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Ubuntu Edge Draws Nearly $13M, But Falls Short of Indiegogo Goal
Nerval's Lobster writes "The crowdfunding campaign to build an Ubuntu-powered smartphone has fallen short of its ambitious goal. Canonical, which works with the open-source community to support Ubuntu worldwide, decided to fund its Ubuntu Edge smartphone via crowdfunding Website Indiegogo. The funding goal was set at $32 million, and at first it looked as if the project had enough momentum to actually succeed: within the first 24 hours of the project's July 22 launch, some $3.45 million had poured in. But that torrent of cash soon slowed to a trickle. In the end, the campaign managed to amass $12,809,906 by its August 21 closing. Nonetheless, Canonical did its best to put a brave face on the situation. 'While we passionately wanted to build the Edge to showcase Ubuntu on phones, the support and attention it received will still be a huge boost as other Ubuntu phones start to arrive in 2014,' the organization wrote in a posting. 'Thousands of you clearly want to own an Ubuntu phone and believe in our vision of convergence, and rest assured you won't have much longer to wait.'" Update: 08/22 16:14 GMT by T : Oops -- headline edited to reflect that the Edge was an Indiegogo project, rather than Kickstarter.
Using a crowd-funded campaign like this gives Canonical a very good idea about just how much interest there is in the phone essentially for free...and if they met that goal they'd be all the better.
No one trusts Canonical outside of the die-hard Ubuntu fanboys. Canonical forks everything due to their NIH syndrome. They released the buggiest, ugliest and most uselessly incoherent Desktop imaginable (Unity) and then sold their userbase to Amazon.
The Edge could be the greatest thing since sliced bread, I still wouldn't give them my money.
'Thousands of you clearly want to own an Ubuntu phone and believe in our vision of convergence, and rest assured you won't have much longer to wait
Huh? Well, they're not making one, because there isn't enough interest to make it worthwhile. Why would another company have different results?
I don't respond to AC's.
It wasn't kickstarter, it was a different crowd funding site. Get your facts straight retard
This officially means the smartphone is dead, Ubuntu can stop making crappy interfaces for its OS, and it can concentrate on its desktop again to win in the only field that truly matters. Because no matter how much people rave about their little toys, it's not good enough to do what a real PC can do. The smartphone is severely limited in its interface, its power, its scope, its precision, and its visuals. PCs have no such limitations.
Canonical, time to turn your ship around, use KDE as your desktop, fine tune it, and attack the desktop market with a fury now that Microsoft has been weakened and Apple has all but given it up. There is still a desktop market, and always will be; don't let the naysayers clutching their toy phones tell you any differently.
Attack it, get manufacturers to deliver the new KDE Ubuntu Desktop on every PC sold, and win.
This is your only hope now that we've proved that betting the farm on a toy device is not a smart idea.
Whaaaaat there was one on Kickstarter too? Damn, if they wouldn't have had the other one on Indiegogo they might have got it funded.
I hate to say it but Ubuntu has missed the mobile boat. It would have been nice to have an open source alternate to Android and iOS. I use Android but I've got to say, it gives me the creeps the more I read about Google and how they are mining our data with seemingly no regard for their customers.
Come on, it wasn't Kickstarter. Indiegogo. There is a difference.
A powerful phone, by the proposed specification, but just a phone.
It is hard to excite the masses when all you're offering is another black-cased smartphone, even if it does offer HDMI output.
I would have plunked my money down, if they could produce a CDMA version of the phone for use on Verizon and Sprint.
IMO, the goal was deliberately set too high to meet. Now all the money goes back to the donators.
Huge amounts of free advertising, hype generation and likely leverage in existing negotiations with hardware vendors, care of the interest $13m worth of donations the "chumps" who bought into it loaned to Indiegogo for a couple months.
Smart. Very smart.
> No one trusts Canonical outside of the die-hard Ubuntu fanboys ..
Canonical has contributed Ubuntu into the community, for free, any criticism of their business strategy is therefore groundless ...
AccountKiller
The Kickstarter price for one phone was about $700. If I want to get a phone with a Linux derivative, I can get the newest Nexus for $300. No matter what my free software convictions and Google paranoia are, they're not worth that much. Particularly for vaporware.
Maybe if they hadn't played fast and loose with the desktop GUI and amazon searches they would have still been popular enough in FOSS circles to get something done. Not now. Bye canonical.
I've only used KS etc, rather than Indiegogo.
Does this money actually go to a project before it reaches the end-date? The details on the site don't really mention either way.
On KS projects, your donation is more of a pledge, which only goes through if the target is made by the end-date of the project.
*Indiegogo. Whatever.
Actually it does matter a great deal. A key difference is what happens to the money if the project is not funded to the goal level. On kickstarter if the project misses its goal, no money changes hands. On indiegogo campaigns can be set up as "Flexible Funding" and the hosts get whatever is pledged (minus 9% for fees).
