Kerbango

» see kerbango.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

in 2000 i was sixteen, on a 33.6k modem at home in ankara, listening to mp3s ripped from cds friends had passed around at school. kerbango was building a product i could not have used if it had shipped. an always-on internet radio box that assumed you had a broadband connection plus a us-based streaming radio directory, wired into your living room. really though, none of that existed in the neighborhoods i lived in until several years later.

kerbango inc had been founded in cupertino in 1998 by a small team out of the palo alto embedded-linux scene. jon fitch was the ceo. the box itself was an embedded linux device with a rotary dial and an lcd, dual-band wireless was added late in development, ethernet was the default. it also had am and fm tuners as a fallback for when the wire was unplugged. the pitch was that you would tune to bbc world service or npr or any of ten thousand streaming stations the same way you tuned to a broadcast frequency.

3com announced acquisition on 27 june 2000 for around eighty million dollars in stock. the plan was to fold kerbango into a new internet audio division alongside the audrey web appliance and a couple of other pilot products. either way, by early 2001 the box had won best of show at ces in las vegas and had a pre-order page live on amazon.com. all the industry press pieces from january 2001 assumed the product would ship in the second quarter.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the ces 2001 booth demo was the peak. reviewers loved the physical dial and the fact that the box worked outside a computer without any pc software. really though, cnet and edn both filed positive coverage. for whatever reason the audio pipeline used red hat linux inside and gave the company an early public case study in commercial embedded open source. amazon set up the pre-order slot at 299 dollars with expected shipping listed as march.

~ the day it died ~

on 21 march 2001, 3com posted a note that it was dissolving the internet audio division as part of a broader restructuring. the audrey web appliance and the kerbango internet radio were both cancelled the same day. really though, no boxes were shipped to any customer. the amazon pre-order pages went from "coming soon" to gone. the reason 3com gave was cash conservation: its own stock had collapsed with the broader dot-com correction from march 2000 onward, palm was being spun out, the company was cutting anything that would not ship revenue inside the current quarter.

give or take a couple hundred units had been built for reviewers and internal testing. those got auctioned on ebay over the following years as collectibles and a handful ended up at the computer history museum, which still has the prototype in the catalog. still, the closest a kerbango box got to a paying customer was a nine hundred dollar ebay listing in 2004.

~ the funny part ~

the actual product idea, a stand-alone internet radio with a directory service, took another four or five years to reach the market. c. crane and sangean and roberts all shipped similar devices between 2005 and 2008. still, none of them ever won a best of show award or got the same press coverage. really though, by the time internet radios were an actual product category people bought, sonos was already reframing the whole space as multi-room streaming with a phone as the remote. for whatever reason, the kerbango box, with its physical rotary dial and its little lcd, ended up as the platonic form of a product that arrived at exactly the wrong moment.

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