I hope they are wrong, but in my opinion, they are not far off as far as Chumby's relation to the Captivate displays in my office building's elevators.  I watch them because I am stuck in the elevator.  If they were in the hallway, I would just keep walking.  Sure, unlike Captivate, I can program which streams the Chumby plays, but it still is a product that most people just won't get.

Honestly, I think they are losing a huge market by marketing a product that is so open-ended.  If I was in charge of marketing, we would be marketing it as the world's best alarm clock...and focusing on everything around that.  The clock would rule..and it's clock functionality would be best of breed.  Forum members complaining about screen brightness at night, lack of ramping up audio for alarms, alarm reliability, alarm sounds, et al. indicates to me that the focus on the alarm clock aspects of the Chumby have just not been a priority.  Other channels?  I would market those as items that are ancillary to the clock.  "Wake to weather and news!  Check weather quickly before you walk out the door!"

I would also make sure that widget navigation was extremely straightforward and focused mostly on the clock being displayed, but allow you to quickly get to another widget...especially weather.  Perhaps a handful of hard buttons...one with perhaps a silkscreened sun/cloud icon...another with a newspaper...and one with a clock....or reserve some screen real estate for single-touch access to core widgets.

What we have now is far more flexible...and far geekier...and far less consumer-oriented...and most folks just are not going to get it.  If it was marketed as an alarm clock, many non-geek consumers would get it instantly...and the geeks here would figure out how to get it to do far more.  Chumby could dominate a niche...or they can continue to try and market the device's flexibility and mostly fall on deaf ears.  BTW, alarm clocks may be a niche...but they are a niche that everyone has at least one of...and mostly hates...and would probably not mind replacing if you could convince them that yours would make their life better.

I have other ideas if you folks want to fly me in.  Just make sure that you buy an extra seat for my soapbox. 

cheers,
Steve

Well, the alarm clock is just one function of the device. I personally feel that they are overemphasizing (in marketing) the alarm clock functionality of the device. Basically, if you look at the device (insofar as to the product design itself) and the software UI, it is essentially supposed to be a customizable "internet window." Also, if you read a lot of the reviews of the device by non-tech oriented publications, you will find that they focus on the device almost completely as an alarm clock and consider everything else it does to be somewhat secondary. Which is, to a degree, what I believe the guys at Chumby Industries were trying to achieve. It seems to me that they thought the idea of an information appliance would scare off a lot of people, and so instead focused the marketing on, while not specifically calling it an alarm clock +, a slight emphasis of that feature, so that people get the impression that the Chumby is an alarm clock +.

Your idea about adding hardware buttons to the device is, at least seemingly, a good idea. However, when you consider that they are trying to make the device as non-threatening as possible for the non-technically inclined, then you can see the logic behind not having more hardware buttons. And, one must admit, that insofar as the hardware design goes, they have succeeded in making perhaps the least threatening looking/feeling piece of technology ever (I don't think anyone can come up with something less threatening than a leather covered bean bag with a screen).

One of the things they talk about when people start suggesting using the accelerometor for widget switching or adding button or extra functions to the one non-power switch on the device is the concern about having too much hidden functionality. According to (I think) Duane, some people in the company thought the one built in button itself was too hidden. And, using the device, especially after having gone through the simple set-up procedure, I am hard pressed to call it any part of using the Chumby threatening or unintuitive, save for perhaps the my streams music functionality, but even then only for excessively long station URLs.

I do agree with you overall assessment however insofar as what markets are likely to be interested in the device, although I honestly do believe that to be more a marketing problem than anything else.

Sure, but look at how they market the iPhone or the iPod...

They are a phone and a music player respectively, but both capable of so much more. Getting this across to the public is a real skill and I wouldn't know where to start.

That's why I'm a programmer and not a marketing expert!

