the onda

The hoopla about whether Mike Arrington, of TechCrunch fame, is really about to launch a piece of consumer hardware is the most exciting thing to happen in the TechCrunch ecosystem since Google bought YouTube.

If he does launch it, and it doesn't tank, the following two implications are likely to redefine the landscape of the consumer computing industry forever:

1. It means that most of the hardware "value add" really does take place outside of the big companies like HP and Dell and inside the ODMs in Taiwan and the supporting ecosystem of far east software/services companies (TechCrunch it would seem is using one in Singapore for both bringing up the hardware and getting the bits to run). If a non-VC funded startup can pull this off, all of the big companies with their leagues of non-engineer program managers should take a moment to be horribly embarrassed.

2. It also means that what will be increasingly relevant in this new world is access to an audience who is willing to buy based on the media relationship you've established with them. TechCrunch probably has 5-10,000 really passionate folks who would take a risk on a gadget like this (out of the million and a half that come to the site), and in the end, that may be all that is needed to jump start a hardware product with these kind of build economics.

I don't know if this project will succeed in the end but I applaud Arrington for taking the risk. If he does pull it off (by which I mean if he manages to sell 5,000 of these), you can bet that everyone will take notice— both big and small— and we may yet see a new era of hardware-led innovation born.