The NYT has a bog entry about the Chumby, a little open source Internet device. Besides the lame blog posting that doesn't actually link to the Chumby site (I mean seriously, no link?), the business model is what I want to you pay attention to (no not the advertising part, which I don't know enough about to comment on, but I know most people most of the time don't like advertising, but if their only revenue stream is on the sale of the hardware, that is not as good as having a continual revenue stream from the ads). From what I've read, Chumby runs widgets, and the OS is Linux (yay open source!). People who can code (the geeky early adoptors) can make widgets for it. That is the genius of it, which honestly is rather old hat at this point but not enough companies understand that. Here is the bull's eye sentence:
Chumby Industries is betting that those early, tinker-mad consumers will transform its product into something more compelling to the rest of us.
