OStatic

Chumby Industries announced this week it has secured $12.5 million in Series B funding that will allow the company to "accelerate growth of the company, and expand and broaden the Chumby Network to other screen-based Internet connected devices." This is great news for Chumby fans who will hopefully soon see some new features and improvements to their gadgets. It also shows that venture capitalists, who have been talking about supporting the open source community for a while now, are willing to put their money where their mouth is.

What's a Chumby? Well, it's not exactly a toy, although kids love it. It's not a computer, though it relies on the Internet for functionality. Essentially, the Chumby is an interactive device that connects to the Internet via your wireless network, and lets you customize the interface with whatever widgets you choose. Check the weather, watch a Panda Cam, view videos at YouTube, or watch your Twitter feed by downloading one of the dozens (and counting) widgets already available at the Web site. You can even chat with other Chumby users by typing on the device's touchscreen.

The makers of Chumby have designed it to be completely hackable, even going so far as to post its schematics online for anyone to download. Hackers are encouraged to improve the design, take out the innards and repackage them into new housing, and, of course, create as many widgets and people can dream up. Essentially, Chumby is almost completely a collaborative project.

Of course, this kind of collaboration can only take a product so far. The typical Chumby user won't have the facilities to do research and development on touchscreen technology or do much testing of inter-compatibility with other devices, so VC funding is a great way for the company to explore product improvements that are out of reach for most hackers.

I'm glad to see venture capital firms helping companies rooted in open source take their products to the next level. This isn't the first open source company to receive this kind of support though, and naturally won't be the last.

What open-source projects would you like to see receive an infusion of VC funding?

• venture capital
• vc
• chumby