Feeling
overwhelmed by information overload? Wait, there's more
coming. A lot more.
Chumby is a pretty goofy device with a
silly name and a weird shape. And nobody needs one. But
it's worth checking out because we're going to be seeing
a lot more devices like this, smart little machines
constantly fetching information from the Internet,
spreading the Web beyond the realm of PCs.
"We're already living in a Blade
Runner world, where we're surrounded by connected
information screens," says Stephen L. Tomlin, chief
executive and cofounder of Chumby Industries in San
Diego, Calif.
Sci-fi movies never anticipated that
the future would be so, well, cute. Chumby weighs 13
ounces and looks like a little leather beanbag with a
screen. Plug it in, let it find your Wi-Fi network and,
boom, you're on the Chumby Network, pulling weather,
music, news, photos and trivia from the Web.
You can choose from more than 400
streaming widgets on the Chumby Web site. Keep track of
your friends on MySpace and Facebook, see photos from
Flickr, check in on your Ebay bids, read right-wing
blogs or left-wing newspapers, watch sports videos or a
videoclip of David Letterman's Top Ten List, listen to
podcasts or check out your daily horoscope. If your
friend has a Chumby you can become online "chums" and
send widgets to each other over the Chumby Network.
Chumby has a virtual keyboard that
pops up in some applications--for example, when you
search for music on Shoutcast--but this isn't a device
for typing and sending messages. It's for reading and
viewing. The touch screen handles mostly simple commands
like "play" and "stop" for music streams. You might
think of Chumby as a souped-up clock radio and digital
photo screen with a toylike exterior hiding a full-blown
(albeit tiny) computer running the Linux operating
system on a chip typically used in portable devices.
You pay $180 for the device, and
there's no subscription fee for the data streams. Chumby
hopes to make money from ads injected into the stream.
Tomlin describes his target customers as "people with
rich Internet lives," meaning people who can't bear to
be untethered. I have to admit I'm one of these people.
The idea of having a Chumby sitting on my desk sending
me news feeds and Chuck Norris jokes while I'm working
makes perfect sense to me.
Apparently I'm not alone, because
these so-called ambient Internet devices are springing
up everywhere. A firm with that very name, Ambient
(otcbb:
ABTG.OB -
news -
people ) Devices, sells wireless desktop baseball
and football tickers ($125 each), a seven-day weather
forecaster ($200), a stock market ticker ($125) and an
umbrella with a handle that pulses with blue light if
rain or snow is in the forecast ($125). Another company
sells a cute plastic bunny called Nabaztag ($165),
which, like Chumby, picks up the Internet from your
Wi-Fi router and feeds you a wealth of information, with
the added (and superannoying) feature of being able to
speak.
My Nokia (nyse:
NOK -
news -
people ) N800 tablet computer mostly serves as a
fancy touch-screen remote control for a music server but
also feeds me news headlines, runs photo slide shows and
plays Internet radio. (I also use it to Web-browse,
e-mail and make phone calls via Skype. That's a lot of
gadget goodness for under $300.) In my living room
another ambient device, Logitech's Squeezebox music
player, pulls music from the Internet and scrolls news
feeds.
The biggest ambient device may end up
being the digital picture frame. These things were a hit
over the holidays with sales up fivefold from the year
before, according to NPD Group. While most frames just
display pictures stored on memory cards, some high-end
models now can connect to the Internet. Currently all
most of them do is zip photos back and forth, but once
this thing can attach to the Net why not add all the fun
stuff that you can get on a Chumby?
In fact, that's Phase 2 of Tomlin's
master plan. He aims to let people attach non-Chumby
devices like picture frames and Net-connected LCD TVs to
the Chumby Network. He's trying to persuade hardware
makers to use the Chumby Network rather than build their
own online services.
One way or another, Chumby-like
streams will soon be coursing through things all around
us: our TVs, photo frames, clock radios, portable music
players, GPS navigation screens in the car. One of
China's hottest advertising plays is Focus Media
(nasdaq:
FMCN -
news -
people ), which has 140,000 networked LCD billboards
and TV screens throughout the teeming country.
Information overload is about to go into overdrive.
