Web 2.0 Startups: Will Geek Chumby ‘Fade Away’ in 2008?
What is on Tim O’Reilly’s Radar for 2008? His own investments, of course! BUT, will his portfolio company Chumby really “change our future”?
A “big part” of O’Reilly’s business is “paying attention to what’s new and interesting in the world of technology,” proudly proclaiming ”We have a pretty good track record at having anticipated some of the big technology events in recent history.” Web 2.0 CONFERENCE, for big example, “launched a worldwide meme.”
O’Reilly belives he has an uncanny ”predictive sense” and brands it the “O’Reilly Radar.” He also has self-declared a “catalytic” impact on technology:
Creator of the first commercial website (GNN),
Organizer of the summit meeting that gave the open source software movement its name,
Prime instigator of the DIY revolution through its Make magazine…
WOW! What is the O’Reilly secret? He offers but a “simple” methodology: “we draw from the wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst, paying atttention to what’s interesting to them, amplifying those weak signals, and seeing where they fit into the innovation ecology.”
Perhaps deceptively simple, though.
O’Reilly told a college student in 2001 that his company was “instrumental in spreading the early gospel of the Web.” He also indicated how such a “catalytic” impact on technology dovetails with the economic best interests of his own company:
Our open source advocacy grew naturally from our involvement with open source communities and the technologies they developed.
For example, my early PR efforts on behalf of open source were sparked by the immense press coverage of Microsoft’s ActiveX (which no one was using) and the lack of any coverage of Perl (which our book sales indicated was a core Internet technology). I saw an injustice, realized that open source communities had no PR machine at their disposal, and started making noise on their behalf.
A core principle of O’Reilly has always been to “do the right thing.” As the company has grown, we’ve had a larger platform for advocating technology issues. But, this is also good marketing.
O’Reilly Media is driven by a “philosophy” to pursue “advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism,” as a for-profit business model tenet.
When O’Reilly speaks then, is he speaking for himself personally, or to “evangelize” a favored “cause”, or on behalf of one of his ventures…or are all motivations inexorably intermingled towards a singular O’Reilly-centric economic end game?
The end game of O’Reilly’s final post of 2007 is clear: Promote a Web 2.0 startup he has a financial interest in, Chumby, portfolio company of O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.
What is Web 2.0? O’Reilly wrote the book on it, literally ($375 in PDF version)! O’Reilly Radar is crystal clear: “O’Reilly Media gave Web 2.0 its name.”
Michael TechCrunch Arrington gives Web 2.0 startups their names, daily. Odd, indeed, then, that Tim O’Reilly dismissed out of hand the “obsessive” work of Arrington’s TechCrunch on the very eve of his own beloved Web 2.0 Summit in October:
TechCrunch is the #1 site on the Techmeme leaderboard, yet most of what it covers will be forgotten not merely in years but in months, and have proven to be completely unimportant: the froth of me-too company creation around ideas and trends that as yet are quite immature and poorly understood. (Michael Arrington himself told me that most of the companies he’s covered since starting Techcrunch “have just faded away”.)
REALLY? TechCrunch has covered O’Reilly’s financially favored Chumby! Will Chumby just “fade away” then in 2008???
Chumby is certainly on O’Reilly’s favored ”alpha geeks” list of favorites. BUT, is that REALLY a good thing, for the commercial future of Chumby?
Cory Doctorow “can’t wait” to see his geek “toy” go into “wide distribution.” Ryan Block wants the “squishy and oh so adorable” Chumby at his bedside.
Chumby would be foolhardy to count on crossover dreams in 2008, however. After all, how big is the market for what the The New York Times calls an “Internet enabled alarm clock,” saddled with a $179 price tag.
John Markoff recently spent “a night with Chumby,” a non-inspiring one:
You connect the Chumby to your home’s wireless network and then configure it from the company’s website by selecting various software widgets and organizing them into channels which then cycle endlessly on your Chumby’s 3.5-inch color LCD display. The obviuous widgets are weather, news, alarm clock, stocks…Chumby cycled dutifully throughout the night.
PLUS, the BIG caveat:
Chumby reserves the right for the company to insert its own widgets (a.k.a. advertisements) into my widget stream. Like everybody else in the Web 2.0 era, Chumby is hoping to subsidize its business and the Chumby network by selling ads.
Ads on my alarm clock? Is this the cool site of the day or a step closer to “Minority Report?”
O’Reilly claims an “audacious goal” for his AlphaTech Ventures, as he does for every spoke in the O’Reilly Media hub, “funding entrepreneurs to transform the technologies and trends of the alpha geeks into world changing companies.”
Chumby may change the sleeping patterns of some geeks, but the world at large will undoubtedly NOT be losing any sleep in favor of Chumby in 2008.
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