This is a great discussion, guys.  And interesting to us because we've made, and still make, all of these same points to ourselves.  How *do* you best market this thing we call "chumby"?  After all, it *isn't* a clock radio or an Internet radio or a digital photo frame or anything else: it's a *chumby*!  To bow towards the larger market and not just to those early-adopters visionary enough to "get it," we have of course had to emphasize some specific features, like it being "a better wake-up," and we're going to continue to make the case for the chumby's real usefulness in so many parts of your life (e.g., for me, right now, it's the only way I'd ever derive value from a podcast).  Not to diminish the totality of things the chumby can do or its flexibility, but you'll see and hear real demonstrations of real people finding clear and unique value with their chumbys -- plural form intended :^).  Specifically to get beyond the thrust of a lot of the press we've been receiving: "here's another fun little techy gadget!"  Yes, I'm the CEO, but the chumby makes my life better every single day, amuses me, delights me, allows me to know something I didn't know before, and enhances my "social capital" with anyone who sees one in my house, which is of course the best marketing tool of all :^).  And from the blog posts, Forum posts and our surveying, people who get a chumby almost universally seem to think it's better (and getting still better all the time) than they expected.  So we'll keep focusing on delighting our early-adopters, while still trying to do a better job of making the "why a chumby?" case to a broader market.

But don't get overly distracted by our hardware story -- that's only part of what Chumby Industries, the company that we all want to see prosper, does.  We see the bulk of the value residing in the Chumby Network.  We opened our hardware spec and published it for a reason.  We want to see the Chumby Network on every sufficiently-capable Internet-connected screen in the world, not just our own.  So, to try to be clearer, the *real* value in Chumby, and in *the* chumby, is when there are lots of people, including many that you know and love, also on the Chumby Network.  Then your chumby device is better and so is the fast-growing world of digital photo frames, LCD TVs, and every other imaginable connected screen that carries the Chumby Network.  Our marketing focus is there.

I keep my Chumby on my nightstand...and just between us Steves, there is far less occasion to entertain new friends in that area since the wedding. 

Of course, if you guys add a network proxy ability, I would be able to show off another one at work. 

I'm happy to hear that. One of the widgets I looked at was "FrameChannel." I went to their web site and realized that the Chumby's competition (as it appeared to me then) was digital picture frames. And with the latter now appearing in a wide variety of sizes, I thought the Chumby would have an increasingly hard time competing. After all, FrameChannel (which looks like a creation of of digital frame manufacturers or their trade association) obviously wants to expand the info that can be displayed on a picture frame. By including news, weather, sports scores, etc., they make frames look more and more like Chumby's.

Based on your post, above, though, I'm now guessing that instead of "photo frames" being competition for "Chumby's," it'll be "FrameChannel" as competition for "Chumby Network."

Unless, of course, those two organizations are one and the same, or cooperating.

We really don't see digital photo frames as competition for Chumby, but rather as delivery platforms for the Chumby Network -- simply yet another screen in the "Blade Runner world" of connected screens everywhere that we live in.  You will see DPFs delivering the Chumby Network -- not the super-cheap ones, but the higher-end ones that have connectivity and some decent electronics in them.  We also don't see Frame Media as competition.  Yes, they deliver information to connected screens, but currently it's an extremely limited content service with no open publishing model, no easy content sharing, no rich media like audio, animation or video, no "future-proofness" from over-the-air functional updates, ...  It's probably the best option currently possible for really low-end digital photo frames, but it doesn't seem like it's trying to be what Chumby is trying to be, i.e., the full "10 pounds of internet" squeezed into these "5 pound packages" of net-connected screens.  Frame Media seems more like "1 pound of the internet" presented in "1 pound packages."  That said, we're delighted that they produced a Chumby Frame Channel widget -- for someone who wants what they provide, why not make it available on the chumby?  Let 100 flowers bloom.

Part of the inherent problem here, I think, is the misconception in articles like the one posted is that the Chumby is an "alarm clock".  While it is, that's kind of like marketing a car by only focusing on the fact that it has a radio. While the Chumby is an alarm clock, Joe Consumer isn't going to pay $180 for one. Especially not one that contains advertising, even in small amounts.

Honestly, I don't know what the answer is for Chumby, because I think that pushing ads on the device is a bad business model. People aren't going to go to the trouble to configure their own content and show the device off to their friends and family, only to have to embarassingly explain why it contains ads. By the same token, folks aren't likely to pay a subscription fee to eliminate the ads for a device they don't really "need".  To be perfectly blunt, had I known that the device would arbitrarily push ads and/or content that I had no control over, I would have never purchased it in the first place. I managed to get all the way through the website and through the order process without realizing this was a possibility. Quite frankly, the fact that unrequested content can appear on the device isn't extremely clear on the website. It is only through a little digging that you'll notice that information. Again, I don't think all of this really weighs in the Chumby's favor, and this first and foremost is what needs to be thought through.