• Registered: 2011-03-04
  • Posts: 6

Topic: Some answers please

I have enjoyed my Chumby immensely.  I pretty much only use it for an alarm clock and listen to Pandora which I subscribe to and use on all my computers and TVs as they all connect to the Internet or the home network.

How much longer will we be able to get service out of the hardware we own?  Are there contracts in place to support the servers?  With no store and no sources to buy any hardware I am confused and don't know what to think.

Thus my question.

Thanks

  • bobsz
  • Blue Buddy
  • Offline
  • From: Long Beach NY
  • Registered: 2011-01-01
  • Posts: 546

Re: Some answers please

@Dereks- There's been a lot of us wondering things like that, on several forum threads. But Chumby (ie, Duane) has been really good about letting us know about events as soon as they develop. They've mentioned they've already changed their servers to reduce overhead, and working on ways we can use our Chumbies when their servers are unavailable, like in an outage. It sounds like they're scrambling to do as much for us as possible, with really limited resources. (We might have been more patient when they tried using ads if we knew where things were heading.) There's also still a lot of Chumby hackers at work, so maybe they'll come up with something, too.

  • From: Australia
  • Registered: 2009-03-19
  • Posts: 503

Re: Some answers please

Dereks wrote:

How much longer will we be able to get service out of the hardware we own?  Are there contracts in place to support the servers?  With no store and no sources to buy any hardware I am confused and don't know what to think.

On the other hand, I would argue that Chumby's exit from the hardware business bodes well for the future of the Chumby service. As Duane has stated, there was always an intention to exit manufacturing once they had built up sufficient product awareness to make Chumby a licensable commodity to other, larger manufacturers.
If time, money and energy no longer has to be devoted to hardware manufacturing, then the whole focus of Chumby Industries becomes the maintenance and development of the 'soft' side of things. Furthermore there are now large manufacturers out there who have paid licence fees to embed Chumby into their devices who also have an expectation (and maybe even a contract, who knows - this would presumably be commercial-in-confidence info) that the Chumby servers will keep operating.