Yes, exactly! Or, to be more explicit, here's my perspective on how a chumbified PC could become a significant part of the modern computing experience.
I own three chumbies (all classics). I bought the first one when the chumby was fairly new. At the time, the chumby was was ahead of its time, and to a certain extent I still think that the chumby is just hitting its stride now. More accurately, the way people think about using technology and information is just now reaching a point in which an always-on very easily customizable internet video and audio player can become an important part of our everyday lives. That's certainly happened in our household, where each chumby plays a significant role in those three rooms in the house.
Thanks in part to the wildly popular iPhone/iPad/iOS/App Store and the mainstream success of Apple's "it just works" design and marketing philosophy, consumers are now looking for and even demanding that the internet and information in general be offered to them in the most convenient way possible, through highly customizable but very easy to use mechanisms. The chumby is the distilled essence of one solution to that demand.
That's why I was so excited to hear of the screensaver. I don't think the announcement was quite done in the right way however-- it's significant not because we can "turn our monitors into chumbies", but rather because bringing full-screen chumby apps and chumby philosophy to mainstream PCs is potentially a very big deal... if chumby (the company) is willing to take the bull by the horns and drive the opportunity to widespread adoption.
Apple is frantically trying to get an App Store for Macs open by 1-2 weeks from now. That move is ingenious in some ways, but missing the point in other ways. The problem is not that it's otherwise inconvenient to buy applications for our Macs-- it's that there aren't many desktop computer applications that are designed to passively transmit information, entertainment, culture, news, etc. on our computers in an easy-to-use, customizable way. So right now I see a niche in which the chumby world put on PCs and Macs everywhere could become quite popular, especially for those computers that aren't 100% dedicated work computers (i.e., probably 70% of all computers in this country, especially the ones sitting in our closets that we no longer use because they aren't sufficient for modern work tasks but are plenty powerful for chumby apps).
If it helps with coming up with a tenable business model for such a product,
1) It's presumably not too much more work to develop than the screensaver that you already have
2) People would pay money for this app (my guess is at least $10-$20 per MAC address)
3) Or you could offer the app for free with small advertising a la Google apps and make money from advertisers
4) It would immediately leverage the MUCH larger PC+Mac community of developers to make new apps for the suddenly much larger PC/Mac chumby customer base.
What do you think?
-David
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