Slashdot Mirror
Finance Firm Bloomberg Goes In For $80,000 On Ubuntu Edge Project
DW100 writes "Ubuntu has secured a surprise enterprise backer of its $32m Edge smartphone crowd-funding push with corporate powerhouse Bloomberg signing up for the top tier Enterprise 100 package, worth $80,000. Chief technology officer at Bloomberg Shawn Edwards said the firm wanted to give its support to the innovative open source project as it could have real benefits for its IT workforce." Adds reader nk497: "So far the campaign has raised $8.5 million and has two weeks left to run. Individuals can buy the smartphone-cum-PC for $780 at the moment, but Canonical is also offering business bundles of 100 handsets, including a month of support, for $80,000. Bloomberg is the first business to opt for the bundle — but it will get its money back if the project isn't fully funded." Update: 08/08 12:58 GMT by T : One more note: Canonical has dropped the price to $695 for the remainder of the fundraising campaign.
With 14 days to go, it’s time for our biggest announcement yet. From now until the end of the campaign, we’re fixing the price of the Ubuntu Edge at $695! No limited quantities, no more price changes. You wanted a more affordable Edge, and now you’ve got it.
So of course we’re passing those savings on to you. There’s now a single unlimited $695 Ubuntu Edge perk, which comes with a year’s subscription to LastPass Premium and a place on the Founders page. At the end of the campaign, anyone who’s already pledged more than $695 for the phone will be offered a refund of the difference.
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
Perhaps in five years
that has custom operating software that prevents you from ordering soft drinks?
Bloomberg is the first business to opt for the bundle — but it will get its money back if the project isn't fully funded.
This is no more than free publicity for Bloomberg then. They're pledging to give 80 thousand USD to a project if it gets fully funded. Said project after getting 7 million in the first 24 or 48 hours, has only managed to go up 1 more million in two weeks. And it needs 24 million more in the next two weeks!
Chances of actually having to give the 80 kUSD... close to 0. Free publicity... a lot!
Is Bloomberg's buy-in going to get Ubuntu to add any "custom" features that will help spy on people? http://gizmodo.com/bloomberg-reporters-used-sketchy-terminal-access-to-col-503232014
the default OS on the phone is ubuntu. You can also install android if you want. you can even dual boot if you want.
or are you saying you want a phone that can't run android?
Nobody is "buying" anything. These are donations to a private, for-profit corporation, in the hopes that said corporation will send a phone, if they can and do end up making them.
Ah, fuck it. I really thought that this whole Kickstarter donation thing would go away once people wised up, but I suppose that these donation scams are much like multi-level marketing and other scams... for every people who figures out that it's a scam, there are two more that get sucked into the stupidity. I really wish that I had less of a conscience so that I could take advantage of all of these suckers. It's got to be the simplest, most lucrative scam in history, as far as I can tell.
I don't respond to AC's.
Apart from the free publicity for Bloomberg ( which, at at a $ 80000 ticket, comes in really cheap ), where is BB's hidden agenda ??
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Android is designed to exploid it's users Data. Preloading it on a device only shows you cannot trust the company that did it.
"Individuals can buy the smartphone-cum-PC"
Using Latin in a place where it's not needed and has no historical ties (as "cum laude" would) is stupid. Using the one Latin word that's also English for "jizz" just makes you look like a moron. Unless you like using video chat for... stickier activities than most people.
Were the following questions by the FSF ever answered?
"Will the Ubuntu Edge versions of both Android and Ubuntu contain or rely on any proprietary software or proprietary firmware?"
"Will the Ubuntu Edge include any Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) software?"
"Will the device's bootloader be free software?"
"Will the device have Restricted Boot, or will users be able to replace the operating system with a free one of their choice?"
"Will Ubuntu Edge include F-Droid, the free software Android application repository, as part of a commitment to promote and recommend only free software?"
"There can be little doubt that union activities lead to continuous and progressive inflation." F. A. Hayek
i guess you are using an openmoko?
No, for various different reasons. Openmoko is a failed Project in my view but since it isn't related to Ubuntu Edge this answer is good enough.
When will this phone be delivered? Right now, it's vaporware with no promise of a delivery date and specifications subject to change.
the default OS on the phone is ubuntu. You can also install android if you want. you can even dual boot if you want.
WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG.
it SHIPS with android. it's an ANDROID PHONE.
they promise that after they ship it they will ship ubuntu os sometime. at launch you can just use the regular ubuntu android app.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The phone will be worth over $1000 when it ships. I am loading up.
