Wired on Friday: A small, plump black cloth-covered gizmo you can hold in the palm of your hand, the Chumby appears about as unprepossessing as a piece of consumer electronics can be.
It looks like a hamster's beanbag, with a little TV screen embedded within it - or perhaps what you'd get if you chopped the head and limbs off a Teletubby.
When you first turn it on, it's just as modest in its features. You need to plug it in to a wall socket, so that's not its killer feature. Left on its own, the only thing it can do is act like a soft alarm clock, plugged in next to your bed or desk. For an estimated price of $150, (€116) that's quite an expensive alarm clock. But that's part of the idea. It's not what Chumby starts out as - it's what the Chumby can turn into that spells out the manifesto, the business model and the future of this intriguing device.
Chumby was the brainchild of Bunnie Huang and Steve Tomblin, noted hardware experimenters and internet entrepreneur and venture capitalist respectively. Chumby's killer feature is the same as the internet's: its initial power, flexibility and openness. What they're trading on in the hardware world is what so many web companies are depending on in the online world: user-generated content.
The Chumby's alarm clock default belies quite how crammed it is with capabilities. The screen is 320mm by 240mm and has a touch screen. It has a microphone input as well as stereo speakers. It can tell when you squeeze it and how hard you're squeezing. It has an ambient light sensor and two USB ports. Detecting and acting on all of these inputs is a near-complete PC, running Linux, with 32MB of RAM.
There's also a built-in Wi-Fi connector, and your Chumby finds and connects to nearby Wi-Fi networks and immediately starts running its own web server.
The Chumby comes with a CD and development kit that contains everything a dabbler in computer hardware or software may want to know to create their own Chumby feature.
The display is driven using Flash, the graphics program that millions of web designers use to drive complex graphics on websites.
Even though the Chumby's prototype has only been handed out at a small invite-only conference, the truly curious can already download all the schematics for the gizmo and build it themselves. Everything from the type of rubber that its surround is made out of to a full list of every capacitor, resistor and microchip used in its electronics is provided.
Even the outer surround of the Chumby is meant to be easily modified. The rubber that holds its soft cloth surround is designed to be soft enough to sew on to by hand. The company provides flat designs for fabric makers to create their own Chumby covers.
As Bunnie Huang, the lead designer says: "We consider not only open-source software hackers, but also hardware hackers and artists and "crafters" - people who are equally skilled in their ability and passion to do non-computer things, such as metalworking, sewing, or carpentry".
The idea then, is to create a small, network-enabled thing that has lots of possibilities, but whose use and limits are defined by its users and community of modifiers rather than the company itself.
That poses three questions that must vex not only the Chumby's inventors, but any company riding on the same ideas of openness that Chumby represents.
Firstly, are there really enough enthusiasts willing to put in the (free) work to make this possible? The answer, for Chumby as well as the internet, seems to be a clear "yes". Wikipedia and Flickr, Linux, YouTube, the IMDB and FriendsReunited show that if there's enough of a return, there is a huge audience of creators willing to help.
Secondly, if you give away the crown jewels of your intellectual property, won't you be ripped off? What is now to stop another company from manufacturing and selling Chumbys for cheap, perhaps even before the "real" Chumby has even launched? This is a much trickier question, and one that away from the millions being pumped into these experiments by venture capitalists, may still be unanswered.
In Chumby's case, the model is subtle: each Chumby registers and connects to the Chumby company's server. Chumby owners can fine-control their devices and can easily download the latest user-generated widgets from this site. It's expected that Chumby will charge a small subscription to remain connected to this server.
Third-party faux Chumby's aren't permitted to connect to the Chumby server - and Chumby developers currently have to agree to a licence that forbids them from competing with the service.
Chumby walks a fine line here. A few hackers feel that any limit on their freedom to do work with the Chumby is painful and intrusive; similarly, sites like MySpace and LiveJournal regularly deal with user rebellions when they try to introduce restrictions on what their users can do, or attempt to take control of their users' work.
So far, the correct approach (and less damaging route) has been for the companies to give into their users' demands. Right now, Chumby doesn't seem comfortable or big enough to make that final step.
Finally, and the killer question. The Chumby is cute, but it's no iPod. It's not a gleaming, intense focus-group product of a large professional team of designers.
Geeks and hackers are already drooling at the chance to play with it - but is there any way that it can go beyond play, to being something that everyone will have instead of an alarm clock?
That we can only wait and see. The Chumby makers call their aesthetic "anti-iPod": not closed, secret and shiny like Apple, but open, inviting and malleable. It may be a niche - or, as widgets from a blood-pressure monitor for your grandma to a cheap burglar alarm emerge, the Chumby may turn into the new IBM PC.
Endlessly retooled and modified, sometimes ugly and clunky, sometimes sleek and beautiful, but always and everywhere a ubiquitous part of our lives.
