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Funding for iFind Kickstarter Suspended
An anonymous reader writes As of approximately 9AM PDT, funding for the iFind project at Kickstarter, the one with the bluetooth tags that have no battery and that harvest energy from WiFi and other radio sources, has been suspended. No word yet on how this came about.
Not an unexpected outcome since their claims of harvesting enough energy for a Bluetooth beacon from ambient wireless signals looked pretty far-fetched.
It's not any one thing, it's the culimination of nonsense.
They are going to market in 3 months, but there's not even a prototype to show, that's crazy if you've ever done hardware design work. They just need $500K, that's outrageously low for hardware, I know software startups which eat 10x that. Hardware eats a lot of money in test alone. Their claims are outside the range and specs for the technologies they work with. Not outrageously so, but ... enough that eyebrows have to be raised. Their "technical details" carefully avoid explaining why any of it is possible, and instead give intellectual symbolic links to why it might work and secret sauce.
The things that are really dubious are the "shake to find" feature, which seems to be magical at best given how bluetooth works and what their claims are.
Then people are background checking the CEO and while this may or may not be trustworthy, his alleged linked in pages does not give him the credentials he claims. He's allegedly got patents on cold fusion... Add it all up, and you have to lean on the side of scam. Maybe he's a misunderstood genius, but he's going to have to prove it.
The problem is it's not RFID. They state it is bluetooth. Further more they claim functionality not even possible/correct with Rope etc. BTLE uses around 0.15 mW or 150 W according to a overview by DigiKey and according to Powercast and their P2110 Powerharvester you can get a few 10's of microwatts from a 3W transmitter at around 40 feet. This tells me it's not fesible.
The iFind project stunk of a pseudoscientific scam from the outset. Ignoring WeTag's laughable claims of the iFind being able to harvest any usable amount of energy from a device that small (RF harvesting circuits either need big antennas or to have RF energy beamed right at them), consider the biography of the so-called "Dr. Paul McArthur":
A bachelor of science degree in "Electronics and Microprocessor Design"? That's like earning a degree in "Computer Programming and Windows Apps". Pseudoscientists love to claim academic credentials, but always seem to screw up the details, because they want their credentials to sound as impressive as possible. And on the flip side, they'll never tell you where their degrees supposedly came from.
Then there's the matter of the Ph.D. and the M.D. degrees, both earned by the age of 28 while he was working full-time as an RF design engineer. Really? So did he start when he was 12 years old? And I guess he never slept? And of course you could ask the obvious questions, such as:
(1) "Dr. McArthur, what schools did you earn your graduate degrees at? And what years did you earn them?"
(2) "Dr. McArthur, can you point us to the references for the journal articles that you published as part of your Ph.D. degree?"
Not that you would ever get an answer, because "Dr. McArthur" is a fake. He was clever enough to pick a name that was less obvious than "John Smith", but still essentially impossible to track down using web searches.
If you look into "free energy" scams, you'll find people like "Dr. McArthur" everywhere. Some of them buy fake degrees from diploma mills, and others just make up their educational credentials wholesale. If you ever find yourself dealing with someone who touts his credentials but won't give you a straight answer where and when he got them, then you can be certain you're dealing with a fraud or a pseudoscientist.
they didn't get the half million. Kickstarter shut it down before the transfers.
Here's what has been sent to backers in email from Kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/yuansong84/ifind-the-worlds-first-battery-free-item-locating/comments?cursor=7108319#comment-7108318). I haven't found any additional information from Kickstarter.
Hello,
This is a message from Kickstarter’s Trust & Safety team. We’re writing to notify you that the iFind - The World's First Battery-Free Item Locating Tag project has been suspended, and your $1.00 USD pledge has been canceled. A review of the project uncovered evidence of one or more violations of Kickstarter's rules, which include:
A related party posing as an independent, supportive party in project comments or elsewhere
Misrepresenting support by pledging to your own project
Misrepresenting or failing to disclose relevant facts about the project or its creator
Providing inaccurate or incomplete user information to Kickstarter or one of our partners
Accordingly, all funding has been stopped and backers will not be charged for their pledges. No further action is required on your part.
We take the integrity of the Kickstarter system very seriously. We only suspend projects when we find strong evidence that they are misrepresenting themselves or otherwise violating the letter or spirit of Kickstarter's rules. As a policy, we do not offer comment on project suspensions beyond what is stated in this message.
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