If the Chumby does what it says, I want one yesterday. I can use it to keep up with my RSS feeds and also listen my music. Sounds brill!
Chumby is different. The chumby was not created in the design department of some big consumer electronics company. Market analysis and focus groups were not performed. Frankly, there wasn’t very much traditional consumer electronics experience brought to bear at all.
We made it all up. Chumby Industries was formed by hackers who wanted to create something interesting, useful and different. The starting point was the humble clock radio.
Um, this is the Internet era, isn’t it? Why is this still sitting next to my bed?
What we decided to build was a really low-cost, wireless (WiFi), Internet-connected device that will sit on your bedside table (or in your bathroom, or kitchen, or living room, or maybe even plug into your car somehow…) that could do a lot more than this old clock radio (or your cellphone, if that’s what you use to wake yourself up.) And we named it “chumby.”
It’s designed to show pictures that your friends send you from their cellphones, and messages from your IM buddies, your blogs and social network sites. It can display your daily horoscope and the weather, and a whole community of artists and animators can send their creations around the chumby network to entertain you.
In fact, you can set up your chumby to show you almost any information you want, and anything your friends want to send you. And of course it will wake you up: only not just with lousy AM and FM, but with your MP3 files or podcasts from the Internet, from your computer, or even from your iPod™.
Oh, and it’s really different looking. It doesn’t look like a clock radio, or a PDA, or a cellphone, or a laptop computer, or a picture frame, or anything else. It’s soft, even kind of squishy. You communicate with it by tapping or grabbing it (there’s a “squeeze sensor??? inside it, similar to the ones that used to be inside the Nintendo Power Glove™ from days gone by.)
Nice! Especially under the glint of the disco mirror ball.
We also decided that the chumby would be different because it will be “open and hackable.??? If you happen to be another card-carrying hacker, you can blow off the warranty, pull out its electronic guts and reprogram it. If you’re more of a “crafter,” we’re providing patterns so you can give your chumby a new skin. You can sew on patches, attach enameled pins, bury it in glue and glitter; whatever you want to do to personalize it. If you’re a Flash artists, we hope you’ll use chumby as a sort of always-open art gallery for your coolest stuff.
Clearly, a chumby isn’t intended to replace electronics you already own. It doesn’t have a keyboard, so don’t plan on using it to deal with your backlog of email. The chumby is designed to let you stay connected to your Internet life in locations where it might be fun and convenient.
We’ve now built a few hundred and and are in the process of getting feedback from early users, mostly hackers and artists. We want to learn what people think of chumby, and how they’d like to use it or collaborate to make the world a chumbier place.
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And I want me a chubby.
Cue the Rolling Stones, someone…