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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."
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.
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."
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/
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.
Right, but the article isn't "Ubuntu Edge now most backed escrowed campaign". It's claiming it's the biggest crowd-funded campaign, which it's clearly not. Although, it's not Star Citizen either. I believe World War II takes out that title. $185.7 billion in un-adjusted crowd-funded dollars.
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
And that's why I don't participate in Indiegogo, but do many Kickstarters.
Kickstarter doesn't charge you UNLESS the project is funded. Indiegogo charges you first, then refunds you if it fails.
There are two problems with the charge/refund model - one, if you're doing a currency conversion, that means an instant 5-10% hit on your pledge - just due to currency exchange losses. Neverminding currency fluctuations that occur from when you pledge to when you get refunded (and no, you can't win).
The second problem is well, you tie up money. Indiegogo makes a profit based on simply holding the money (and this isn't including the Indiegogo fees). I suppose it makes Indiegogo brilliant business people - they have this huge pool of cash they can pretty much invest with - all they need is enough cash to cover the payouts of the day, but money's coming in for future payouts.
But it's the currency losses that get to me. Pledge under $100, and it's not a huge deal - it's probably $5-10 you lose. But I've done bigger pledges on Kickstarter, and you're looking at huge losses. $1000 pledge? Are you really willing to give up $100 or so in the currency exchange?