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. With The future will be cute. And, uh, ad-supported.
Posted Under: Products
I mentioned the Chumby the other day (here’s that post and some thoughtful comments from discerning readers). Forbes has a bit more detail on the “cute” device.
You can choose from more than 400 streaming widgets on the Chumby Web site. Keep track of your friends on MySpace and Facebook, see photos from Flickr, check in on your Ebay bids, read right-wing blogs or left-wing newspapers, watch sports videos or a videoclip of David Letterman’s Top Ten List, listen to podcasts or check out your daily horoscope. If your friend has a Chumby you can become online “chums” and send widgets to each other over the Chumby Network.
Okay.
But the surprising thing is that the $180 price tag on the gizmo is apparently not the core of the business model: “Chumby hopes to make money from ads injected into the stream.”
Hmm. Anyway, the article also names another of other “ambient internet device” enterprises. Here’s the piece.
Still keeping my eye on this one…
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Reader Comments
I’ve been interested in the Chumby for a while. I think the current $180 price tag is for what you might call a “development platform;” they’re making it available for folks who might be interested in developing software for the device, rather than end users. We’ve got one in the office where I work. I’m pretty sure that they know they’ll have to get it wayyy under $100 for it to be a success.
That said, I do think their imagined audience is “power users.” It seems like the main use case is offloading things like weather widgets from OS X Dashboard or Firefox extensions on to a discrete device. Because so many internet appliances have seen their business models fried for being hacker-unfriendly, they’re making their platform as open and hacker-friendly as possible. It may also serve as a good reference platform for other embedded applications like, combination toaster/RSS readers.
Good points, thanks…