Is Cambridge Consultants’ Wi-Fi "RadioPro" a Platform for Success?

Portable internet radios don’t share the stage with other MP3 based players…yet. Cambridge Consultants, a marketing and product development firm based in England, is betting that lowering the eBOM (electronic bill of materials) for possible portable Wi-Fi products is the key to initiate a surge of interest in the technology’s marketability. Their new platform “RadioPro” is a dedicated portal of over a 10,000 radio stations, a software development kit, and two chipsets that include a Multimedia Application Processor and WiFi chip.

The SDK allows for customizable menus and automatic firmware updates. RadioPro will be offered to manufactures at the low price of $15 per unit, which should bring the actual consumable product cost to about fifty bucks or so. In order to illustrate the point, the firm has developed a Wi-Fi product of their very own. It was unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in the beginning of the year. Their version is sort of goofy looking; it would take an aesthetically conscious company to really present this technology appropriately. Looks are a big part of creating the desire to acquire that is needed for the portable Wi-Fi radio market to be fully realized.