Well, 2010 is here, and I’m back from a restful Christmas break.

2009 was an awesome year to say the least. Our success included being featured on the MAKE magazine blog 3 times, Boing Boing video, and a variety of other sites. In addition, BW Science Labs won Sun Microsystems’s (yes, that Sun, the creator of JAVA) and the Institute for the Future’s international innovation competition, the Digital Open. Not only did this give BW Science Labs quite a bit of media attention, but I got a real nice laptop (and some other stuff) out of it!

A couple months ago I got an offer by a publishing company to write a chapter of a book they were publishing on technology and its affects on society and the modern world. I just heard back from them, and they’re almost ready to publish it, and I’ll get 10 copies soon.

We’ve sold a ton of kits through our store over the past few weeks, and I got a lot of feedback that they are being put together by families and young engineers. If you’re curios as to how many we’re selling honestly it varies from week to week, however I always try and set a minimum of 2 per week (excluding holiday breaks because I can’t ship them if I’m out of town) and so far this goal has been surpassed nearly every week.

Over the break I drafted 10 new kit ideas, and I’m actively prototyping 2 of them, soldering iron in hand. The 1st I’m working on are a beginner GPS kit, where you put together a complete, handheld GPS locator that gives you your coordinates in real time. This is tricky, as the GPS module I’m working with has several wires, none of them labeled, so I’ll have to keep working on it very slowly. The 2nd is a more advanced robot kit, a sort of sequel to our popular Vivus the robot kit. I have selected an IR sensor, servo for a moving head, body, and so on. To keep costs down, I’m using a 18 pin microcontroller (as opposed to 28+) which means I’ll have to program it in as few lines of code as possible.

As far as site design goes, I just posted a job on Elance to hire a developer to redo the site. The new site will have a beautifully integrated store, web applications, and more.

I want the theme of 2010 to be “watch me”. I plan on surpassing all expectations and making BW Science Labs grow more rapidly than ever.

Watch me!