Chumby: An Experiment in Hackable Pervasive Computing

As computers become more pervasive, they become more personal. The ultimate pervasive computer would be as unique as the individual it serves. Unfortunately, consumer products are typically closed to protect the manufacturer's intellectual property—a policy choice that hampers users' ability to customize products to fit their unique environments. The chumby is a pervasive computing device and novel business model that were designed to explicitly enable hackers (or "lead consumers") to customize their experience and participate in the hardware intellectual property ecosystem through a unique end user license. The chumby ecosystem is architected such that sharing the product's engineering plans with end users doesn't adversely affect the product's commercial viability. Indeed, by exposing this "lens of engineering" to end users, Chumby Industries' customers actually add value to and help define the company's product.