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Ubuntu Edge Now Most-Backed Crowdfunding Campaign Ever
Volanin writes "The Ubuntu Edge has now passed the $10.2 million mark, thus making it the most pledged-to crowd-funder in history. While the Ubuntu Edge campaign is to be commended for reaching such a mammoth milestone as this, it can't quite claim ultimate victory yet, since it's just short of making one-third of its $32 million goal with a little less than a week left."
cause it passed the 15 million dollar mark last month from pure croud funding .
Shuttleworth should just cancel his next trip to mars to raise the funds.
Regardless of how you cut it, they've still managed to attract $10,000,000 of pre-orders in 25 days, on a second-tier crowd-funding site which lacks a lot of mainstream footfall, for a product running unproven software and ill-defined hardware. That tells you* a lot about how appealing their product pitch is to it's potential market. I personally haven't pledged, because I can't quite stomach putting down $650 blind for a hypothetical product. But I would bite their arm off for it if it were on general sale.
* And more importantly, it doesn't just tell YOU about how appealing the concept is; it tells their potential OEM partners. That was probably the whole point of this. The good folks in management at Lenovo, Dell, Acer, etc. will be looking at those pre-orders a little enviously- do they think they could get the same interest and blind faith for their next "premium" Android handset?
It also was very helpful in showing them the correct price-point for the phone. It is different from anything else out there, so knowing how to price it was going to be a challenge. Now that they know what the market is willing to pay, they can build around that.
Also, I would not be surprised if Shuttleworth makes up the difference at the last minute and goes forward anyway.
One thing I like about FairPhone is the emphasis on open hardware in addition to software. Can anyone explain the relative strengths of Ubuntu Edge on the open source front?
This is more interesting, I think, because quite likely this is going to be the first record-breaker that fails. A lot of people will for the first time have supported a failing project with considerable money.
That may be sad for Ubuntu, but it's good news for treshold pledge funding (crowdfunding is a poor word). I'm pretty sure that for most people, it hasn't quite sunk in that you aren't out any money if your project fails. It's one thing to hear it, another thing to see it. The people who pledged this time around will be (even) braver threshold pledge funders in the future.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Ah yes, the box that turns it from a propoer treshold pledge scheme to scammy "I want the money anyway" begging.
That checkbox may superficially sound like a good deal for project starters, but it's a rotten deal for supporters. Ubuntu would NOT get to the amount they have if they checked that box.
The only reason Kickstarter's competitors offer that box at all is that they're desperate to get projects. So desperate that they'll accept the dumb and greedy ones. This also sends a rotten signal to buyers (if you though there were many dodgy projects on Kickstarter, it's nothing to its smaller competitors!) but the attitude of competitiors is that "we'll worry about that later, once we have projects". Which makes a certain perverse business sense.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
It tells you about how appealing their product is, but not why. It's appealing to people for the same reason as an Apple product: the name. Proof? There's no evidence whatsoever that it won't suck, but there were many attempts to preorder anyway.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I don't quite understand...they are celebrating selling over $10 million worth of vaporware, when the goal is $32 million. Were they actually out to build a new phone, or did they just want to break a fund raising record? I won't be contributing to the hype, they are a for profit company in there somewhere, they need to either build the phone, or shut the fuck up.
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
For me the attraction is to get my hands on a device that can replace the old Nokia N900 and allows the use of mainstream Linux software.
Shuttleworth has made statements that could be read as if it's going to be a quite open platform but it wasn't a crystal clear and hard commitment he made.
For the time being my sympathy goes to jolla.com.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Remember, you're not putting down $650 blind. If it doesn't reach the goal, you're out nothing.
