Sony Tablets Open New Opportunities for San Diego’s Chumby

Bruce V. Bigelow8/31/11Follow @bvbigelow

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about $29 million so far from Avalon Ventures, Masthead Venture Partners, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and JK&B Capital, has applied most of the financing arranged last year to reposition the company around televisions and other devices, Oien says.

Currently, the biggest drawback to Chumby’s cloud-based apps is the limited interactivity they offer. For example, a Chumby app can display a Twitter feed, but users can’t click on a bit.ly URL embedded in the message. It’s a shortcoming that Oien hopes to address by deploying a browser capability on Chumby-powered devices.

In particular, Oien says Chumby is looking to provide some interactive capabilities so users can respond to Facebook notifications such as new messages and friend requests. It also wants to add the ability to use its digital picture frame display app to make telephone calls, presumably on devices with a built-in camera and microphone, and using a third-party Voice over Internet Protocol service.

Oien describes Chumby’s relationship with Sony as “really important” because it has helped to validate how Chumby is moving beyond its own hardware—and because of the opportunities to include Chumby’s apps in connected TVs, Blueray players, and other consumer electronics.

With connected TVs, for example, Oien says, “Manufacturers are putting all their money into the display technology and the glass. But they’re not as focused on the computer processing power, so a lot of our software and hardware works very well for these television applications.”

Bruce V. Bigelow is the editor of Xconomy San Diego. You can e-mail him at bbigelow@xconomy.com or call (619) 669-8788 Follow @bvbigelow