Chumby Industries shuts down | Hacker News Reader

Chumby Industries shuts down

theverge.com

42 pointsjoe_bleau19 comments

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.

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.

Like a lot of failed companies, they built a product the market had no need for. I don't think this reflects at all on hardware startups - just poor investment.

Hardware startups can be very risky..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat

Very risky, but not all failures.

Square, FitBit, MakerBot, Nest, Tesla

I don't think Square counts as a hardware startup.

Food for thought, is a bank that only provides internet banking services and providing a 2-factor auth dongle a hardware company?

In fairness, I doubt most traditional banks actually design their own 2-factor authentication hardware. But yeah, calling Square a hardware company is nevertheless a stretch. (particularly as the hardware component is a freebie/loss-leader IIRC)

All of these companies are great, but have any of these companies reached sustainability? Most seem like they are still in investment stage and are trying to grow the company. I guess Square is the only exception here because they have a secondary revenue which is transactional payments.

C'mon, bad example. CueCat was dead at birth: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000037.html

It's hard to say from the outside whether the hardware was what killed them. Increasingly, hardware lives and dies by the software that comes with it. If they were building it today, they'd probably be basing it on Android or bits of WebOS or something and "standing on the shoulders of giants," to overuse that phrase some more. (i.e. reduce the effort going into the software stack) And the ARM chips and mobile browsers of today are quite a bit better, too. So maybe they were just ahead of their time. Or maybe they just didn't see the iPhone and iPad coming.

Chumby is gone. But it's lead engineer Bunnie has a new company, BunnieStudios. http://www.bunniestudios.com/

BunnieStudios makes the netv device: it's an HDMI pass-through injector, and it's interface is all web based.

The NeTV is a fascinating device. Until now it wasn't possible to manipulate video protected by HDCP unless you got an expensive license. Probably not doable for hobbyists and startups. Bunnie solved this by performing a man-in-the-middle attack to inject video in the stream. Since he is not decrypting anything he is not breaking the DMCA. Brilliant! The development platform is also really nice. They have a virtual machine with the toolchain setup so you can start developing immediately and push firmware to your device through the net.

Bunnie gives more details here: http://youtu.be/37SBMyGoCAU

Hopefully, he will have more success outside the consumer market.

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 ?

Yeah this is what I fear as well. I didn't know everything including the interface depended on a server. A little annoying once you figure it out after paying for one.

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.

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.

I had a chumby. His name was Grumpy. I sold him. Got out in the nick of time.

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.

Sad story of a multi-pivot failed, hope somebody there takes the time to write the posthumous, I'd read it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby

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