What Exactly Is a Chumby?

Computers are cold, hard and uninviting. A Chumby is soft, playful and at the forefront of Web-enabled home and business-travel devices. So what exactly is a Chumby? Categorizing it has probably been one of the biggest challenges founder Steve Tomlin, 46, and his team has faced.

"We call it an interactive media player," says Tomlin. "It isn't a smaller, bigger or fancier computer. It's not something you already have."

The Chumby, which looks like a standalone car headrest with a built-in high-resolution touch-screen, is an always-on Internet-enabled device. It offers all sort of information. The Chumby is a clock. It's also an entertainment news feed, a calendar, a digital photo frame, a video player, a stock-quote display and nearly a thousand other things enabled from the widget applications that run on it. ...