Meanwhile, the official Kerbango Web site continued to promise a product that will now never materialise. Prototypes have been demonstrated at consumer shows. As recently as January 2001, the Kerbango won an award at the Consumer Electronics Show and an 'Editor's Choice' from Popular Mechanics magazine. But while the consumers have been waiting to buy it, the market has moved on. The concept behind Kerbango, and similar devices, was simple enough.
People are familiar with using a conventional radio receiver to listen to programming.
Instead of frequencies, you would 'dial up' formats and individual station names. That's the way radio is expected to develop anyway, once digital AM, FM and shortwave become ubiquitous. But while the Kerbango development team was beavering away behind closed doors, figuring out how to make the radio metaphor work, things in the real world were moving on. Products such as Windows Media Player and Real Player improved their interfaces and ease of use, as did the individual stations and radio portal sites. All the evidence suggests that most existing Web users are quite happy accessing their content via the current methods, and do not want a separate appliance.