Yes, but assuming they'd reach their $32 million they'd take your money now and you might get a product that is roughly what they promised and on time or just one or neither. Chances are there's no canceling, no return, no refund so anything they slap an "Ubuntu Edge" sticker on you're stuck with, at best a class action where you get a silly coupon. There's a huge difference in risk between that and a finished product on the shelf.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
So this isn't like an ebay auction for 10lbs of crack where the price hits 80m before it gets shutdown because people have realized that its not real? Give me a break. There is a considerable amount of people who have pledged to this and know for a fact that it won't get funded. This is a nebulous speculative design that may or may not be awesome in a years time. The only thing we know is that it will have 4GB of ram and 128GB of storage. Ok, and for ~700 USD it would likely be seen in today's market as relatively inexpensive, but not ground breakingly so considering the long lead times and other unknown variables. The thing I hate the most about these stories on here is that the fanboys are going to trumpet this as amazing and positive when there is almost nothing about this that could be seen that way. Microsoft did 75x this with Surface and is taking a very public beating for having failed. Samsung sold about 20m units (1,000x as much gross revenue as this project) in only 2 months of the S4 and Apple sold 50m iPhone 5s in it's first quarter. The market as a whole can't even distinguish if this is signal or noise.
Time and again projects have come along to 'revolutionize' smart phones. Remember the original Google Nexus? It was such a failure that Google licensed off the brand and is now relying on other companies to make the hardware. The F1 analogy is also bullshit. The difference is that the F1 people are actually using spectacularly unique hardware (and software) to do things orders of magnitudes faster than a regular joe could and can do it in a clear way that is exciting and spectator friendly and as such can be dramatically subsidized by tickets, merchandizing and tv rights. If there were a market for performance luxury phones the $10,000 Vertus wouldn't be absolute shit. http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/12/vertus-first-android-smartphone-will-cost-7-900-euros/
Totaling up the numbers on the page, only $2.1 million are pre-orders ($695 and up). The remaining donations bring the total to $3.1 million. So, I guess they have mystery-backers that are not on Indiegogo that they add in. Or are they just fudging the numbers? Nobody knows, you just take their word for it.
But, as far as proven crowd-sourced backers, they've raised $3.1m. That's on-par with several Kickstarter projects (Doublefine's adventure, Wasteland 2 come to mind). Ouya brought in $8 million from the general public.
Or if you had bothered to ever read the little faq on the Ubuntu Edge påage you would have discovered that they indeed will allow a refund if you are not satisfied with the end product.
I understand why Canonical wants to do this product. The Linux desktop is, along with all desktops including Windows and Mac OS, declining in importance. Canonical needs to establish their presence on mobile and Edge us their best hope. But I don't understand why any user who is less than wealthy would want to pledge $700-$800 for a first-time device from Ubuntu. It's somewhat analogous to people wanting to pay $1500 for the Google Glass Explorer Edition, but at least Google Glass is in new territory, wearable technology. Ubuntu Edge is going to be compared to all the smartphone systems that have come before it, and I don't think very many people are going to find the case for running it very compelling.
Yes, Edge is supposed to be one device that does it all, but that has been tried before, most notably by Motorola and Asus, and their devices turned out to be expensive and didn't sell especially well. I don't think substituting Ubuntu's phone system for the Moto/Asus devices' Android would have made much difference. Solving all the hardware problems of the do-everything Edge is going to be the hard part, no matter what OS it runs. And there's the biggest hurdle. Ubuntu is not a hardware company. They are a comparatively small software distributor for desktop Linux with no known experience in hardware, mobile or otherwise. They are a big fish in the desktop Linux pond, but that's a very, very small pond.
What seems to appeal most about the Edge is that nifty slide-from-the-left launcher. I think instead of going all in with a new device with very difficult to solve hardware design problems, Ubuntu could have set their sights lower by offering their user interface design as an add-on launcher on Android. If that went well, they could fork Android the way Amazon has, to offer their own user experience, development environment and app market.
By trying to do the difficult-to-design hardware of the Edge along with selling people on their software, I think Canonical is trying to do much too much at once, and unless they get very lucky with the hardware, the odds have to be heavily against them.