I'm pretty surprised this is just getting out now. The company essentially ceased to exist as anything but a legal entity back in December of last year.<p>However, most of the team is still working together at a new company as mentioned in the linked article on theverge. And most of us still even sit at the same exact desks we sat at while working for chumby.
I'm interested to know what HN thinks this means for hardware startups. Is this a case of Chumby not executing well enough or is it too hard to build a hardware startup? I think it's the former, but many people out there including investors seem to think otherwise. Some even go as far to say it is not worth doing a hardware startup because software scales soo much easier.
Chumby is gone. But it's lead engineer Bunnie has a new company, BunnieStudios. <a href="http://www.bunniestudios.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.bunniestudios.com/</a><p>BunnieStudios makes the netv device: it's an HDMI pass-through injector, and it's interface is all web based.
Can't say this is unexpected... I haven't used my chumby for months, but does it mean the chumby channels are going to shut down as well after this summer, leaving everyone with a useless box that cannot do anything ?
I still use my Chumby as an alarm clock, and it works really well. I hope that it will be possible to keep it running without the chumby servers through some hacks.<p>Really sad to see that it didn't work out.
Maybe I'm cynical but this reads as an innovator becomes a zombie, a patent portfolio that's worth billions in potential lawsuits, or perhaps more fuel for the arms race.
Aw sad day. I had one of the original Chumby's right after they went on sale. Haven't used it in year since the wifi became so flakey but it was nice at the time.
$17.5m raised and lost for a leather-coated-open-source-widget-powered-alarm-clock in their early days, to a smart-TV platform in their later days.<p>Sad story of a multi-pivot failed, hope somebody there takes the time to write the posthumous, I'd read it.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby</a>