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The Mind-Reading Gadget For Dogs That Got Funded, But Didn't Get Built (ieee.org)
the_newsbeagle writes: Crowdfunding campaigns that fail to deliver may be all too common, but some flameouts merit examination. Like this brain-scanning gadget for dogs, which promised to translate their barks into human language. It's not quite as goofy as it sounds: The campaigners planned to use standard EEG tech to record the dogs' brainwaves, and said they could correlate those electrical patterns with general states of mind like excitement, hunger, and curiosity. The campaign got a ton of attention in the press and raised twice the money it aimed for. But then the No More Woof team seemed to vanish, leaving backers furious. This article explains what went wrong with the campaign, and what it says about the state of neurotech gadgets for consumers.
"Where are my testicles, Summer."
She also said that NSID shifted attention to other projects and basically forgot that it had promised to build a canine mind-reader. “We missed a lot of emails, so we’re really sorry about that,” Mazetti says. “We had a restructuring at the company, and we had an absent-minded engineer in charge.”
No, you ignored a lot of e-mails. You had people trying to contact you for two years. "Missing e-mails" is believable when it's less than five. It's really not necessary to continue lying to your backers.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
I had one for cats. It worked fine. Could only get one phrase"kill and kill again" it worked on every cat I tried it on.
Caveat emptor. If you thought crowd funding a "mind reading" machine without a demonstrable working prototype was a good idea, you probably deserved to have your money taken.
The reason people like dogs is that no mind-reading tool is ever necessary. It's always immediately obvious what's on their mind.
I'm not even a dog owner or dog lover and I can usually tell the difference between the "hi, let's play" bark and the "hi, I'm going to eat your face for lunch" bark. Oh, and the bark while looking at the door usually means "I need to go bend a biscuit", while hanging around the dinner bowl while barking generally translates as "feed me you ignorant bastard". That bark whenever the doorbell rings generally means "Danger, Will Robinson. Danger"!
I didn't RTFA, but it's obvious what happened. I can sum it up using two old quotes:
1) A fool and his money are soon parted
2) There's a sucker born every minute.
#DeleteChrome
Gullibility: it has no lower limits. People that invested in this should immediately consult a doctor to see what kind of head injury they have.
And the hucksters that were supposed to build this thing made me laugh:
She also said that NSID shifted attention to other projects and basically forgot that it had promised to build a canine mind-reader.
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiight....they just "forgot" about that mind-reading machine they were building. Sure, that's totally believable.
Like one time I was building a nuclear-powered orbital weapons platform, I went to make a sandwich and got sidetracked, and years later I was like, "Heyyyyyyyyy, what ever happened to that orbital weapons platform I was building?"
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
UBI is needed by the millions of unemployed to pay their rent and bills, not the people you describe who have to float on cash to pay for stuff like this
Just let me download and 3D print it. It's the future, right? Only Luddites buy things in stores, right?
I did an indiegogo in 2014, hit around 300%, bought a lathe and a drill press and a 3d printer, and delivered all the units within 90 days.
After that I decided to start selling my invention through regular channels... and discovered that crowdfunding is radioactive to investors unless you hit more than 1000%. Most people told me that what I had already invented, built, and sold was unfeasible.
One person even told me that it was unfeasible AFTER it had made a hole in his desk.
Why do grifters ruin it for the rest of us?
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
No More Woof sums up the current state of neurotech products intended for consumers
Why didn't they just save us all some time; instead of sugarcoating vapourware and trying to be all hip and NEUROTECH, call it SNAKE OIL like we have been for hundreds of years already.
I feel for you, that sucks. Having said that:
> Most people told me that what I had already invented, built, and sold was unfeasible.
I've owned a few companies built aroundv things I created, one that did over a million dollars in sales.
Later, I found out that I didn't own an investable business as much as I owned my JOB. My creations paid my bills for 15 years. I worked, I took home a paycheck. The question for an investor is:
If I give you a million dollars today, can I reasonably expect to get back $200,000 each year for a few years, then also get my million dollars back within five years?
The long term average in a broad-based, fairly safe mutual fund is about 9%, and you can get your investment back whenever you want to. For a risky investment in a new business to make sense, it has to offer much better than 9% returns, and the ability to get your principal back in a reasonable time frame.
