OAKLAND — Last year, a West Oakland startup called Next Thing Co. raised more than $2 million from more than 39,000 people around the world to create a low-cost computer called C.H.I.P.
But if you talk to the vice president of operations, a 28-year-old woman named Ari Turrentine with a masters in social work, her growing revenue stream is just a means to an end. Though she must keep an eagle eye on a supply chain that stretches from Oakland to Southern China, Turrentine sees the $9 C.H.I.P. as about more than making money. She wants to place computing within the reach of schoolchildren, low-income people in the United States and the developing world, where 900 million people live on less than $2 a day.
About the size of a graham cracker, C.H.I.P. is a semi-fast computer, but with an eye-poppingly low price tag. The company began shipping its first production run of 30,000 units in January, and it plans to produce hundreds of thousands more.
With a 1 GHz processor, a 4GB hard drive, and 512 MB of memory, C.H.I.P. is as powerful as a 2011-era smartphone, such as the iPhone 4s. So it’s not fast enough for cutting-edge games or graphics programs, but just fine for word processing and surfing the web, albeit slowly. And for just $9 — keyboard, mouse and monitor not included — the no-frills unit makes Internet-enabled computing practical for a small fraction of what it costs now. To further keep costs down, C.H.I.P. can use most existing T. Vs as a monitor.
“We have an eye toward becoming more than just a company,” Turrentine says. “If we become a company with the sole purpose of generating revenue, I won’t be here. And our employees won’t be happy, because of their social justice, green, or artistic leanings. That’s why we hired them.”
Artistic types are particularly well-represented among the 23 employees at the spacious Next Thing offices. CEO Dave Rauchwerk describes himself, in self-deprecating fashion, as a “visual artist who lost his way.” Co-founder Gustavo Huber trained as an architect, designed electronic bike lockers for the city of Berkeley, and met Rauchwerk when the two were unhappily creating interactive advertising in Texas. At a San Francisco hackathon in 2012, Rauchwerk met co-founder and industrial designer Thomas Deckert, who was trying to make crosswalks safer by illuminating the legs of pedestrians at night.
So what is C.H.I.P. good for? Rather than dictating how people use it, or how an end product should look, Next Thing prefers to deliver the computer and see what the world makes of it. So far, that has meant creative yet practical gadgets. Just 48 hours after receiving his in the mail this winter, a British man had hacked together a homemade version of the Amazon Echo, a cylindrical $179 countertop digital assistant. Next Thing staffers are replicating the hack, by installing the C.H.I.P. in a Pringles can.
The most widely emulated hack uses the computer to take a pair of old speakers and turn them into inexpensive wireless “airplay” speakers that stream music from an iPhone. The Internet connection on C.H.I.P. receives the audio stream from the iPhone, and then outputs it to the speakers via an audio jack. Off-the-shelf, Airplay speakers retail for between $150 and $400.
Professor Amy Hurst, who runs a design and prototyping lab at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, says that West Oakland invention is one of several low-cost computers that builders around the world are embracing for do-it-yourself projects. The Raspberry Pi Zero ($5) is a prominent competitor, though C.H.I.P. has significantly better functionality for such a low price tag, she said. “The C.H.I.P. differs from its competitors by offering integrated Wi-Fi and 4 gigs of internal storage,” says Hurst. “It’s very exciting that another low-cost computer has hit the market. I hope it builds an active developer community.”
Turrentine, who began her career bringing low-cost medical devices to the developing world, echoes the Next Thing mantra of building the $9 computer and seeing how the world responds. She sees the One Laptop Per Child program, which aroused criticism for dropping off cheap computers in Latin America and Africa with little additional support, as a cautionary tale. Turrentine wants to partner with existing schools and nonprofit organizations to figure out how C.H.I.P. will usefully fit into existing programming to make computing more accessible to low-income students.
“Just handing a laptop to a kid in Africa doesn’t solve any problems,” she says.
