CrunchPad Fans

It seems the only way you can get Arrington to talk about the CrunchPad is if some of his dear old friends ask him.

In a recent episode of the Gilmore Gang, which is a weekly podcast about technology with Arrington and other tech geeks, he stated that we will hear something shortly and that costs are actually coming down. He says:

The CrunchPad is great actually. It’s actually steam rolling along, everything is good. That stuff about costing was too high, I don’t know where it came from. Actually costs keep coming down. We’ve been working entirely on the software for the last month trying to make it perfect to get it to market. Should be good news on that shortly.

He also says it’s going to sell from “somewhere between 300 to 400 dollars” and the cost remains “in the high 200s, sort of all in”.

In addition, something we didn’t know before, Arrington says there will be some software revenue on the device such as sponsorships “without impacting the user experience” and of these avenues will include revenue from the search bar similar to how Firefox makes money.

It’s now November, the promised month for its release. We hope the price will be at the lower end of the range, but I have a feeling it’s at $350-375.

Arrington comes on at 38:50.

From GottaBeMobile.com

Nik Cubrilovic, the current CTO of TechCrunch and founder of TechCrunchIT and a series of technology start-ups, is working alongside FusionGarage on the CrunchPad, Asian technology community e27 reports.

Cubrilovic was the CEO of Omnidrive, an online storage service  founded in 2005 that competes with the likes of Box.net. In 2008, it entered the deadpool, probably due to the increasingly crowded online storage space. Phil Morle, the ex-CTO of that company quit after 5 months because he mentioned he was never paid.

Another CEO of a deadpool was reported to have been recruited by CrunchPad Inc, though that rumor was denied. But having that history does not necessarily say anything about the person’s competence.

From Scoble.

As a one man news site and a full-time student, I was overwhelmed with my final exams and couldn’t write as much. Nevertheless, hopefully you have received your news from other places. I will continue writing from now.

Initially envisioned to be a “dead simple” tablet for $200, the price had seesawed between $200 and $300 for a while, until Chandra Rathakrishnan, CEO of FusionGarage,  was interviewed by the Straits Times where it mentioned that the price is “not confirmed yet, though it is likely to be in the range of US$399 (S$575).”

This is obviously just a guesstimate of the journalist at hand and I have contacted him to figure this out (Update: Tan Weizhen says this wasn’t a guesstimate, but was from the source which is unnamed of course). The blogoshpere exploded when the $400 price was mentioned, yet it would help if some merit were attached to it.

In other news, Arrington has not kept his promise of holding a press event in July. In the Straits Times article, Chandra mentioned that it will be available around November.

Successful internet entrepreneur Keith Teare has denied reports published by Silicon Alley Insider that he is being wooed by Michael Arrington to become CEO of CrunchPad Inc.

Gabe Rivera of the technology news aggregator Techmeme, tweeted that he asked Keith in person about the rumor and that he denied being recruited as CEO (Teare has also denied it himself here). But there is no report yet on whether he is being recruited for any other CrunchPad related position.

Arrington told the NYT last week that operations surrounding the CrunchPad are taking two-thirds of his time and he “will remain actively involved for now, but wants to replace himself at CrunchPad and return his full-time focus to the blog.”

This would not be the first time Arrington and Teare worked together. In February of 2006, they co-founded Edgeio, an online classifieds platform which was used by publishers. But that didn’t last long, and in December of that year Edgeio, run by CEO Teare, joined the deadpool. Former Altavista CTO Louis Monier, who is now leading efforts surrounding the CrunchPad, invested $1.5 million in Edgeio.

One of the main problems with Edgeio was its high cost structure. Teare burned through $6 million of cash at Edgeio in less than two years, and by the time it was auctioned off, they had 11 full time employees.

And indeed, criticism some what exists of Arrington’s abilities to sell the CrunchPad at a low price point while keeping costs down. Laura DiDio of ITIC told TechNewsWorld that “if he can sell it at around $300 and make money, more power to him.”

When Edgeio went under, Arrington said “In general I’ll say this – it is unwise for a company to spend a lot of money building out infrastructure before a product proves itself.”

A person who claims to work for a company that supplies parts to Acer says they have been shown a demo of the new Google Chrome OS.

The entire blogosphere went bonanza, but here is the kicker: they didn’t even get the Google logo colors right.

Update: A fake as expected.

It looks like the clones didn’t come out from China this time, but from the UK – and from a publication. The Register, an often satirical British technology news site, has released the phony RegPad. Designed for Reg readers, it runs on a Vulturium processor (sounds faster than Intel’s Core i7) and has a “wireless connection rates of up to 8 petabytes per millisecond.” Best of all however is the biscuit dispenser which seems to be designed specifically for the morning users.

Google has just announced the making of Google Chrome OS, its latest onslaught against Microsoft. Sundar Pichai, VP of Product Management, explains that users are fed up with current operating systems since they want to check email and browse the web without having to wait for a computer to boot.

FusionGarage, the Singapore start-up which was acquired by CrunchPad Inc., is also developing an awfully similar concept. In fact, Pichai’s post itself looks like a mirror of Michael Arrington’s post a year ago.

Comparing Google’s post with Arrington’s vision:

Google: We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better.

Arrington: I’m tired of waiting – I want a dead simple and dirt cheap touch screen web tablet to surf the web.

Google: The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.

Arrington: Just a Macbook Air-thin touch screen machine that runs Firefox and possibly Skype on top of a Linux kernel.

Google: People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up.

Arrington: The idea is to turn it on, bypass any desktop interface, and go directly to Firefox running in a modified Kiosk mode that effectively turns the browser into the operating system for the device.

Google: Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.

Arrington: So let’s design it, build a few and then open source the specs so anyone can create them.