Our approach from the beginning has been to put early devices in the hands of people who would give us constructive feedback — and we’ve evolved from giving chumbys only to alpha-hackers, to giving them to Flash developers to, recently, getting them to “normal" people — at least the most “normal" (i.e., non-hacker, non-developer) people we could identify who registered on our site and filled out our survey ;^)
We learn important things at each step and keep improving the product based upon this. So, I guess we’ve been running an extended real-world focus group, with our “testers" actually living with the product for awhile so their feedback is more valid than knee-jerk. The product has improved a lot through this process — I’ll try to do a post soon on some of the new additions we’ve made thanks to your collective patience. But our goal with this approach, and I’m sure you’ll all appreciate this, is to get the product to a level of capability that you will be delighted to buy one for $179.95, or to give one to someone as a gift, and will regard it as an unbelievable value at that price.
Chumbys will go on sale in the U.S. this month, September, as promised. International is next year sometime — frankly hasn’t been a big focus for us so far but will become so quickly after our domestic launch. This month we’ll be conducting what we’re calling our “Insider’s Launch," which means that we’ll be getting back to each person who has sent us their email address and will give them a link to buy a chumby. Still won’t be open to the general public yet, probably not until October or maybe even November, but starting this month and running through October we will be sending out regular batches of emails to all of those people, hopefully including all of you, who have expressed interest to us and sent us your email addresses. Certainly want to put our longest-standing and most patient fans first in line.