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."
X10 popups have made the Web what it is today. Losing them would be like losing a part of one's body. I'm glad to hear they will still be with us.
Long live X10!
1) Spend bazillions on new web marketing campaign
2) Alienate web users with pop-unders and fake pr0n
3) ???
4) Bankrupcy!
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
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.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
'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.
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.
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.
--
RumorsDaily
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
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.
So, someone caught X10 with their pants down, so to speak?
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
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.
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...
-- $G
Now really, is there anyone who reads Slashdot that is still dealing with popups? Between builtin popup blockers in the Mozilla family, Safari, and Opera and the Google Toolbar in IE why would any self-respecting geek ever have to see an X10 ad?
But on the other hand, now Advertisement Banners is free to license their popunder code to everyone out there. And suing X10 (and winning) has brought them tons of publicity.
Is this where I shoot myself in one foot and stab myself in the other and wait to see how long it takes me to bleed to death? If not, it kinda feels that way.
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.
Well it sounds like they didn't actually spend lots of money on the web advertising campaign - the lawsuit that triggered this bankruptcy was by a pop-under company suing x10 for unpaid bills (among other nonsense). In a strange way it's a karmic balance for x10 to go bankrupt depriving some pop-up "innovators" from getting their bounty.
Having said that, x10 was amazingly successful at their campaign - from a collection of fringe items by a company that no-one knew, to millions in sales and a company whose name we all know well. I also think it's a bit foolish to demonize x10- x10 didn't put ads on the sites you visit--The site put ads there (well, apart from gator but that was a prior story). If you don't like the pop-under ads at a site, blame the site itself not the people paying the bills.
X10 going backrupt? That's just as depressing as the eventual announcement that Darl McBride has looted the SCO accounts and fled to the Carribean.
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
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)
So that would make them X11 then?
Well, confusing. Whats more, What are these popups you speak of? Use a decent browser and you wont have them...not at all.
In all my life, I have never been happier to read a headline than right now. X10 filed for bankruptcy directly because of pop-up ads.
Today is a great day
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.
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.
"Sexy Man" is not a moderation option. -- arose
Of course they are broke! I imagine the food and housing bill alone skyrocketed after all those hot chicks kept breaking into their living rooms, bedrooms and porches.
Luckily I have a camera to keep them away...at least I think it's the camera that does it..
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?
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"?
WAY better solution.
/. 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.
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
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...
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. -Oscar Wilde
Just when I was starting to get some good footage on the nanny-cam!
NEW! Bankruptcy special! Buy 1 X10 Super-Delux Cameramatic 5000 and get your own pop-under Javascript Code FREE!
It will be a shame to see this company go. Seriously. So they used pop-up and pop-under advertising -- so what? Lots of companies do. At the end of the day, they still sold home automation gear at great prices. I hooked up my entire home using their products, didn't spend a lot, and it's wonderful to use. With the X10 company gone, I will have to turn to Lutron, Smarthome, or other more expensive makers of X10 gear.
:)
Or we could all just upgrade from X10 to X11. I hear the upgrade lets you run graphical applications remotely.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
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?
October 7: X-10 loses the lawsuit. Compensatory damages are $4.3 million. The punitive damages hearing, where the huge dollar figures are likely to be determined, is to take place October 22.
October 8-20: X-10 and its lawyers think about how to generate the most sympathy for their plight -- specifically, how to make themselves sound pathetic so that the jury will keep the punitive damages figure low.
October 21: X-10 files for bankruptcy the day before the punitive damages hearing was to take place. But they don't really file for bankruptcy: As the CNet article states, "X10 filed what the bankruptcy court termed a 'deficient' filing, meaning that it lacked a statement of its financial affairs." In other words, X-10 is a privately held company, and like any private company it doesn't want to divulge its financial affairs. So it claims that it's filed for bankruptcy, getting all the PR benefit of a true filing without any of the real costs, such as having to disclose private financial affairs.
The best estimate of their debts that they can come up with is between $10 million and $50 million? They really have no idea whether they owe $10 million or $50 million??? Or maybe they just prefer not to say -- and why would you specify your debts publicly if you didn't have to?
I bet they never complete their bankruptcy filing. It seems like nothing more than a tactical maneuver to keep the overall damages low.