Half an hour after I signed up for $780 I received the email telling it's now $695. Normally prices get lower with time, but this is very awkward, the product is not even in the market. There is a big mix up of crowd sourcing and traditional marketing. Now I'm confused as a consumer and Canonical is confused as... wait, what is Canonical now?
That spies on traders terminals?
In that case I think I'll pass.
Emeril? Is that you?
The lower price is a great deal. It's much more powerful than phones currently on the market and is right in the same price range. I don't really understand why sales have stalled as this is going to be 2-3 years ahead of the market. Either that or it will drive the market to produce better phones. I for one bought 2. I'm surprised a bunch haven't been snapped up to sell on the secondary market, ie thEbay.
That is probably less than what they spend on their office fish tank maintenance in a month.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
isn't qt pretty much ported to android? other than that, you won't buy one in 2015 since this is a campaing only stupid thing. something where support dies right when you hold it in your hand and nobody develops apps for it because nobody actually got it... got it?
The date is right there on the indiegogo page. Vaporware maybe, but you could say that for nearly every crowdsourced project.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
wrong wrong wrong wrong
it ships (if it does) with a dual boot Ubuntu Touch/Android setup. If you boot into Android you can plug in an HDMI monitor and run Ubuntu desktop on the big screen sharing some stuff between the Ubuntu Desktop operating system and the Android operating system. They promise that sometime after launch they will do the desktop OS trick alongside Ubuntu Touch as well as alongside Android.
So this is an Ubuntu Touch phone, and an Android phone from day 1. If you want to start the Ubuntu Desktop then you can do that from day 1 if you booted into Android and at some point you will be able to start the Ubuntu Desktop from Ubuntu Touch.
So yeah, it is a bit complicated, and has two more operating environments than a phone needs, but if you are going to correct people you do have a bit of an obligation to get your facts in order.
Welcome to the real world, where we have such a wide range of options as Symbian (in all its flavors), MeeGo, Blackberry, and WebOS.*
All OSes that have been produced by real companies at real scale, without the compromises resulting from the collision of hardware or software freedom dogma with real-world business practices, which makes them far more practical choices than OpenMoko. Now for people who are sufficiently concerned about software freedom (or the very few nutters who are sufficiently concerned with hardware freedom, as though they hope to build 4-layer PCBs in their garage), OpenMoko may still be the better choice, but GP's stated issue with Android wasn't about software freedom (note that AOSP is free software, though not copyleft), but about Google "exploiding" [sic] their users' information.
All of the OSes listed above were produced by companies who sell phones, and plan to compete by making that phone more functional with better software. Android, OTOH, is produced and offered to the world for free by a company who doesn't primarily sell phones, but rents it's users' eyeballs to advertisers, and makes those eyeballs more valuable by exploiting the users' data to match users with the ads that will be most effective on them. Android is just the bait to get you into the Google ecosystem, so they can collect more data and rent your eyeballs out. Personally, I don't have a problem with that, as long as they keep the bait tasty enough, but if you can't see the difference (and thus, see the wide range of commercial phones answering GP's objection as well as OpenMoko) you're truly blind.
*If you've read the whole way to here and are wondering why iOS and WP8 didn't make the list... early versions certainly were centered around selling phones, but there's some controversy that, in the current versions of each, they're trying to beat Google in part by behaving like Google, e.g. relying on cloud services and ad frameworks for "free" apps, and I'd simply rather not become embroiled in those arguments. The point is, the OSes listed all disprove the Android/OpenMoko false dichotomy, not that they are the only alternatives.
Bloomberg, as a financial and inparticular, media firm should be interested in privacy and security.
There isn't a phone out there that has integrity to trade... closest we got was Replicant on a Samsung but the modem had carte blanche to everything so it was imperfect.
So Bloomberg would be a good customer. Any Bloomberg employee who has sensitive info has the possibility of communicating privately.
A blog I run for the wealth
Will it start to stop and frisk minorities now? Bloomberg is totally in love with the idea.
capcatcha: perverts - how appropriate.
If this thing takes off Apps could be written in C/C++ or JS instead of Cocoa or Java. Probably Python down the road?
You seem to be pointing towards Android by mentioning Java. The thing is you can develop in C for Android devices, you merely need to get the NDK. Sure, portions of the UI stuff have better support for Java, but if you really want to you can write an entire Android application in C.
$695 is still way too high.
