Quick heads up to RSS subscribers: I got word earlier that the RSS feed wasn’t updating properly (thanks, Nuno). Turns out the feed was indeed missing the 5 latest posts, which explains why you’d now have a few unread items from this blog.

You might have missed today’s post on how the Chumby failed, a post on what I’ve been reading lately, one on Design Research, a great quote from Adam Greenfield, and the first post (on a series of three, 2 still to come) on the lessons we learned so far at WBS. I’m sorry about the inconvenience – shouldn’t happen again, unless Feedburner goes back to its misbehaving antics. Now back to the regular program!

Remember the Chumby? I sure do, as I just saw mine in one of my miscellaneous electronics drawing. In it it lay, quiet and turned off. Chances are it won’t be getting turned on again unless in a totally different form, torn apart, serving as middleware for some other random system during a random electronics hacking session – for I don’t see any other use in it except scavenging material.

It sure did have potential, however. I remember when it was first announced everyone at Foo Camp was totally excited about it. The possibilities, the mistery, the sheer awesomeness of what could be the perfect open platform – a PIY (program it yourself – I just totally made that up) tool (and cute looking too). Alas, it failed. Why? That is what I attempt to explain in the following paragraphs.

The open platform… that never was

Imagine this: wifi, powered, touchscreen device that runs Linux and packs one headphone and two USB ports. Sounds awesome, right? It does, and I’m not describing the next Apple tablet, JooJoo or OLPC. I’m describing the Chumby as it was three years ago (and still is today). Allowing such a device to be hacked at by developers around the world would create an ecosystem of applications running on bedsides and desk tops everywhere.

All it needed was the ability to run, say, Ruby, Python or Perl code. It might even work well with just a browser and people would build web-apps for it (like this other device, the iPhone, did for a while). But no. In order to build apps (they call them widgets) for the Chumby, you needed to use Flash. Flash, with all its merits, is not the platform you want to build embedded device widgets on. However on the Chumby, it was your only option.

And so started the limitations. Real developers gave up on it (not that those that did not aren’t “real” – they are just patient enough to deal with flash, which is “unreal”), and that made the widget catalogue look like a glorified clock theme download platform. Which is what it is to this date^[1].

When a great device becomes a clock

I find it hard to believe that at least some of the people working for Chumby aren’t bitter for how things turned out. After all, it was one of those ideas that you knock your head against the wall for not having. Open, hackable, affordable, good looking device? Sign me up. Well not now – now we’ve got the iPhone and Android.

When you believe you’re changing the world and you end up with a cutely-shaped alarm clock/paperweight, you have got to rethink things and see where you went wrong. Not seeing the potential in the platform is where the Chumby failed miserably. They had 3 years to date to realize this, and still haven’t. Apple once said no third party apps would ever run on the iPhone, and then corrected their mistake – now there’s companies like TapTap making a million dollars a month on it. I wonder where good old Chumby might be, if only they opened it up just a little bit more.

Footnotes:

^[1]: At the time of this writing, the all-time most popular widgets are the Weather Channel, two widgets for the New York Times, Roboclock (a clock widget) and David Letterman’s Top Ten. No joke.

I’ve been slowly but steadily getting my reading habit back and have been amassing books to read during the next few weeks. I thought I’d share my current reading list for those interested, and take the chance to ask you what you’re reading right now – as one can never have too many books lined up.

Glimmer, that I referred to in the last post on Design Research, is a great book by Warren Berger on research, process, inspiration and design as a potential solution for the world’s pressing problems. It covers this material with perspectives from designers such as Bruce Mau and Yves Behar, which makes for an interesting read.

Design As Art, by Bruno Munari, is an inspiring voyage into design as a whole and as an art (as the name would imply). I’ve refered to this book in particular in a recent post. It’s worth the purchase for the feel of a well bound Penguin Book alone. And then there’s the content, but it being a Bruno Munari book you know you’re covered.

I got Change by Design by Tim Brown in the mail last week and I can’t tell you how excited I was – I had been waiting for the book to be released for quite a while now. Change by Design is a book on innovation and design thinking. Haven’t gone through it yet, but it is definitely next on the list.

I’m also reading A Week At The Airport by Alain de Botton, that I’ve heard about (if I recall correctly – apologies for the uncertainty) from a post by Dan Hill over at City of Sound. It is a book that tells the experience Alain went through as Writer in Residence for a week at the Heathrow Airport in London.

There’s a bunch more books either in the queue or that I’ve just finished but in order to stop myself from boring you to death with this post, I’ll just briefly list some of their titles:

• Free, by Chris Anderson
• In the Bubble, by John Thackara
• Shaping Things, by Bruce Sterling (which came in the mail today)
• Everyware, by Adam Greenfield (re-reading, waiting for his new book)
• Tribes, by Seth Godin
• SuperFreakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

Curiously all the books I mentioned are hard copies, and while I have a Kindle I seem to have never really picked up on the habit of substituting real books by their digital counterparts. However, the fact that the Kindle now supports native PDF reading is making me use it more often for papers and smaller publication reading. The Kindle DX, however, might make me want to leave more books at home when I travel.

What have you been reading? Anything I should be picking up?