CONNECTIONS™ welcomes Derrick Oien, CEO, chumby, Derrick is a speaker on the session Connected TVs: Beyond OTT. Enjoy as you read more about chumby’s challenges and advances.
What do you feel is the biggest challenge/obstacle for your company right now?
At chumby one of our greatest strengths is also one of our biggest obstacles. People who know of chumby, know of us as the Internet connected bean bag. While that is true and it has created a ton of chumby fans, it makes it difficult for people to realize that we really are a network of content that can be played across a wide variety of devices not just bean bags and photo frames. As we launch our set top box, television and tablet partnerships, we have to articulate how these platforms are simply an extension of what we have done in the past when we created and manufactured our own devices. It is also important that we do that without losing the core fan base that we have established so far.
What is your company's greatest asset/strength?
As a relatively new CEO at chumby, it became really clear to me early on that our experience working in environments with slow processors and little memory made us an ideal partner for companies who want to bring applications to their various devices. Working in these constrained environments meant that we had to figure out how to make applications work across categories like video, news, weather, sports and Internet radio in a way that provided a good user experience and also maximized every bit of computing power available to us. Our work and the work of our various developers has created a catalog of over 1500 applications that can be run on hardware that is already deployed today, whether that is a dedicated device like a photo frame, a television or a legacy set top box.
What new advances/changes has your company made in the last 12 months?
We are rolling out our first television related products in the set top box space as well as directly with television OEMS. We released android clients optimized for tablet devices. We are completing the integration of advertising across all of our platforms. We introduced a new photo frame hardware device in the last two months.