Also, to "go big", I learned, you'll have much higher costs than you have as a hobby/small business. You'll need to put 25%-50% of the retail price into sales and marketing, another big chunk into taxes, admin staff, regulatory compliance, insurance, etc. So something that costs $100 to make and sells for $200 isn't viable on a large scale - to sell a shitload of them at $200 each, your marketing expenses will be at least $70 each, often more if you're going through a retailer. To go big, the item that sells for $200 better not cost more than $40-$50 to produce.
What I owned was a decent job for myself, but not a feasible investment for an investor who could instead make 9% in a much more diversified, and therefore much safer, investment. I wonder if your situation may have been similar.
They should've funded a brain-scanning gadget for Apple IIs.
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
Crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter try to make it seem like you're pre-paying for a final product, but you're not. You're investing in a business concept - basically you're a venture capitalist. If it works, you'll get your product. if it doesn't, you'll get nothing.
Crowdfunding is actually worse than venture capitalism. With the latter, you the investor get part ownership of the company, so if it becomes successful (e.g. Oculus VR, Pebble) you share in that success. With crowdfunding, all you get is a shiny trinket. If you even get it at all. All the risk, none of the rewards.
This is why science education matters for the general population, even though most of them will never work in a scientific or engineering field. It immunises them against ridiculous claims and scams.
I'm no neurologist, but I know that EEG contacts don't work through fur - and I've seen plenty of photos of laboratory animals with shaven heads, or narrow probes that pass through the fur and through the skin in a way that most dog owners would not permit.
Four years of this garbage. SMH
HA-HA!
>"Like this brain-scanning gadget for dogs, which promised to translate their barks into human language."
It would be better if the device could convert barking desire into silence, or maybe reduce the volume by 75%.
that I can get backers to fund my fart counting machine? Any takers?
I'm sorry, but you can't follow "It's not quite as goofy as it sounds" with "The campaigners planned to use standard EEG tech to record the dogs' brainwaves, and said they could correlate those electrical patterns with general states of mind like excitement, hunger, and curiosity". At least not with a straight face!
I mean, I can generally believe the first part about standard EEG readings of dog's brainwaves, but even that beggars belief when we're supposed to also accept that they'll somehow be translated into intelligible messages to humans! They could just be spewing whatever and we'd be none the wiser, so, NO, it is EXACTLY as goofy as it sounds. If not more, when you actually think about it!
> after it made a hole in his desk
> Still, what possesses a man to say "This thing cannot possibly work" after having seen it work?
The same thing that possesses a man to destroy his potential investor's furniture? ;) LOL
Seriously, I can only imagine your face when he said that.
Crowdfunding is based on a singular conceit: that you can capitalize a business with initial product sales. Yes, a few companies have managed to pull-off crowdfunding successes, but only through skipping salaries and donating massive amounts of labor. That makes the fantasy of crowd funding look feasible, when it's actually a recipe for failure. There is a reason business capitalization has traditionally come from a source outside the income stream: that methodology works. It's been used to launch successful businesses for centuries, and failure to adhere to it is why undercapitalizing is the number one cause of collapse for new ventures.
Most crowdfunding projects fail. That's a fact. It's time to get back to the basics of adequate advance capitalization derived not from seducing unsophisticated public investors, but from good old hard work, sacrifice, and delayed gratification. Grow up, Millenials.
Seriously.. Shut up already. You aren't going to get free money asshole, no matter how much you dress it up in populism.
Unless it was going to do more than do rudimentary brain scans, and just say
simple phrases such as 'I'm hungry, please feed me" and "I feel agitated, I think there is an inrtruder around", it would not have provided any real benefit to the owner. The only benefit it would have is if it could sense the dog was in distress, and send an alert to the owner through *both* SMS and an app, and possibly allow the owner to turn on an audio/video feed to see what was going on, but otherwise, it would have done no more than an experienced dog owner could do without it, probaly much less.
Yeah, this was an obvious fail, except that there were enough gullible people with more money than brains to pour money into this.
Given that the gizmo in question is a handheld laser cutter, making a hole in the desk was intended to be impressive :) I was intending to make a hole in a piece of acrylic, but left it on a few seconds too long.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Av handheld laser cutter sounds fun. You could use it to cut a mount for itself, to mount it to a shark's head.
There's your problem.
Seriously. Backing an IGG project is admitting you have too much money and don't like hookers and blow.
You do know that UBI is a libertarian proposal from the 1940's, right? And that left-wingers were opposed to it until very recently, as they thought it'd hamper the will of the proletariat to get up in arms and make a revolution, right?
Conservatives: always illiterate.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.