Stage Two's blog

We’re missing some team members here at the S2 San Francisco office thanks to the 2010 Mobile World Congress and our favorite award-winning, open-source modular hardware makers, Bug Labs. BUG is making a big splash at the conference this year with a major announcement and will be working with great companies like Accenture, Texas Instruments, and Pitney Bowes to show off some of the next-gen tech solutions these companies and many others are creating using the BUG (check out the MWC dedicated  Bug Labs page here for reports from the floor).

So what’s the big news? Bug Labs announced this morning the development of Bug 2.0, based on the OMAP™ 3 platform from Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) supporting their suite of BeagleBoard applications. This new BUG will also support development on Google’s Android platform, bringing two talented and growing developer communities into the BUG open hardware family. Today’s announcement is only the basics, and we know BUG has many more exciting details to come in the near future. In the meantime, check out the full release here.

Coverage (updated as it comes in):

• Engadget
• Bloomberg
• Crunchgear
• ZDNet
• Gizmodo
• BusinessWeek
• MAKE Magazine
• Gear Diary

Today, the entire team from Stage Two spent the entire morning helping the community. For the second time this year, we were honored to participate in some community service at the San Francisco Food Bank to do some social good – a perfect tie in to Social Media Week in the city. Joining us this time were Alyce Lindquist, the president of the San Francisco/Silicon Valley chapter of the Social Media Club and Dana Oshiro, writer for tech blog ReadWriteWeb.

While last time we had a good time packaging orzo pasta, this time we were needed to package cabbage and oranges that would be sent to schools and other non-profit agencies who would distribute the goods to those who needed it. You might think it was tedious work for the three hours, but it was really fun to talk with other volunteers and the employees there about the Food Bank’s mission.

To help highlight our efforts to bring social good to Social Media Week, both Jeremy and Dana Oshiro were guests on the Social Media Hour – a weekly podcast that highlights different trends in the industry and is hosted by storyteller and thought-leader Cathy Brooks. You can listen to the entire podcast by clicking here.

At the end of the day, our reward was hearing how much we have helped the community. For just three hours, we packaged around 12,000 pounds of food! If you consider the fact that 150,000 people in the city alone go hungry every day, the amount that was done in such a short time just by volunteering speaks volumes and can greatly help the people that truly need it.

To help out at the San Francisco Food Bank or to learn more about what you can do, please click here.

Here are some photos from our time at the SF Food Bank (and even a short video!)

Most of the entire gang that helped out today at the San Francisco Food Bank

Team Stage Two and volunteers packaging cabbage

Jeremy Toeman doing some social good

Even the oranges were happy for the help!

David Speiser helping to package some oranges

Mielle Sullivan with her specially formed orange

Jeremy Toeman just can’t stop himself from packaging oranges!

I wanted to call this a tweetup, but if I’m blogging it I think that breaks the rules? Just kidding. Anyhow, a bunch of us mobile/gadget/convergence folks wanted to get together, chat about how the world just changed (or didn’t), and also talk in advance of Mobile World Congress (aka 3GSM).  We’ve teamed up with Lisa Whelan, from SocializeMobilize, to gather fun people and the great people at Jillian’s (at the Metreon, spitting distance from the event. literally) put aside a little space for us.

No RSVP needed, but all the details are available here.  Looking forward to seeing you there.

I’ll buy a drink for the first person to show up WITH whatever new thing got announced at the event. :)  Yes, multiple winners if there are multiple things.

BTW – you can visit my personal blog to see recent thoughts I’ve shared on the supposed tablet.

No client updates, no social media marketing thoughts, nothing but a brief plea to send some help to those in need in Haiti.  Our friend Andru Edwards at gearlive.com has put together a great gift-matching program, and we’re supporting it.  The Red Cross has created an SMS-based donation plan, and we along with a few other groups and individuals will gift match to a certain dollar amount.  Details:

Starting now, if you send an SMS donation to either the Red Cross (by texting the word HAITI to 90999) or to YELE (by texting the word YELE to 501501) Gear Live will match it, up to $500. In addition, we have a bunch of our friends joining in as well:

• David Geller of Eyejot and WhatCounts will match up to $2500
• Leslie Camacho, President of EllisLab (which makes the fantastic ExpressionEngine CMS) will personally match up to $600
• Nate True of Tap Tap Revenge and iPhone hacking fame will match up to $500
• Jeremy, Adam, and the team at Stage Two will match up to $500
• Dave Taylor, the man behind AskDaveTaylor.com, will match up to $250
• Don McAllister of Screencasts Online will match up to $250
• Robert Scoble, the face behind Building43, will match up to $200
• Local Gear Live fan Shauna Causey will match up to $100
• Parnassus Ventures, the folks behind 140: The Twitter Conference, will match up to $100
• Jason Neudecker, a Gear Live Twitter follower, will match up to $100
• TechieDiva.com will match up to $50

In total, so far, that’s $4500 $5400 $5650 in pledged matching donations! For each donation you make, each entity above will match it, until their limit is reached. In other words, with our current eight eleven twelve contributors, your $10 donation will actually be matched six nine eleven twelve times, resulting in a $70 $100 $120 $130 payment. So, what do you need to do? This is the easy part. Just scroll down and leave us a comment letting us know that you made a donation, and whether it was a $5 or $10 contribution. If you do it multiple times, let us know that too. Even better, if you want to be on our list as a person or company that will match donations, let us know!

I just read a piece which claims that over 300,000 people are now homeless.  And this is a poor country with very little quality infrastructure – in other words, it’s not going to just “get better” without some serious help.

Huge kudos to the Red Cross, Andru Edwards, and the millions of people who will inevitably help.

As one side note, and not to distract from this, we at Stage Two have decided we’ll be making a monthly stop at the SF Food Bank.  If you feel moved to help the ONE in FIVE residents of San Francisco that live at or below the poverty line, please get in touch and you can join us!

It’s been a while since we’ve moved into the new office and we definitely wanted to celebrate the holidays, so we figured that this year, we’d knock off some long-delayed things to celebrate, including having a nice office “housewarming” party and  to celebrate our third-year anniversary.

To help spruce up our place, we turned to our friends at 1:AM gallery and Quinn Wharton who generously provided art and photography work that is currently hanging on our walls. And not one to leave our friends famished and parched at a party, the fine folks at Work of Art event planning & catering made some delicious hors d’oeuvres and set them up on our very own meat tree – yes, you heard that right…we had an artificial tree that was filled with meat on a stick on the tree. It was absolutely delicious!

Stage Two also made a couple of cool announcements as well, including a new “soon-to-be” website for the company and our next new product called Gunman – the first iPhone First Person Shooter using augmented reality. We encourage you to give it a shot and to let us know what you think.

We thank you for stopping by our office for our Holi-Warming-Versary party and regardless of whether you were there or not, here’s a recap of photos:

Some of the artwork provided by 1:AM Gallery

Photography art provided by Quinn Wharton

Legacy Locker’s Gregg Delman

Stage Two’s Adam Burg & Jeremy Toeman

It’s our very own meat tree!

Decorating the meat tree.

Transforming the Stage Two office.

Ron Hirson of BOKU and Sol Lipman of 12seconds.tv

David Cohn of Spot.us and Stage Two’s Jim Schaff

David Cohn, Dave Mathews, Jim Schaff & Kevin Brown checking out Gunman

Jeremy Toeman with CNET’s Rafe Needleman

And what holiday party wouldn’t be complete without some Foosball? It’s David Speiser, Gregg Delman, Andrew Kippen & Jim Schaff.

To view more photos from our holiday party, please click here.