Tag Archives: Chumby

Sync Your Passwords Between Macs Using 1Password and Dropbox, Bunnie Huang Unravels a Mystery, New Prototype Chumby Devices, Realmac Software On Sale, and an AppleScript to OCR your Scansnap PDFs.

It’s a widget-player…and a clock radio…and a digital picture frame. But where is it going now?

Chumby

Product designers and engineers everywhere are trying to re-envision how the commonplace things that we use everyday can be updated for a digitally-connected world. Alarm Clocks, Radios, Picture Frames, Coffee Makers — you name an existing small appliance — and somebody, somewhere is trying to stick a Wi-Fi card into it.

Chumby Industries has developed a gadget that does all of the above (except for making coffee, sadly) — the eponymously-named “Chumby” — and is also open source, allowing enthusiasts to customize its workings. And now, the company seems to be making a move to concentrate on the software side of things, licensing the platform to a wide variety of consumer electronics manufacturers.

Clearly, über-connected, totally-hackable devices like the Chumby are catnip to tech junkies like me…but will the technology “have legs” when rolled out to a mass market in items like digital picture frames and set top boxes for televisions?

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