Prototype: Tech Accessories, Courtesy of the Mountain Pine Beetle

With his father and stepmother, Dave and Nadine Lipson, he owns 37,000 acres that include a cattle ranch, a resort and a 10-mile stretch of the Blackfoot River, other parts of which were featured in the 1992 film “A River Runs Through It.” The infestation had the potential to ruin their business, which banks on the area’s scenic beauty.

“Having a resort in Montana with no trees is a big problem,” Mr. Lipson says. So rather than watch the bugs turn the land into a tinderbox for wildfires, the Lipsons decided to take steps to stop the beetles in their tracks. In the process, they found a way to turn their ravaged wood into something useful: a material for making accessories for Apple products. Their story offers lessons in adapting when an environmental crisis hits and, more broadly, how to be resilient in the face of adversity.

The mountain pine beetles that descended on the Lipsons’ ranch have coexisted with pine trees for millenniums, but as temperatures have risen in recent years, the insect’s range, population and winter survival rate have grown. The beetles now inhabit trees from Southern California all the way up to the Northwest Territories of Canada and as far east as South Dakota.

“From an evolutionary perspective, it’s very similar to a pack of wild dogs attacking an elk,” Andrew M. Liebhold, an entomologist with the United States Forest Service, says of the beetles’ prowess. “When they gang up on the tree in large numbers, they’re able to overcome its resistance.”

The Lipsons’ challenge was to shut down the pack. “We had scouts that hiked through the forest, identifying trees that were infected,” Mr. Lipson says, adding that the needles turn a burnt-red color. The next step was to isolate those trees by thinning around them, then cut them down and haul them out. Within two years, their corner of the infestation was under control.

But now they had thousands of tons of lumber to dispose of. While other landowners burned the wood or sent it to mills to be mulched into sawdust, Mr. Lipson, a self-proclaimed serial entrepreneur, was eager to find a better use.

He learned that beetle-kill timber retains its structural integrity if harvested before the natural decay process begins. He reasoned that the wood could be used for flooring, framing and moldings in projects on the ranch, which has more than 50 buildings, so he sent 16 feet of raw timber to a mill for processing. What came back surprised him: a shimmery, blue-tinged wood. The mountain pine beetle, he found out, carries a fungus that produces a natural blue stain. “We thought it was pretty spectacular-looking,” he says.

That further motivated the Lipsons to make something out of the wood. Last June, they started Bad Beetle, which makes accessories for Apple computers, tablets and phones. They also hope that the company will raise awareness about the mountain pine beetle infestation.

The accessories “have the ability to reach people who are interested in eco-minded issues,” Mr. Lipson says. In January, Bad Beetle started offering iPhone backs and iPad stands on its Web site and has sold 730 so far. This summer, it will roll out cases for MacBook computers and iPads. Should Apple, which doesn’t require a licensing agreement for the products, become interested in selling Bad Beetle items in its stores or online, Mr. Lipson says he’s prepared: “We have a stockpile of blue-stain pine that will provide the raw material for Bad Beetle products indefinitely.”

Were his supply to somehow run out, replenishing it would be easy. Some 20 billion cubic feet of such beetle-kill timber is now standing in 12 Western states, by Forest Service estimates. Private land with gently sloping contours and good access to roads provides the easiest and most profitable harvesting and manufacturing opportunities.

Bad Beetle is not the only company using this type of wood. Judson Beaumont, a furniture designer who owns Straight Line Designs, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, creates cabinets, benches and children’s treehouses with beetle-infected two-by-fours. He estimates that in the past three years he has sold about 75 items at $1,000 to $4,000 each.

“It’s probably been my most successful run of furniture pieces,” he says.

John Stein, owner of Kirei, a company based in Solana Beach, Calif., says architects and interior designers have been enthusiastic about the beetle-kill wood panels it began selling six months ago. When they hear the back story, “it resonates,” he says. That’s especially true in the West, where many prospective buyers have firsthand experience with the beetle infestation.

The Forest Service’s Forest Products Laboratory based in Madison, Wis., has worked with insect-killed wood for 50 years, and is now using it as a component in plywood-like panels. The state of Colorado has exempted beetle-kill lumber, sawdust and furniture from sales tax, and estimates that the value of items made from trees felled by the mountain pine beetle and the spruce beetle will hit $22 million this year.

The byproducts of two environmental scourges in Southeast Asia have similarly been transformed into furniture at the hands of Bannavis Andrew Sribyatta, founder and design director of a Miami design firm, Project Import Export.

He obtains dried water hyacinths and liana vines — both considered destructive plants — from his home country, Thailand. He weaves them into chairs, chaise lounges and wall panels for individual and commercial clients, including a Nobu restaurant in Los Angeles. The story behind his creations often “seals the deal” for potential buyers, he says. “Our work doesn’t stop at the point where I tell the customers about the product,” he says. “They tell their friends. It’s a topic of conversation.”

