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August 29, 2006

Chumby

I am sitting in a hotel room right now, having just awakened to the pleasant wake up song I put on my Nokia N90 phone. But as you know, one of the basic tenets of the LMNO construct is that mobile phones are not really mobile phones anymore – they are connected media networking devices. Or more to the point, media networking is the new communication construct, and the “device formerly known as the mobile phone” is a device that is enabling this new communication construct. There is a long chain of value being built now to deliver the full value of this evolved communication, and one link is the device. We will see converged devices, like my N90, that is a phone, but also a text messaging device, camcorder, calendar and, given it’s 1.0 weight and size, doorstop or, in a pinch, bludgeoning weapon. We will also see verticalized devices like Danger’s HipTop (SideKick) which is so optimized for instant messaging that few people use it for much more.

Then there is Chumby, which falls well outside of the realm of devices that I had been considering likely to enable the LMNO communication revolution.

Let me step back for a moment and ask you about consumer electronic devices. There are certain categories that have not been refreshed for decades:
- the blender
- the calculator
- the digital clock

Ok, the blender is not exactly a consumer electronic, but I mention it to illustrate that the basic design is nearly perfect: It needn’t do anything more than blend. How do you improve it? The only way is industrial design, capacity and maybe the size of the motor. Other than that, when it does what it is supposed to do, the consumer is satisfied. Adding wifi to it doesn’t improve it.

Basic calculators are practically free now. Yes, you can buy graphing calculator to help with your calculus and trig, but I mean the basic adding machine that AP clerks everywhere still use. It adds, it subtracts, it multiplies and divides. Adding wifi to it doesn’t improve it.

What about the digital clock? I am looking at the one next to the bed right now. I didn’t even bother trying to set its alarm for this morning, and I never bother to use its big innovation, the radio. This one is a Sony, it has red numbers. This is the most tired of all consumer electronic categories. It is useful, but only to confirm information that I already have on my watch and my cell phone, both of which are more fault-tolerant than an electric clock if the power goes out. This particular application, the hotel room clock, annoys me the most, because there is information that I actually need while traveling, and can’t someone replace that clock with a device that provides that information? Rather than 6:18am, shouldn’t it tell me the weather and the traffic conditions on the route to my important meeting? How about showing my news alerts for the company I am going to meet so that when I get there I can intelligently discuss their big announcement today or the fact that they are being probed for irregular stock option grant practices?

My point is that this is a category of consumer electronics that could be massively improved and updated. Let’s add wifi to the digital clock. Then let’s make it display cool and useful information. And let’s make it open and easy to build widgets for, empowering millions of Flash developers to publish applets. Let’s even make it hackable, like a vanilla platform, the many purposes of which we have not yet contemplated.

When Steve Tomlin, an investor in Intercasting Corp, described Chumby to me six months ago and asked me how I would describe it, I immediately thought of the digital clock. “This is like a digital clock on steroids,” I said, because it is as simple to use as a clock, but built for today’s technological environment.

It is also “anti-tech” in that the industrial design is more like a beanie baby than a digital clock or a small computer. I like that even the skin is customizable.

It is sort of a soft-sided teletubby with an LCD screen and a wifi radio inside to which you can push information RSS-style. If RSS is a transport mechanism, Chumby is a termination point. Someone built a widget that syncs to a time server, so there’s your digital clock. It can also show local weather or traffic conditions. Add news alerts if you want. We are building a little Rabble widget just because. Why not stream audio and video, too? And why not put one in the kitchen as your recipe server rather than spilling soup on your laptop again? (Yes, I did.)

Now the fun part: Why not build a network of Chumbys that are all location-aware based on their IP addresses? Hack an upstream temperature transmitter into them that does nothing more than transmit micro-weather in locations not covered by major weather stations and then make the aggregate information available to whomever wants it. The weather report said it is raining in Chicago, but what about specifically in Bucktown, right now?

Anyway, check it out. This is the kind of special-purpose device that just makes perfect sense in the media networked world.

Posted by Shawn Conahan at August 29, 2006 08:19 AM

Comments

Posted by: Michaela L. Rodwick at August 29, 2006 12:45 PM

Posted by: Wes Biggs at August 30, 2006 08:21 AM