Where is it going?

In the months ahead, it looks like lots of things will also be “Chumby Devices”:

• Broadcom Extends chumby® Platform to Internet-Connected TVs, Set-Top Boxes and Blu-ray Disc® Players
• MARVELL AND CHUMBY COLLABORATE TO BRING INTERACTIVE INTERNET EXPERIENCE TO CONSUMER DEVICES
• Samsung and Chumby Power Always-On, Internet-Connected Digital Photo Frames
• Even Sony is trying out the service in demonstration devices

With these new partnership announcements, it’s clear that Chumby’s business seems to be transitioning from that of a specialty hardware maker to that of a content network. While business schools often teach students the basics of operating a company by asking them to imagine they are selling “widgets” to their customers, the irony is that this is exactly what is Chumby will be in the business of doing — at least, they are selling a platform to widget-makers and advertisers.

For Love or Money?

The success of free, open devices depends on the ingenuity and dedication of their user base — and it’s interesting to compare Chumby’s development community activity with that of the iPod Touch or the iPhone.  At about $200, Chumby is priced about on par with an iPod Touch.  Unlike Apple’s model of mixing free and paid content, it seems that Chumby will continue to offer all of it’s content free for people who own a Chumby device (at least… for now).

In an article in the New York Times last year, Saul Hansell pinponted the dilemma for a company (and an open-source device) like Chumby. “Why would advertisers pay, for example, to reach a platform they could get to free?”

I hope that they do.  Philosophically, I’ve always liked that Chumby’s approach has been open source and D.I.Y.   There is a strong developer base and community of users who are developing both software and hardware hacks for the device — and the engineers working on the device are clearly committed, talented people with a love for technology.

Development of Flash widgets has been slow but steady since Chumby has been in beta.  While it may not be fair to expect that Chumby could create the same financial incentives for developers that Apple’s App Store does, I don’t think that it would be out of the question to see development efforts kick-started in the future by some sort of revenue-sharing arrangement between advertisers and widget makers.

I think that the Chumby device as a platform is less important than the Chumby Network as a means to connect platforms to one another via widgets. Windows Sidebar, Mac OS X Dashboard, Yahoo, Konfabulator…. the current state of informational widgets is totally Balkanized.  As more people expect that their information be available on all of their connected devices, could one widget network come in and unify the market?

Yes — and I think that manufacturers of consumer devices will like Chumby’s “turn-key” approach to leveraging those Wi-Fi connections to add value for their customers.  Time will tell whether Chumby Industries will also make inroads into the Desktop widget market, opening up new opportunities to tie together all of your computers, digital picture frames, televisions, and — yes — little bean-bag alarm clocks that sit at your bedside.

Somebody is going to figure out how to do it — and when they do, the “widget factory” will go from being an exercise of a professor’s imagination to a lucrative, real-life business in very short order.

Available on Amazon.com

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