Sponsorship-supported Crunchpad is alive. ‘Steamrolling’ says Arrington.
I should have been in bed but I got hooked into an excellent Gilmore Gang videocast (below) this evening. Robert Scoble, Mike Arrington, P Rangaswami, Kevin Marks, and Saul Hansell talk a lot about the iPhone and Driod war …
Context & Ripple Effects
UMPCPortal's report comes straight out of the Gilmore Gang videocast recorded the day before, where Scoble, Arrington, Rangaswami, Marks and Hansell spent much of their time on the iPhone-versus-Droid fight — and where Arrington volunteered that the sponsorship-supported Crunchpad is very much alive and 'steamrolling' ahead.
The claim matters because CrunchGear had already framed September 2009 as the start of a tablet war, and the Crunchpad is TechCrunch's own entrant: a blog-turned-media-company building consumer hardware underwritten by sponsors rather than sold at retail.
First-order effects
- TechCrunch and Mike Arrington are publicly committing to shipping a hardware device whose economics depend on sponsorships, not unit sales — an unusual funding structure for consumer electronics.
- The Crunchpad now positions itself directly against the iPhone/Droid device ecosystems that dominated the same videocast's discussion.
Second-order effects
- If a media brand can field a tablet via sponsor backing, rival gadget blogs and media companies face pressure to treat hardware as an extension of their brand rather than something they only review.
- Sponsors gain a new placement channel: pre-installed services and branding on a device aimed squarely at the tech-early-adopter audience TechCrunch already owns.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward media companies becoming product companies — collapsing the line between publisher and OEM just as cheap tablet reference designs lower the barrier to entry.
- A credible blogger-built tablet would also force incumbent tablet makers to compete for mind-share in channels they don't control: the feeds and podcasts of the people who cover them.
The trend: As the tablet category opens in late 2009, media brands are testing whether audience and sponsor money can substitute for traditional hardware economics.