I am Zach Supalla, CEO of Spark. Ask Me Anything

Would you rather fight a shark with bear arms or a bear with sharks for arms?

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This community! Businesses are about people, and if it weren't for you guys, everything else would be meaningless. You guys help keep us on course.

A couple of weeks ago I saw Jeff Atwood speak (many people know him as codinghorror, and he's the creator of Stack Overflow, Stack Exchange, and Discourse, the forum software we're using here). He talked about the value of the community and how much it drives a company's strategy when it's done right, and I definitely believe that.

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Zach, Do you have any future plans for Spark blue-tooth low energy devices ?

I look at this community as the measure of our success as a business. If we have a large, engaged community full of people who help each other, we have succeeded.

A community like this creates a virtuous circle where people who are trying to solve hard problems with connected devices come here and help one another. Our hardware and software solve some problems, but the community solves the rest.

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Assuming that I was fighting each one in its native habitat, I would rather fight the bear with sharks for arms, because I'm a much better runner than I am swimmer.

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What if you have to fight the beark in a raisin factory?

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Many of you have been tracking the development of Bluz, formerly known as SparkLE:

Right now our plan for BLE is to give @eely22 as much support as possible to bring his board to life; he's doing awesome things and has all the right ideas!

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I would lure the beark over to the room where they dry out the grapes to make raisins, and I would convince the beark to DESTROY IT FOREVER. And also eat the raisins instead of me.

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Which one do you prefer : Apple, Microsoft or Linux? Or is it all equally good?

I'm a Mac guy, have been my whole life (even when they were super uncool and making terrible business decisions). So I like Apple's stuff; I think they do a great job of providing a great user experience while letting you under the hood.

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Coca Cola or Pepsi? :slight_smile:

Zach, why is Christine saying beark? Is that a secret language?

Bear + Shark = Beark

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Coca Cola, natch! :slight_smile:

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A more serious one : atmel, microchip or arm?

Zach, Any plans to do more with the Spark App ?

Definitely ARM. ARM is the future for microcontrollers; the whole industry has been too fragmented for way too long, and ARM's Cortex M series is bringing everyone together. That makes cross-platform development a lot easier.

I have an enormous respect for Arduino, but I think one of their challenges has been that Atmel's AVR series is getting pretty long in the tooth, and their ARM portfolio isn't the strongest out there (it's kind of expensive). Being tied to one hardware vendor means that if somebody starts making better hardware, it's hard for Arduino to adopt it.

Our strategy is a bit different; we'll always be constantly picking up the best hardware and adding it to our portfolio, and doing our best to provide development tools that work the same across hardware. Right now we use ST microcontrollers, but next year if theirs aren't the best on the market, then we'll switch to somebody else. That way you can always trust that we're using the best hardware available.

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We've had a lot of big ideas about what else we could do in the app, but the biggest problem is that it's not easy enough right now to make your own mobile apps for Spark-powered things. So my first goal is to make that software development experience easier before we focus on adding new features to our own app.

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Did you have a backup plan if spark would fail? Also, did you go all in on this?

Hey Zach, I am very excited about the Electron. But the only thing holding me back from pulling the trigger is the absolutely abysmal β€œlow” cost data plans you are offering. What is this 1992 again? Can you expand on why your initial offering is such a high cost per MB?

Not that I am expecting to send gigs of data, but I can see instances where I could use up several MBs in a day if I want to say stream output from a single pixel camera sensor or something.