Slashdot Mirror
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."
I disagree, I have been using Firebird for months and I feel fine!
(paid for by friends of Mozilla)
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
'only last year billed itself as the world's largest online advertiser'
I saw this and thought back to the mid/late '90s. Remember all of those big internet companies? The ones who survived off advertisements online? No? Me neither. I don't think I'd promote the fact my company is the world's biggest advertiser online. We've been down that road that's littered with the corpses of about a thousand defunct new e-conomy companies who either; A) Didn't turn a profit after spending huge amounts of money advertising online (as is the case here), or B) Who's sites were abandoned by said failed business plans and then folded with no positive cash flow coming in.
Just a thought.
Request: ECM unit, 1000 km fullerene cable, 1 tactical nuclear weapon. Reason: Birthday party for foreign dignitary.
that are rapidly becoming illegal or at the least highly regulated on the interent. Why is it legal to pop up unwanted windows under OR over the browser without the Expressed Written Concent of the END USER.
I suppose they would argue that by viewing the site said concent is implied, however its hard to know what you are signing up for when you click a link and WHAM you get attacked by unwanted windows containing advertisments, often times, inappropriate material to say the least. would be nice to see a question on the home page of these popup serving pages like: "Would you like to see our ads?"
Unrealistic, yes. but so are some of the laws being proposed that TAKE away from the user experience, and they seem to be passing through as laws easy enough.
Just Say no to pop-ups/pop-unders
Are you sure you never miss content? I use internet explorer and an add filter (the popup Ad Filter), sometime when I click on something and it dosn't work (eg. the CNN poles) I realize my popup filter is catching it and I hold down CTRL to disable. Is there a 1 button disable in Mozilla or is there someway around it? Or do you just argue that any site with popups dosn't deserve your time.
My own outlook on the whole matter is that any company that uses pop-ups as a form of advertising deserves whatever it gets. Not so much because of the fact that pop-up are wrong, but they are unpopular, and any marketing exec that hasn't worked out that getting people to hate you isn't a good way to sell products needs to go and do a refresher. The best advertising is word of mouth, if your friends recommend it then you are more likely to go there. Which is exactly how I found slashdot, the other important aspect is that slashdot has the community and the content to make people want to stay around. Essentially they are not just in it to weasel people out of their money.
Good? The "kids" were pop-under advertisement "innovators" - how in the world could they even remotely be considered the good guys in all of this? Hint: They can't.
How ridiculous to see x10 hung to out to dry when what they did required the explicit permission of every site that they tacked their ads onto (and those ads often kept those sites in business).
Seriously, X10 had a decent concept - build budget networks, budget devices, and sell to people who really don't need much more than that.
Their biggest problem was their promotion. By sexing their ads up, they really didn't do much for themselves. By then having said ads as extra windows - hey, that got irritating, really really fast.
This demonstrates how NOT to sell a product. You want to sell something, you make it attractive to the consumer, not so repulsive that they want to spit boiling acid at the computer screen. (Unless you're a merchant of either boiling acid, or computer screens.)
X10 have only themselves to blame for this. Very few companies, once in Ch11 ever really get out. For most, it's just a delayed death of the company. Usually because they don't actually change anything. Sure, they dump workforce, but that just makes the company top-heavy. It's not the workforce that's the problem, it's the income. There ain't any. The solution is to change what you're doing, to make some. Duh.
Sadly, this often doesn't happen, and I doubt it will in the case of X10. Anyone that persists in ads that don't work, but just infuriate, has demonstrated an inability to change a failing strategy.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Absolutely agree.
In the news this week, down in Florida (I think - too lazy to google for a link), was a report about the huge demand for security cameras to watch over child-minders, following a case where some parents used a covert camera to watch their child-minder, and got some footage of the child being shaken. Seems to me that this would be an ideal application for the X10 camera.
This still kind of sucks. Yeah, yeah, we hated their ads, but anyone on this site should have figured out by now that almost all browsers offer pop-up blocking (IE being the sole exception that I can think of).
But what about the rest of the story? I'm going out to Radio Shack tonight to buy a bunch of X10 stuff, because it actually works. It's getting dark out in the mornings so I'm going to use their alarm clock and a plug module to turn my light on in the morning. I'll probably stock up on a couple things for future expansion. Currently I have two lamps in my living room and a coffee machine on a remote control thanks to the Slashdot X10 deal.
The other problem is that someone patented pop-under ads. This seems like yet-another-bad-software-patent, but I guess Slashdotters pick and choose which bad software patents to get upset about. If this affected Microsoft it would be a valid software patent, but if it affected Linux it would be an abomination. The ends don't justify the means and you can't root for software patents when they happen to bankrupt someone you don't like.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
The Company that goes by X10 on the internet is not the company that makes the home automation controls modules and cameras. They just sell them. If the web based X10 falls off the planet tomorrow you still will be able to get the product. All you will have to do is look for them. I you were not running Internt Exploiter you would be dealing with the pop ups.
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?