Chumby: The Internet Reading, Wi-Fi’d Multitool.

These last three weeks I have had the extreme fortune of working on the Chumby Web site. I was the XHTML/CSS guy for a dream team of developers. Susan Kare did the graphic design, Zina Powers working on content and Duane Maxwell cranking out some amazing Rails code. It was a lot of fun. (The rest of the Chumby team is brilliant as well, those are just the three I worked most closely with.)

Chumby is basically a cute, cuddly, Internet ready clock radio with a LCD touch screen and flash player that can stream media via wifi. “Web 2.0 meets low end consumer devices“, as it is being heralded by O’Reilly, who ran the Foo Camp where it made it’s debut yesterday.

Chumby is completely open, inside and out. You can hack the chumby’s hardware, software, casing/shell/covering, completely customizing it as you see fit. The real question: will it run Quake? This will probably be the first thing I attempt to achieve with it :).

It is already generating quite a bit of noise in the blogosphere. (Including being written up on techcrunch and engadget) I’m excited to see where it goes. More than that, I am excited to see a chumby in person. One is apparently making it’s way to Iowa in the near future. I’ll tell you all about it as soon as it arrives.