Hey! What happened to my widgets?
Chumby Industries closed its doors in December 2011, and laid off all of its employees.
Since then, the service has been maintained by a small group of volunteers, and paid for by a succession of companies. The volunteers were notified that the funding would cease at the end of February, 2013, with the prospect of the devices being rendered completely useless.
In January 2013, one of the volunteers initiated an effort to create a company to acquire all of the remaining assets of Chumby Industries for the purpose of maintaining the service. That company, "Blue Octy, LLC", completed the transaction in mid-February.
However, the cost of maintaining the full service in its previous form was prohibitively expensive for an individual to fund. Due to the short time remaining before the prior funding ran out, it was decided to create a "stub" service that would keep enough going to allow the devices to start up, authenticate with the service, and allow the use of alarms and music, and the playback of a single, fixed, widget - a clock.
The database of user accounts, device registrations, widgets, channels, etc. has been completely backed up for the purpose of restoring the full service at some future date, once the economics have been set up to make the service sustainable. In other words, our strong hope is that the limited service you're looking at today is temporary.
This "stub" service is designed to support the following products:
- chumby Classic, chumby One, chumby 8
- Insignia Infocast 3.5" and 8"
- Insignia Connected TV
- WOWbox 3.5" and 8"
- chumby Lite (Android)
- chumby for Sony Tablet S (Android)
If you have a Sony dash, your device is now supported entirely by Sony. Please visit http://www.sony.com/mydash to manage your device.
Please give us your input by visiting the Chumby Forum at http://forum.chumby.com and follow us on Facebook and Twitter
Save Chumby. a video by Ryan Shelley on Vimeo
