Chumby keynoted at the Adobe MAX conference in Las Vegas

At this morning’s opening keynote presentation at the Adobe MAX conference, it was thrilling to hear Al Ramadan, Adobe’s Senior Vice President of their Mobile and Device Solutions Business Unit, discuss how the chumby was the coolest Flash device he has seen — and, even better given our target market, how his son, Lucas, loved it. Here’s a lousy photo of the event that I took with my camera phone — however this photo was almost instantaneously streaming over my chumby because I MMS’d it from my phone up to my flickr account where my chumby grabbed it and displayed it in the flickr photo viewer widget.

And here’s a better photo from flickr (taken by Andrew Muller with a real camera)

It was pretty amazing to see our little chumby on a 30-foot screen (actually several 30-foot screens) and in front of 3,000 Adobe/Macromedia faithful.

Even better was the fact that Al mentioned us to lead off his presentation. So we got top-billing over both the Sony PS3 (that has Flash embedded in it) and today’s announcement of FlashLite 2.1 on BREW over Verizon — at least that’s how we see it :)

But top-billing for the chumby is probably appropriate because, unlike with any cellular carrier, Flash developers can put their creations up on the Chumby Network right away and with no onerous certifications, third-party distribution agreements, business negotiations, and deck placement wrangling. Simply upload it and it’s there for hundreds (soon many thousands) of chumbians to share.

After the keynote, Duane Maxwell, our head of software engineering, attempted to conduct at the conference a so-called “Birds of a Feather” session about how to create and upload widgets to run over the Chumby Network. Unfortunately due to poor organization and communication over which day, when and where this session was to be held (this part of the event was IMO a total disaster), only a handful of “feathered birds” were able to persevere and find Duane’s session. The good news was that these attendees received prototype chumbys and are, we hope (remember, you promised!), developing cool new widgets that will show up on the Chumby Network soon.

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Not slacking, working!

Sorry to all who have been looking for an update here or who have sent a message to us through our site and haven’t heard back from us. We have been more than a bit crazed keeping Chumby on the launchpad under an aggressive timetable — and frankly haven’t had time for opining. I can assure you that Chumby is very much alive and kicking and hope that you will be impressed when you see the enhancements we’ve made beyond the existing alpha-level prototypes. I won’t give away the news here but, if you spend some time on the Forum, http://forum.chumby.com/, you’ll probably get a good sense of what’s coming :)

We’re going to be giving a “Birds of a Feather” session at the upcoming Adobe MAX conference in Las Vegas, so if you’re attending, please look us up. It’s Tuesday night from 8:30-10:00pm.

Here, I think, is the summary of our session:

Creating Widgets for the chumby, an Open, Hackable, Teen-oriented Wi-Fi Flash Device

In this session, you’ll learn about the hardware and software environment for developers in Chumby Industries’ “chumby” wifi-enabled Flash device. The chumby runs an enhanced version of FlashLite 2 and enables Flash developers to create, test and deploy Flash applications to users. Chumby has taken a very “open” approach to supporting both developers and users – the chumby comes with source code and schematics for the device itself, and there are very few limitations and no fees associated with creating and publishing Flash movies for the chumby.

We’ll have a fresh batch of prototypes available in November and, as noted, we will be giving a few more away. If you’re an amazing Flash developer (who’s happy working with FlashLite) and can point us to some of your work, please let us know you’re out there.

Stay tuned for an update after Adobe MAX.