The Rojas MP3 Player

In my “what next” blog post last week I put in an inside joke about starting a gadget company with Peter designing the products. Peter picked up on it and now others are pinging me about it–but taking it seriously.

So, that leads me to the question: Could two guys in a garage create an indie gadget company?

If anyone knows what a gadget should be, and where the market is going, it’s Peter. Dave Winer joked with me at dinner this past summer that Peter would make a better iPod than Steve Jobs–I think I agree. So, back to the origional question: What would it take/cost to make a gadget hardware company?

I’ve been to China and seen the knock-off devices (in fact, Engadget’s “keeping it real… fake” covers the knock offs), so it’s clear that you can make devices cheap. So, what if Peter designed a wifi-enabled media player for geeks. Like something with built in podcasting software and the ability to sync podcasts whenever and IP device is detected?

Adam Curry mentioned that someone should make a super cheap podcast MP3 player on a recent DSC.

Is this something we could actually do? What would it cost to design a media player? How many do we need to order? Who would design it? Who would built it? Anyone have insight into how to make an Mp3 player out there?

I can just imagine the “Rojas vs. Zune vs. iPod” shootout on CNET.