture but it was blinking at Cylon speeds last night).

The simplicity (or "dedicated purpose") of these products really does point the way forward for injecting network intelligence into things beyond the three primary screens in our lives (the PC, the TV, and the mobile). The elusive hunt for a generic "4th screen" on the part of investors and entrepreneurs seems to yield a number of dumb photo frame investments (trust me we see them when they run out of cash and want to be bought), or at best, products that are fundamentally flawed in their attempt at flexibility (witness the Chumby).

To borrow another one of Carl's insights last night: it's about wrapping hardware around individual applications (email, weather, sports scores, etc.) if what you are looking for is mass-market traction. To this point, I enjoyed hearing his stories about his time at Palm and particularly some of these hardware-wrapped applications that didn't see the light of day. It reminded me that there is indeed tons of opportunity to wrap a few more applications with net-intelligent hardware.

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