B1BLOG

This is a Chumby (the thing with the screen, not the cof­fee cup). And, out of the box, it doesn’t do a hell of a lot. OK, it does come with a clock/radio and – this is the impor­tant bit – a wire­less inter­net connection.

The inter­net con­nec­tion gives you access to an ever increas­ing range of Flash-based wid­gets that you can use to add extra func­tions to your Chumby. Using the touch-screen or squeeze-sensor, you can view pho­tos on Flickr, the lat­est news from Digg or your day ahead on Google Cal­en­dar – and in future, who knows what else. Of course if that was all, it wouldn’t be that inter­est­ing (wid­gets are not exactly new news).

The really inter­est­ing thing is that Chumby is com­pletely open source. The peo­ple behind it have released soft­ware and hard­ware devel­op­ers’ kits and are actively encour­ag­ing users to hack, mod and gen­er­ally pimp their creation.

Essen­tially, if you have the skills, you can do what you want. Write new wid­gets. Tear out the innards and install them else­where (the tele­tub­bie is par­tic­u­larly scary). Or lit­er­ally re-skin the unit (in leop­ard­skin if you like).

This com­mit­ment to co-creation and open source think­ing is so smart. The engage­ment that Chumby is receiv­ing through their blog, forums and devel­op­ment wiki is price­less. They will end up with a bet­ter prod­uct with more inter­est­ing fea­tures and a com­mit­ted com­mu­nity of users who get the chance to show­case their own skills through the product.

While the open source approach is becom­ing more wide­spread, it is still the excep­tion rather than the rule. But it is the future – for tech com­pa­nies, for cus­tomers and for agen­cies. Per­son­ally, I can’t wait.

Sources: TechCrunch, psfk, Christine.net

No related posts.