Archive for July, 2007

Personal Widgets – Chumby

Friday, July 20th, 2007

Connected alarm clock, touchscreen photo-frame, Desktop email reader, Desktop RSS Reader…possibilites are limitless with Chumby.

A decent processor packed inside a soft cushioned, good-to-feel casing, 3.5″ LCD color touch screen, wi-fi connectivity promises to take your ‘connected life’ anywhere you can imagine. Think about a Chumby sitting on your side-tables under the nightlamp, tuning in to your fav RSS feeds/emails in the morning, and being a clock in the night.

Take Chumby on the move, wherever you go. Have Wi-Fi, Chumby can get you online. Dont like the widgets available in the community? Write your own widgets. Dont like some feature or miss some feature, Hack the Chumby! Chumby offers full HDK & SDK and is completely open source, so you can hack the guts.

I think the device holds a good potential in becoming a useful consumer tool, for variety of uses. Chumby should be in market by Summer 2007, and will be priced well under $200. Awesome, cant wait to get my hands on one :-)

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SunRocket Fiasco. Packet8 gets customers

Wednesday, July 18th, 2007

Update: Official Press release is here

Sunrocket tanked. (This really is not a emerging technology to belong on this blog though!).

Other VoIP providers are all over the lost customer pool, to get them in their customer base. Packet8 is the newest entrant. Not sure if they have anything official to do about this or not. (see Update)

Question here is, how the transition will happen? As evident from teh press release, Packet8 will not honor any charges paid to SunRocket. So does this mean that existing customers will see new charges on their bill once the service is transferred to Packet8?

One GOOD thing is that if you were on a pre-paid yearly plan with Sunrocket, and paid by your CC, you can try calling your CC company and just say Sunrocket :)

I did so, couple of moments ago, and all she wanted to hear was SunRocket, and she started the dispute process and did a full temporary refund to my account. I get th refund in next billing cycle, and in the meantime the dispute process would run in parallel.

Here I come Packet8, lingo, Vonage ( take me back pls!!), ComCast. Oh, not ComCast. :)

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Chicago startup – LifeShadow

Friday, July 13th, 2007

It is a rare opportunity to see startups coming out of Chicago area, funded and backed by some industry veterans.

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