[Cross-posted from Kpao!]

I plunked down my credit card no more than five minutes after seeing David Creemer’s mention of the Chumby.

Here is the first product I have seen that embodies the future envisioned at the dawn of the Web era. An unobtrusive, wireless, sub-$200 Internet terminal with no specific purpose.

That no-specific-purpose part partitions people who hear about the Chumby. Some see it as its greatest weakness, others see it as its greatest strength. I’m in the latter camp. I think the potential and relevance of this class of device is enormous. Here are some scenarios:

Alarms of every stripe: It’s time to wake up. It’s time to sell Google. It’s time to move the car for street cleaning. My checking balance is getting low; better transfer some funds. Oh my, something big exploded somewhere. Oops, we left the garage door open. Looks like a storm is brewing. Uh-oh, traffic is bad on 101. Oooh, Tahoe got a huge dump of snow. Oh! Was that an earthquake? How big, and how far? Hurry! Wii’s are available! Shh! Stay low! There is someone at the front door and he’s carrying a clipboard!

Ambient awareness: What time is it? How many minutes before my next appointment? Ah, my web traffic is growing nicely, and I even made $0.42 this week with Adsense. Cool, there’s the updated status of a bunch of my Facebook friends. It’s Friday night and three of my friends have no plans; maybe I will call them. Hmmm, it’s only foggy in my neighborhood of San Francisco, not everywhere How does it look in St. Catherine’s Street in Montreal? Does the baby look ok with the nanny? We’ve been using a lot of energy this month. Philip’s birthday is in a few days.

Control: Time to put the house lights, climate and security in bed-time mode / away for the evening mode / away for vacation mode. Time to put on ambient jazz or groove or drone or classical or acoustic chick rock or energetic rock throughout the house to suit the current mood. Tell the DVR to record Heroes and Earl.

Tools: Alarm clock. Kitchen timer. Game timer. My favorite Epicurious recipes. The family calendar in the kitchen.

Decoration: Ah there are photos showing what I was doing every year this month for as long as I have been collecting digital pictures.

Communication: Receive a video voicemail. Press a couple of buttons and record a voice message to your spouse.

On-demand radio: Listen to the latest NPR news broadcast in the bathroom, when you are shaving.

One could go on. I could imagine several Chumby’s around the house as views and controllers being fed by the same model. (Our mobile phones would take part, too.)

One piece apparently missing on the platform is a coherent infrastructure for pulling together alarms, ambient awareness, control, and tools. From what I can tell, the first batch of applets will be disjointed, inconsistent, mostly useless. The signal-to-noise ratio of useful vs. demo applets is too low, as happened with Palm apps and desktop widgets.

But with the Chumby, the technology and price point have arrived. The only thing in the way of most of these scenarios is a mere matter of design and code.

Posted by Philip Haine on Saturday, December 8th, 2007 at 2:43 pm.
See similar articles in: Commentary, Great Designs, Needs Analysis, Product Vision & Strategy.

One Response to “The Potential of Chumby”

1. Philip Haine wrote on August 21st, 2008 at 12:12 am :

   Update 8/21/08
   Now that I have an iPhone, a lot of the benefits of this cute little information appliance have been supplanted.

   The iPhone does a better job of giving me news, entertainment, music, and connecting me with friends.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.