The effort involved in transforming these raw materials typically results in higher prices. Bad Beetle’s iPhone backs, for instance, cost $69, whereas silicone ones by the fashion designer Marc Jacobs sell for up to $48 and resin hard cases by Kate Spade are $40.

GIVEN the industry’s youth, it’s not yet known how many consumers will pay a premium for such products, but according to Thomas Lyon, a professor at the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan, the beetle-kill wood could be a tough sell.

Since it would otherwise go to waste, the timber that’s used can be considered sustainable. But the response to sustainably produced wood has been underwhelming so far, Professor Lyon says, adding that people tend to open their wallets enthusiastically only for items that affect their health or are showpieces. With wood products, those criteria rarely exist. “Typically they’re hiding behind your walls,” he says. “Nobody can see that you bought sustainable wood.”

Buyers, however, could consider high-end furniture or hand-held tech accessories as a kind of wooden bling that’s worthy of their dollars.

If businesses can “transform the color into a positive so that it becomes something cool, then it may sell for a premium,” Professor Lyon says. “But it won’t be because it was sustainable, is my guess.”

Bits: Accessories Market Is Expanding for Samsung Phones

Incase Incase cases for the Galaxy S4.

Here’s a sign that Samsung Electronics continues to rise as a challenger to Apple in the handset market: the proliferation of third-party accessories supporting its Galaxy phones.

Incase, a popular case maker in San Francisco, on Thursday started selling its first protective cases for the new Galaxy S4 phone, adding to the hundreds of thousands of accessories in the market made for Samsung products. Before, it had sold a case for the earlier model, the Galaxy S3.

Various accessory makers like Mophie, OtterBox, Tech Armor and Aduro also sell gear for Samsung phones. A quick search in Amazon.com’s cellphone accessories category for “Samsung Galaxy accessories” turns up over 537,000 results. A search for “iPhone accessories” turns up about 1 million results.  By contrast, a search for “Lumia accessories” — products made for Nokia’s less-popular Windows phones — gets about 52,000 results.

A similar search on BestBuy.com turns up about 2,200 results for “iPhone accessories,” about 1,600 results for “Samsung Galaxy accessories” and 51 results for “Lumia accessories.”

These are hardly scientific surveys. But they give an idea of just how big a rival the Samsung Galaxy phones have become — not just in terms of sales, but also in terms of the number of third-party companies backing them.

Why care about support from accessory makers? If consumers buy extras for their phones, they’re likely to keep buying phones from the same company so they can keep using those accessories. Accessory makers must be confident in Samsung’s products in order to be devoting manufacturing for them.

It used to be the case that “case maker” was synonymous with “iPhone case maker.” But as Nick Wingfield and I reported this week, the accessories market has substantially broadened to support devices other than Apple’s.

Apple’s Rivals See an Edge in Using Wireless Accessories

Hotels outfitted guest rooms with alarm clocks containing a telltale wedge of 30 tiny pins that could play music from Apple’s devices and charge their batteries. Retail stores were thick with sound docks and other speaker systems meant to work with Apple gadgets.

But Apple’s iron grip on the digital accessories in hotel rooms, store shelves and living rooms is starting to slip — potentially risking the royalties it earns from accessory makers and, more significant, giving Apple customers more freedom to switch to rival products. That could be an issue for a company whose stock has been shaken in recent months as investors worry that the iPhone business is slowing.

Jeremy Horwitz, editor in chief of iLounge, a Web site devoted to Apple accessories, said Apple’s aggressive control over accessories for its products drove many makers to more open means of connecting devices, which helped feed the success of mobile devices made by other companies.

“At some point Apple’s obsession with having control over everything that is associated with its products may wind up biting it,” Mr. Horwitz said.

The Bluetooth standard for wireless connections has allowed accessory makers to build products that can work with many kinds of devices because they no longer have to worry about a physical hook. Other phone makers like Samsung and tablet-computing device makers like Amazon have become strong alternatives in the eyes of gadget shoppers.

And Apple itself provided an opening for competitors when it changed the way its phones connect to other devices, aggravating both its business partners and consumers.

Now accessory makers are eager, even obliged, to think beyond Apple.

“We’ve had to adapt to new technology, support more devices and meet the growing demands of consumers looking for accessories that can accommodate multiple devices,” said Ezra S. Ashkenazi, chief executive of iHome, one of the biggest makers of iPhone clock radios and other Apple audio accessories. This year, iHome is releasing more products with Bluetooth than ever before, he said.

Apple says it is fine with the wireless direction in which accessories are headed. “Apple provides users with the best wired and wireless connectivity options to work with the broadest range of accessories,” said Tom Neumayr, a spokesman for Apple. “As a result, iOS users have access to the world’s largest ecosystem of options and the most seamless integration with our products.”

Apple expected some grumbling from customers and partners last fall when it introduced in the iPhone 5 a new way for the mobile phone to connect to other devices. But its executives defended the connector, Lightning, because the new, smaller design allowed for slimmer phones and tablets.

While the 30-pin connector can be plugged into an old iPhone in only one way, a Lightning cable works even if it is flipped over.

