A little over a year ago we received an email from a company working on ‘an open source consumer electronics device’. About a month later we got a package in the mail containing something that looked like a bean bag with an LCD screen attached to one side and a little label reading ‘prototype’. It was a Chumby. It ran Flash Lite and it was cute.
A few years ago, zinc Roe began working with the Toronto Public Library to develop a tool for displaying archival books from their various special collections branches. The library’s inspiration was Turning the Pages; a tool created by the British Library that, at the time, required the Shockwave plug-in (The British Library has recently produced Turning the Pages 2.0 as a Windows Vista / Silverlight application). Turning the Pages was available for license through the British Library, but the Toronto Public Library …