We have an unproven device here. Nobody knows how well this thing will work or how well it'll be supported. People are willing to play around with things, but not at this price point. The OUYA is $99. That's worth taking a risk on. The Raspberry Pi is $35. Those little Android "Mini-PC's" are about $45. Those are cheap enough to play around on.
The market seems to have spoken and the price point for a device to play around with seems to be about $50-100. Much above that we're getting into "real money" territory, and people aren't so quick to gamble on a device there. They want solid support, but more importantly they're going to want it to be out already so that they can read reviews and such to see how well it works.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
You are delusional. Add the cost of the parts (even bulk) and compare.
$238/piece ...and maybe one or two Foxconn suicides.
$695 is still way too high.
There are many ways to set price. There's a range between cost (nobody will build it for less) and the maximum value someone can get out of it (no point in buying something for more). You don't show in any way it's outside this. The real question is the value that you can get out of it. That's what should decide how much you can pay for it. You need to compare it with other similar devices, not a bunch of non wireless enabled development boards.
In my view the device is new, but the fundamentals of the value are something we have seen before. I guess there are three devices to look at; OpenMoko, the Nokia N900 and the Nokia N9. There are a bunch of things which would work on those devices which are impractical on other devices. Here are some ideas off the top of my head; maybe other people can add theirs:
Compare these ideas with the closed competition. Windows phones, where you can't even really jail-break, are the worst it is true. iOS phones are also pretty limited (software from the app store only unless you get a developer key) but even Android phones which are supposed to be "open" end up as garbage here. Instead of having the full GNU/Linux you are limited to just small bits re-implemented by Google.
If you want to develop new personal device or wireless network ideas, this is going to be worth thousands of dollars to you. Even if you just want a device which does what you tell it to then it's likely to be worth hundreds more.
If you aren't a developer; you don't have any ideas about how to do something with wireless devices and you don't need a portable computing device, then you may well be right, it's not worth it to you. For a person who just uses it as a phone/PC, the competition would be something like a Samsung S4 - on sale for something like $600. In that case your questions about the level of testing would really matter. For most of the people who read this site, though, it's a chance to get a device which will be able to do things no other current device can do and that can really be worth much more than Canonical are asking for it.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
The date is right there on the indiegogo page.
1. That's a target date, not a commitment. If they miss it by two years, what is your recourse?
Vaporware maybe, but you could say that for nearly every crowdsourced project.
2. Yeah, I could, couldn't I? But I only object to the commerical crowdsourced projects. If people want to ask for contributions to crowdsource something that's for the common good, I'll consider it. If they want to crowdsource a project for their own profit, where's my cut?
Well, I just tried to get in on this, but after arguing with the site for an hour I finally had to boot a special VM with no network security of any kind before it would even let me try to send money.
Then I am confronted with PayPal.
No toy, no matter how cool, is worth that. I wonder how much that has cost them?
Sigmentation fault - core dumped
You make the mistake of assuming that just because the parts cost a certain amount that the public should buy it.
If the sum total value of the parts is above what the market would normally pay then they didn't design the device well. I could build a minivan with a V12 engine and slap an insane pricetag on it but that doesn't mean that its a good value.
If their hardware requires a purchase price anywhere near $700 then they should have scaled it back a little. I'll concede that this thing needs a cellular antenna and a touchscreen so it'll have to cost a bit more than the devices I specified, but to have a chance it should be well under half what they're asking.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
1. That's a target date, not a commitment. If they miss it by two years, what is your recourse?
Your are changing the argument. In the post I replied to you had said, "no promise of a delivery date". The target date seems a promise of a delivery date: "expected delivery in May 2014". And what's your recourse? You could check with indiegogo.
2. Yeah, I could, couldn't I? But I only object to the commerical crowdsourced projects. If people want to ask for contributions to crowdsource something that's for the common good, I'll consider it. If they want to crowdsource a project for their own profit, where's my cut?
Your cut is to get something you want that otherwise may never see the light of day. It carries a risk like every investment.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
1. That's a target date, not a commitment. If they miss it by two years, what is your recourse?
Your are changing the argument. In the post I replied to you had said, "no promise of a delivery date". The target date seems a promise of a delivery date: "expected delivery in May 2014". And what's your recourse? You could check with indiegogo.
2. Yeah, I could, couldn't I? But I only object to the commerical crowdsourced projects. If people want to ask for contributions to crowdsource something that's for the common good, I'll consider it. If they want to crowdsource a project for their own profit, where's my cut?
Your cut is to get something you want that otherwise may never see the light of day. It carries a risk like every investment.
There's one born every minute.