After 6 Years and $26M, Insolvent Chumby Selling Remaining Assets

Alas, poor Chumby! We knew him well.

The Internet-enabled device of infinite jest and excellent fancy is now the unfortunate subject of an asset sale supervised by a trustee—Insolvency Services Group of Beverly Hills, CA, according to Mike Freeman, who broke the story in today’s U-T San Diego. To the creditors go the spoils.

As we reported a few years ago, San Diego’s Chumby Industries was the brainchild of Avalon Ventures’ Steve Tomlin, who conceived of Chumby as a simple Internet-enabled wireless device with a touch-screen that could display the time, weather, traffic, and serve as a music and video player. It was about the size of an old-fashioned clock radio, and had a soft leather look and feel. The Chumby gained capabilities over time, and also could stream Internet radio, YouTube videos, RSS feeds, news, stock prices, and other information. Wired magazine named Chumby to its top gadget list in 2008.

Over the past six years or so, the company raised more than $26 million from Avalon, Masthead Venture Partners, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, JK&B Capital, and others. As Chumby’s founding CEO, Tomlin led much of that fund-raising, secured a manufacturer in China, and built out global distribution and other aspects of the business.

Derrick Oien, a software executive with experience at Redwood City, CA-based Good Technology and San Diego’s Intercasting and MP3, took over as CEO in the fall of 2010. Oien spearheaded a move away from hardware and focused Chumby on licensing its technology and expanding the development of widgets for the Chumby platform.

During Oein’s reign, Chumby collaborated with UK-based Pace to expand into the market for Internet-connected TV and partnered with

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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.