From the Kickstarter page:
Why is Kickstarter funding all-or-nothing?
On Kickstarter, a project must reach its funding goal before time runs out or no money changes hands. Why? It protects everyone involved. This way, no one is expected to develop a project with an insufficient budget, which sucks. Remember you set your own funding goal, so aim to raise the minimum amount you'll need to create your vision. Projects can always raise more than their goal, and often do.
From the Indiegogo FAQ
What if I don't reach my funding goal?
If your campaign is set up as Flexible Funding, you will be able to keep the funds you raise, even if you don't meet your goal. If your campaign is set up as Fixed Funding, all contributions will be returned to your funders if you do not meet your goal. Flexible Funding campaigns that meet their goal are only charged 4% as our platform fee, whereas campaigns that do not meet their goal are charged 9%.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
For about 1/10th the cost, one other FOSS phone was able to get off the ground. Actually, even though the main page says 66%, they reached their minimum goal months ago so the startup threshold is much lower than that.
Their initial market is EU-only, but I would still consider getting a FairPhone if only to have a mini-tablet with the most open hardware that's feasible at this point.
An earlier Slashdot post predicted this shortfall.
Not news.
This campaign was launched at enthusiasts who are mostly spec obsessed and they did not have complete specs on the device. There was no working prototype either so for most of us it was too rich to throw money in without knowing what we would get and how it would perform. That leaves Ubuntu fanboys, seems there are quite a few :-D
Mestar is wrong anyways. A 130W 3.4GHz Pentium D (c2006) is a little slower than the current 8.5W 2GHz Atom S1260. Both would still be fine, performance wise, for current desktop use of course. The fastest ARM quad and octo core CPUs deliver very close to this level of performance at 5W.
Give it a year or 2 and even cellphones will be faster than the granddaddy of spaceheater CPUs
Man-O-Man do the Ubuntu fanboys annoy me. Canonical never really expected the fundraiser to succeed? This was all a marketing exercise? Come on, you'll give yourself a lot more credibility if you just admit this was a dismal failure.
They like to mention the fact that the Ubuntu Edge campaign holds a record for most pledges, but It holds the record for the largest unsuccessfully funded project too.
Linux users are cheap, there is no money to be made from them. The top selling app in Ubuntu App store has dozens of sales.
Also, lets not forget Canonical is a for-profit company. It's a bit pathetic for it to have to crowd source funding.
Not sure what they were thinking. A highly ambitious goal, marketed at a customer base who chooses to spend $0 on their OS.
The problem with Linux is its a zero sum game, in this case, revenue. Canonical, like others before them, will eventually die off as their user base are the tightest on earth. Their product is good, their market is not.
Would any of the typical Linux user base, pay $30-300 for each release of their favourite distro? some will, most wont. Linux == Dead
Another project has popped up on Indiegogo, the Linca Exiler SuperSMartPhone, which has got a more reasonable goal, http://igg.me/at/exiler/x/4108381
This seems a bit much when you can get a generic phone in Shenzhen for just 12 USD.
I would be interested to see Bunny Huang's take on this......
( It is Tim actually) nm
http://www.not2misc.com/2013/07/tim-doesnt-give.html
I have used Ubuntu since 8.10 and have 12.04.2 right now. I tried Unity and recently had to fall back to it because I broke something in Gnome Classic. I try to give competing approaches a chance, even occasionally trying Microsoft releases, but I haven't seen Win 8 as yet. The point is that if you try to use Unity on a desktop you lose the direct access you have to the nested menus you have in Gnome Classic or Gnome 2. It becomes time consuming to open dash every time you want to look for the little used application you've installed and you can't remember what it is called. I've even had to open a terminal and do ls on /usr/bin to jog my memory. I fixed the Gnome Classic problem I had and switched back.
Unity is fine for a touch screen application, I suppose, just not as the default GUI for a desktop with a mouse and keyboard. It was the perception that Shuttleworth was going to cram Unity down our throat that made many of us traditional desktop users unhappy with him. Bringing back Gnome Classic and hopefully keeping support for legacy X11 clients as well is the right thing to do.
So all the talk about an Ubuntu phone, but I saw a couple of weeks ago, I think it was on Gismodo, a small set-top box, that could easily replace a desk-side box and with a USB hub add in your existing peripherals, for $99. The device used mobile chips, low power and a flash disk.
So five years ago I bought a $300 desk-side box, Athlon-64 dual processor, 320 GB HDD, and 2 Gig ram. I would guess that if someone offered a processor that was x86 compatable, that I could run Linux off a USB stick or off the flash disk, no problem. If this device were also a phone but I brought it home and docked it and attached the USB hub it could operate exactly like my desktop system. If I could install any Linux I wanted, write code, save video and web pages, write webpages, so much the better, and at home could access a NAS or external HDD. Am I just off the boat or does such a thing exist now? Do we even have to seriously worry about Ubuntu Phone getting funded or not?