Strategy at San Diego’s Chumby Coming to Fruition Under New CEO

San Diego’s Chumby Industries, creator of the consumer gadget that is a plush toy, alarm clock, Web terminal, and video and music player, raised an additional $3 million in debt, options, and rights to securities, according to a regulatory filing yesterday. The latest funding, which co-founder and investor Steve Tomlin describes as “no real news…simply a planned follow-on tranche from our existing investors,” brings the total capital raised to $26 million since Chumby started almost five years ago.

If the funding was routine, however, there’s nothing routine at the startup these days.

Tomlin has stepped down as Chumby’s CEO (he remains on the board). He was replaced at the helm about five weeks ago by Derrick Oien, who was previously a senior vice president at Good Technology, the mobile tech developer in Redwood City, CA. Before that, Oien was a co-founder of Intercasting, the San Diego mobile social-networking developer that was acquired by Good Technology in 2009. He also served as the chief operating officer at San Diego’s MP3.com.

Chumby classic
Chumby classic

I must confess that I never really “got” the soft-and-cuddly Chumby, now called the Chumby “Classic,” when we profiled the company last year. But I’m finally coming to understand that the stuffed animal as a Web-enabled device was a kind of stalking horse for a broader vision of the company’s software technology platform, an Internet apps portfolio that now has more than 1,500 apps, and a gadget that serves as a model for a host of similar category-defying consumer electronics devices.

This became clearer in February, when Sony Electronics unveiled its “Dash” personal Internet viewer at its North American headquarters in San Diego. The Dash, which Sony sells through

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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.