X10 Files For Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection

telstar writes "As a followup to the recent Slashdot story about X10 losing a $4.3 million patent infringement suit over pop-unders, X10, the wireless camera company that 'only last year billed itself as the world's largest online advertiser', have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. This allows them to continue to operate, but they'll be shielded from creditors while they reorganize their finances - so rest easy, X10 popups are here to stay."

Comments

popups

[da_reboot]

popups ? what are popups ? I've never seen one with Mozilla.

Sad for the brothers

[swordgeek]

Read a report on this an hour ago. It seems that X10 has assets of $1-10M, and debts of $10-50M. The three brothers that won the settlement the other day are by far the biggest creditor, so I assume that they get first crack at any assets when X10 goes under. (My prediction there)

So they'll probably get everything that X10 has, and still be short on their settlement. Everyone else will get stiffed, punitive damages against X10 won't be assigned since there's nothing to assign them to, and because it was done under the umbrella of a corporation, the CEO and other execs will walk away with their salaries for the last several years, ready to enter another sleazy line of work.

The best thing about a corporation is that it protects individuals, encouraging risk-taking competitive capitalism. The worst thing about a corporation is that ir protects individuals, encouraging irresponsible and borderline-criminal behaviour.

Re:Sad for the brothers

[leerpm]

That is of course assuming they are able to obtain bankruptcy protection:

"X10 filed what the bankruptcy court termed a "deficient" filing, meaning that it lacked a statement of its financial affairs. The court set a 15-day deadline for the completion of the filing, or X10 risks a dismissal."

Re:Sad for the brothers

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. If people are doing silly things with the money, you get an artificial bubble that collapses as soon as money gets more expensive. Once the bubble pops, you find out that all that value has been wasted. Look at the dot-com boom, for example - was that good? No, it caused incredible amounts of waste.

Re:Sad for the brothers

[Anonymous Coward]

There are cases where courts have pierced the corporate veil and made individuals responsible for the corporation's transgressions. This mostly means that they have to surrender their assets as well as the corporation's. Unfortunately, this case doesn't seem severe enough to warrant this action.

Re:Sad for the brothers

[GigsVT]

Except that this isn't a chapter 7 liquidation, it's chapter 11.

They'll try to stay in business, and a judge will decide how they should pay back their creditors.

Re:Sad for the brothers

[kilgortrout]

The priorities in bankruptcy are complicated, whether in Ch7 or Ch11. Secured creditors(usually the company's financing bank) get paid ahead of general usecured creditors. There's usually very little left for unsecureds. In any bankruptcy general unsecured creditors==screwed; they will be lucky to get cents on the dollar. A judgment creditor like the one here is considered a general unsecured creditor till they levy on the assets of the debtor. That's why X10 immediately filed bankruptcy; to prevent the judgemnt creditor from levying on its assets. Also, 90% of Ch11 bankruptcies wind up in liquidation either through conversion of the case to a Ch7 or through the filing of a liquidation plan.

Re:One company or Two

[ottawanker]

There is no difference between the company X10 that cells the wireless remotes and X10 the company that advertises its wireless cameras all over the place.

Their full name is X10 Wireless Technology. They are also the same company that makes all the home automation software (that was sold for a while by Radioshack).. It's pretty neat stuff. You can hook it up to your computer and control all your lights, etc.. Check it out. You don't need to use their software or interface either, there are plans around, and even Linux software.

Shielded from creditors... but not judgements?

[DoorFrame]

It's been a long time, but I seem to recall that although declaring bankruptcy can shield you from normal creditors, it cannot shield you from legal judgements against you. Meaning that the kids who won the 4 million dollar lawsuit should still be getting their 4 million dollars.

And good.

Re:Shielded from creditors... but not judgements?

[milo_Gwalthny]

No, liabilities created by legal judgements are unsecured (the loss of the lawsuit may have been what prompted the company to decide on Ch.11 in the first place.) These become part of the pool of unsecured liabiities and the amount allocated to that pool is shared pro-rata by all unsecured creditors.

