My new gig

So...

Yeah. Well I didn't really take much time off between gigs.

A couple of weeks ago, I took over the ceo position at chumby from Steve Tomlin. We had been thinking about external communications and for the most part wanted to talk to partners like Sony and Best Buy and some others prior to saying anything in public. Somewhere along the way, I forgot about this press release which hit the wire as I was coming back from NYC and Boston last night, so I guess it is time to say, this is what I am doing!

I have been close to the chumby team over the last several years, but certainly the most with Steve Tomlin who founded chumby and was also my investor and board member at Intercasting. Beyond Steve, the founding team of Bunnie, Duane, Ken and the rest of the team at chumby have done an amazing job creating not just a product, but a product that people actually buy!

In addition to having success with their own product, the idea that the chumby network of flash applications can be proliferated on other devices has been validated with their work with Sony on the Dash and with Best Buy on the Infocast. Expect to see more of that on devices like tablets and televisions in the coming months.

For me this gig brings some new challenges and some familiar ones. A significant part of the job going forward will involve working with content companies, which I have done throughout my career and also marks a return to the advertising world, where I cut my teeth at MP3.com and at Vivendi. The new challenges are consumer electronics and working with retail distribution. My past two gigs at Good and Intercasting involved working with some of the same players that I expect to work with in the future, although in a different context.

I am excited to take the helm at chumby and look forward to helping to scale the business beyond the success achieved thus far. It is a great honor to take the reins of a company that you have watched someone build from scratch and I will do everything in my power to deliver on that promise to the team, to our partners, and to the many people who have become great fans of what chumby has done thus far.