Gibson to Open Firebird X Platform to 3rd Party Developers

Straight off the press at Gibson.com:

Applications Environment and Store for 3rd Party Developers

3rd Party App Store

We are only using about 20% of the power of the Pure-Analog™ Engine. This leaves enormous possibilities for future enhancements without any hardware changes. The entire Firebird X system is designed to a new Gibson standard which will allow other companies to develop hardware and applications that can integrate with any guitar that uses this standard, including the Firebird X.

Gibson will set up an authorized store – very much like the Apple iPhone/iPad environment – where all vendors can sell their applications, which we will verify are compliant with our system. Like Apple, this involves a sophisticated e-commerce site that removes the hassle and overhead for a development company and just generates a pure revenue stream for the developer.

It is our intention to roll this out to hundreds of thousands of guitars in different price points, giving all fans and consumers the ability to take advantage of this new technology. This eco-system, with a well-specified and published Gibson environment, will open up thousands of enhancements for our customers.

EASY FIRMWARE UPDATES AND UPGRADES

Product enhancements, both paid and free, will be very easy to install via a simple firmware update option in our Tone Editor software. The firmware is downloadable, and updates and upgrades take about a minute.

OR, as Engadget so eloquently said:

Portable Audio / Video
Robo-guitar shocker! Gibson opening Firebird X platform to third party developers, app store imminent
By Joseph L. Flatley posted Jan 24th 2011 12:31PM
We’ve seen the future of guitars, and it’s an app store. At least that’s what Gibson would have us believe, as it announces that it’s opening the Pure-Analog Engine and the whole Firebird X platform to third party devs. Didn’t know it was a platform, did you? Thought that it was an over-priced guitar with features that we didn’t need (and a headstock we didn’t particularly care for)? Same here. Apparently the company will soon be unleashing all sorts of Pure-Analog guitars upon the world, at all different price points. We don’t know what this means for rock’n’roll, although we are fairly certain that the guy from Muse already owns three of these. Hit the source link for all the awesome deets.

See the original stories at: Gibson Press Release
Engadget article