Unless, of course, the creditor is the IRS. Never forget that the IRS always gets paid.

There's a good chance that X10 has secured creditors and that the Yorba Linda popunder brothers end up with next to nothing. (Not having seen X10's financial statements, I can't say for sure, but a business like this may have factored its receivables or have leased equipment making much of its asset base secured.)

Patents promote innovation!

[jamie(really)]

Yah patents! I love my X10 home automation stuff. Its useful. But equally, I think that a new and innovative idea about opening one window *underneath* another one is worth $4.3 million. Those silly X10 people for manufacturing useful physical objects and creating manufacturing jobs should pay more attention to the much more valuable world of clever, original ideas.

Re:Patents promote innovation!

[man_ls]

X10 the home automation system, and X10 the company that hawks cameras in popunder advertisements, are two different things.

In this case, X10 Home Automation is a communication protocol/standard that allows for remote control of stuff...and the X10 company, ripped the name off.

live by the sword die by the sword

[MrLint]

Talk about being conflicted, I have used x10 stuff and i liked it and always thought it was cool. A fried told me about them, not some annoying online advertising. The make a useful product that works. Any number of conventional advertising scheme should have gotten them bunches of customers, but they had to go the annoying popup windows and such. Its sad really in its own way.

More to this story

[salesgeek]

X10 made offers they never backed up - anyone remember this slashdot story? I'm still waiting for mine and that was 1999.

X10 had a niche product - home automation products. Not everyone is willing to replace plugs and switches in their home with x10 enabled smart ones.

X10 tried to appeal to rather base instinct: buy our video gear and you can make movies of naked or at least semi naked 19 year old models. The problem is most people don't have anyone that resembles a model living in their home. If anything the footage most people would secure is suitable only for America's funniest home videos...

Re:More to this story

[ergo98]

I'm still waiting for mine and that was 1999.

I got mine about two weeks after ordering (as did a coworker), and their campaign worked brilliantly as shortly thereafter I purchased several more modules, and an ActiveHome kit.

X10 tried to appeal to rather base instinct: buy our video gear and you can make movies of naked or at least semi naked 19 year old models

Actually it appears to a real base instinct, which is sex. i.e. you see the ad and you notice it because it has an attractive young woman on it - you know, just like just about every advertisement there is out there. Most people don't take the ad literally, but instead it gets them thinking about what they could use a wireless camera for (I seriously considered it, after being made aware of it by an attractive woman, for security purposes, but follow-up research determined that the quality is very subpar. Indeed my problem with the ad isn't the contrived context, but rather the insinuation that it gets the sort of quality that the ad portrays rather than the grainy, pixelated barely-perceptable picture that it really offers).

Re:More to this story

[wolf-]

X10 made offers they never backed up - anyone remember this slashdot story? I'm still waiting for mine and that was 1999

Mine came rather quickly. Because of that promotion, have bought a number of wireless cameras to cover the backyard.

Re:popups

[Anonymous Coward]

Your popup filter sucks, though. The problem it has it that it cannot tell the difference between an unrequested window and one which you have requested (By clicking on a link).

Mozilla/Firebird isn't nearly as stupid as this, and you can disable popups just by unchecking a single box which says (Paraphrased) "Allow Javascript to open unrequested windows". You can also disable Javascript resizing of windows and poping windows to the front, too.

Which is one of the multitude of reasons why Mozilla/Firebird is much, much better tha Internet Explorer. You should install it and stop using Internet Explorer and hacky pop-up blockers. Seriously.

Hmm

[Dragoon]

I bought some x10 stuf via a popunder.. does that make me scum for supporting them?

I found the gear fairly awesome, my house is all secure, and automated.

and no, I don't work/know anybody at x10 :P

Re:popups

[Zog The Undeniable]

You still get plagued with Flash popups unless you do a bit of hacking of your etc/hosts file (don't worry, Windoze has one too). See here for how to do it. The list of servers is old but still very effective.

