Chumby and the Ambient Web

Feeling overwhelmed by information overload? Wait, there's more coming. A lot more.

Chumby is a pretty goofy device with a silly name and a weird shape. And nobody needs one. But it's worth checking out because we're going to be seeing a lot more devices like this, smart little machines constantly fetching information from the Internet, spreading the Web beyond the realm of PCs.

"We're already living in a Blade Runner world, where we're surrounded by connected information screens," says Stephen L. Tomlin, chief executive and cofounder of Chumby Industries in San Diego, Calif.

Sci-fi movies never anticipated that the future would be so, well, cute. Chumby weighs 13 ounces and looks like a little leather beanbag with a screen. Plug it in, let it find your Wi-Fi network and, boom, you're on the Chumby Network, pulling weather, music, news, photos and trivia from the Web.

You can choose from more than 400 streaming widgets on the Chumby Web site. Keep track of your friends on MySpace and Facebook, see photos from Flickr, check in on your Ebay bids, read right-wing blogs or left-wing newspapers, watch sports videos or a videoclip of David Letterman's Top Ten List, listen to podcasts or check out your daily horoscope. If your friend has a Chumby you can become online "chums" and send widgets to each other over the Chumby Network.

Chumby has a virtual keyboard that pops up in some applications--for example, when you search for music on Shoutcast--but this isn't a device for typing and sending messages. It's for reading and viewing. The touch screen handles mostly simple commands like "play" and "stop" for music streams. You might think of Chumby as a souped-up clock radio and digital photo screen with a toylike exterior hiding a full-blown (albeit tiny) computer running the Linux operating system on a chip typically used in portable devices.

You pay $180 for the device, and there's no subscription fee for the data streams. Chumby hopes to make money from ads injected into the stream. Tomlin describes his target customers as "people with rich Internet lives," meaning people who can't bear to be untethered. I have to admit I'm one of these people. The idea of having a Chumby sitting on my desk sending me news feeds and Chuck Norris jokes while I'm working makes perfect sense to me.

Apparently I'm not alone, because these so-called ambient Internet devices are springing up everywhere. A firm with that very name, Ambient (otcbb: ABTG.OB - news - people ) Devices, sells wireless desktop baseball and football tickers ($125 each), a seven-day weather forecaster ($200), a stock market ticker ($125) and an umbrella with a handle that pulses with blue light if rain or snow is in the forecast ($125). Another company sells a cute plastic bunny called Nabaztag ($165), which, like Chumby, picks up the Internet from your Wi-Fi router and feeds you a wealth of information, with the added (and superannoying) feature of being able to speak.

My Nokia (nyse: NOK - news - people ) N800 tablet computer mostly serves as a fancy touch-screen remote control for a music server but also feeds me news headlines, runs photo slide shows and plays Internet radio. (I also use it to Web-browse, e-mail and make phone calls via Skype. That's a lot of gadget goodness for under $300.) In my living room another ambient device, Logitech's Squeezebox music player, pulls music from the Internet and scrolls news feeds.

The biggest ambient device may end up being the digital picture frame. These things were a hit over the holidays with sales up fivefold from the year before, according to NPD Group. While most frames just display pictures stored on memory cards, some high-end models now can connect to the Internet. Currently all most of them do is zip photos back and forth, but once this thing can attach to the Net why not add all the fun stuff that you can get on a Chumby?

In fact, that's Phase 2 of Tomlin's master plan. He aims to let people attach non-Chumby devices like picture frames and Net-connected LCD TVs to the Chumby Network. He's trying to persuade hardware makers to use the Chumby Network rather than build their own online services.

One way or another, Chumby-like streams will soon be coursing through things all around us: our TVs, photo frames, clock radios, portable music players, GPS navigation screens in the car. One of China's hottest advertising plays is Focus Media (nasdaq: FMCN - news - people ), which has 140,000 networked LCD billboards and TV screens throughout the teeming country. Information overload is about to go into overdrive.