Sony Tablets Open New Opportunities for San Diego’s Chumby

[Updated 8/31/11, 3:30 pm. See below.]The new 9.4-inch Tablet S that Sony is introducing today includes many features that the consumer electronics giant hopes will be compelling for users, including access to Sony’s network of PlayStation video games, music, movies, and other entertainment services. The Android-based tablet also can “throw” steaming video or music to Sony’s Bravia HDTV and other devices certified by the Digital Living Network Alliance.

But it’s the catalog of free apps that are available when the tablet is idling or recharging that has San Diego-based Chumby Industries CEO Derrick Oien contemplating a vista of new opportunities.

As we’ve recounted previously, Chumby began in 2006 with an electronic device that’s partly an Internet-enabled clock radio, Web terminal, and streaming video and music player, and part soft stuffed toy. Yet the company really was conceived as a software services company, a strategy that began to blossom early last year when Sony unveiled the Dash, an Internet-enabled device akin to the Chumby “Classic,” which Sony created with its own hardware and design, and software licensed from Chumby.

By this time last year, when Oien stepped in as Chumby CEO, the company had more than 1,500 Internet apps in its portfolio, and was working to expand its partnerships with Best Buy and other consumer electronics companies. Last month, the company revealed that its apps would be available on set-top boxes from Pace, the U.K.-based developer of digital TV technologies.

When I talked with Oien this morning, he said Chumby has had a lot of discussions with Sony about its “dark screen” strategy, which basically enables an Internet-connected clock, digital picture frame, and other apps to appear on the display screen of an idle device. “Chumby is really like a music player,” Oien says. “But instead of playing music we play apps, like your Twitter feed, news, and sports.”

[Updated to clarify chumby is pre-loaded just on Tablet S] Placing Sony’s Tablet S into a specialized charging cradle, which Sony sells separately, automatically converts the tablet’s display into a digital photo frame or clock. Oien says users also can access more than 1,500 other Chumby apps by registering  for a free Chumby account. “Every single Sony tablet now shipping will have our software baked into their device,” Oien says. (A chumby spokeswoman clarified that chumby’s software is pre-loaded only on the Tablet S set for launch in September, and not Tablet P, the clamshell-style tablet that Sony is planning for later release.)

While Chumby was always a software services company, the new strategy has really come into focus over the past year or so. The company, which has raised

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.