X10 is a protocol

[Eye of the Frog]

People tend to forget that X10 is a communications protocol designed to send signals over the 60Hz wave in your house's wiring. The X10 Home Solutions Company does not have exculsive rights over the X10 protocol. It's like naming a company TCP/IP. If you'd like to buy home automation devices and not support this company, a simple google search will bring up many companies. I've used SmartHome's products before and have been happy with them. Hell, even IBM got into the game for a while until that part of the business spun off into Home Director Inc.

Re:Popups

[Threni]

"Why anyone would still be using a browser that doesn't block popups is beyond me."

And adverts and flash animations!!! You don't want to see a lot of flickering fake windows error messages and cheesy animations of cars and planes when you`re trying to read the news.

adblock
http://adblock.mozdev.org/

flash click to view
http://ted.mielczarek.org/code/mozilla/

Or just the whole lot of 'em.
http://texturizer.net/firebird/extensions/

This isn't about patents

[meridien]

The lawsuit files by the brothers against X10 had nothing to do with patents. X10 hired them to write the behind-the-scenes code to create their annoying pop-under ads and then chose not to pay them for their work. It appears they had a contract with X10 which is the main reason they won the judgement - AS THEY SHOULD HAVE! Would you like it if your employer chose not to pay you because they just didn't want to? How would you respond to that?

Re:Popups

[Mrs. Neutron]

Opera here! Love the "Open requested pop-up windows only" feature. Stops the lousy stuff while still opening what I click on, even when it opens into a new window.

Re:popups - A WAY better solution.

[pair-a-noyd]

WAY better solution.

Take an old PC. Install Smoothwall GPL 2.0 (router/firewall)

Then hack squid in the smoothwall and add in Adzap

I made my adzap point back to itself to retrieve the "this ad zapped" images rather than getting them from sourceforge every time, for speed, to not hammer sourceforge and to use my own custom pics. I made some very subdued pics to replace the annoying back and yellow "This ad zapped" replacements.

Anyway, since doing that, I haven't seen ad one. No flash ads, no gifs, no jpgs, no pop-ups or unders, no nasty javascripts. EVERY pc that plugs into my lan is instantly ad blocked, including total strangers that bring pc's over for repair/service. No modification is done to any other machine on the lan, smoothwall is transparently proxying port 80 and blocking ads before they ever enter my lan.

Try it, it's very, very nice... (Sorry /. your ads are blocked too...) Oh yeah, you do have a choice to use white and black lists on the smoothwall to allow SOME ads of your chosing to come through, if you so desire or to block IP's that somehow manage to sneak one through adzapper.

Article Text Incorrect

[barryfandango]

As a followup to the recent Slashdot story about X10 losing a $4.3 million patent infringement suit over pop-unders"...

It wasn't a patent infringement suit. The brothers were suing for money owed for services rendered. The popunder technology isn't even patented, though according to the article it is proprietary.

This distinction was made many times over when the last article was posted, so I was surprised to see this misconception make it into the text of the next article...

X10 Linux Drivers - Need testers!

[Anonymous Coward]

If everyone would like to get your x10 camera working under linux, please help test out the driver. DPCM decompression code was added this week and we are looking for people to get back to us on the Vendor ID's and Product ID's.

http://www.emuit.com/webcam.html

Re:popups

[dpierkowski]

Mozilla does two things:

1) It only blocks -unrequested- popups. If a user action (clicking on a link, button, etc.) runs javascript that pops up a window, Mozilla assumes you wanted that popup and gives it to you. Mozilla only blocks popups that are part of Javascript that gets run automatically as part of the page. (.e.g, onLoad(), onUnload(), etc.)

2) It puts an icon in the status bar whenever it blocks a popup. Clicking on that icon adds the current site to a whitelist of sites that you want to see popups from.