Apple did not tell accessory makers about the change ahead of time, which is normal for a company known for its secrecy, but it was painful for many of its partners.

“You really don’t know where Apple is going to go next, if they’re going to change to something else down the road,” said Kyle Thompson, director of marketing for Cambridge SoundWorks. “They’ve made a lot of companies like us really nervous.”

That change frustrated partners whose customers had invested in products that used Apple’s old 30-pin connector. Those older devices are incompatible with the latest Apple products without an adapter that Apple sells for $29 to connect to the latest Apple products. Also, the new Lightning connectors are more expensive to license and manufacture than the old ones, electronics makers say.

“A lot of us were bitten pretty badly by the connector transition,” said Ian Geise, senior vice president for marketing and product development at Voxx Accessories Corporation, which makes audio products under RCA, Acoustic Research and other brand names.

State of the Art: Two New Accessories Move TiVo Premiere to Another Level

I do, anyway. TiVo made me a cultist. “I don’t know or care when a TV show will be broadcast or on what channel,” I’d explain to anyone who would listen. “I just tell the TiVo what show or actor or director I like, and it records shows automatically. I bypass ads with the 30-second skip button. I can watch an hourlong show in 40 minutes!”

Wow, how times have changed. Cable companies can now rent you less polished but far less expensive DVRs. The monthly fee is usually about the same as the TiVo, $15. (You can also pay TiVo a one-time $500.)

People started watching TV over the Internet, too. Most people watch TV the old-fashioned way — from cable or satellite — but many don’t want to be anchored to the living room. They want to watch from any room in the house, or even out of the house.

The TiVo is still out there ($150 to $400, depending on recording capacity). The latest models, the Premiere family, are smaller and better-looking than old TiVos; the high-end models can record from as many as four channels simultaneously.

But the best news comes from the Department of Better Late Than Never: two new accessories that let you both time-shift and place-shift your TV shows. The TiVo Mini ($100) lets you watch them on another TV in the same house; the TiVo Stream ($130) lets you watch them on an iPhone or iPad, either at home or away.

They both work very well. Each upholds TiVo’s reputation for simplicity and smoothness of operation. Video and audio quality are superb. Amazingly, someone can be using your TiVo even while you’re playing back a different show remotely.

Unfortunately, there’s enough fine print to fill an encyclopedia.

For starters, the setup is much too complicated.

Your TiVo, your Mini and your Stream must all be connected to a wired Ethernet network in your house. (The company says that Wi-Fi isn’t reliable enough to ensure stutter-proof high-definition video.) Depending on your tolerance for stapling new cables along the wall, this requirement could be a big drawback.

A workaround: you can buy an Actiontec MoCa adapter ($64). This little box transmits Ethernet signals from your router to coaxial cables (the round cords that bring cable into the house). Once you've attached a MoCa box to your router, your TiVo and TiVo Mini can then get network signals from plain old TV jacks on the wall. If your TiVo is close enough to the router to connect directly to it, you don't even need the MoCa adapter. Either way, presto: no rewiring.

You have to “activate” each on TiVo’s Web site. You have to permit remote access on the TiVo itself. There’s a 20-minute period of downloading and processing. For the Stream, into each iPhone or iPad, you have to type your Media Access Key: a long string of numbers that’s unique to your TiVo. That’s an antipiracy step, meant to appease the TV networks. But it feels paranoid.

Keep in mind, furthermore, that these new products work only with the TiVo Premiere family. The Mini, in fact, works only with the Premiere 4 or Premiere XL4, models that require a CableCard; cable boxes and antennas don't work.

A CableCard looks like a metal credit card, and it replaces the cable box (and its remote control) that used to clutter up your TV area. From now on, you change channels and volume using the TiVo remote control. But exchanging your cable box for a CableCard means a visit to your cable company’s office, or a visit from one of its technicians.

All right. Once all of those setup headaches are complete, how do these things work?

The TiVo Mini, which became available just this week, is a 6-inch-square, black, cheap-feeling plastic slab with sloped edges, like a pyramid sawed off close to the base. It’s meant to be a satellite for a TiVo Premiere (4 or XL4 model) you already own; it brings that TiVo’s screen to a second TV.

It comes with the same brilliantly designed TiVo remote control. It offers the same menus on the screen — including access to services like Hulu Plus, YouTube, AOL On, Rhapsody, Spotify, Live365, Pandora, PhotoBucket and Google Picasa — and makes the same distinctive sounds. But behind the scenes, it’s operating your real TiVo in another room.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 16, 2013

The State of the Art column on Thursday, about new products from TiVo, the digital video recording company, misstated the number of ActionTec MoCa adapters required to use the new TiVo Mini on a home network. Only one adapter is required, not a pair, and only if the TiVo is not close enough to the network router; otherwise, the TiVo can be plugged directly into the router. The column also referred imprecisely to the compatibility of the Mini with various TiVo Premiere models. While it works with the Premiere 4 and XL4, which require a cable card for reception, it is not compatible with older Premiere models connected to an antenna.