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Hello's Sleep-tracking Kickstarter Hit, Which Raised Over $42M In Three Years, Collapses (bbc.com)
Reader AmiMoJo writes: A sleep-tracking tech start-up founded by a Briton, which was one of Kickstarter's biggest success stories, has collapsed. Hello raised more than $2.4m (1.9m pound) for its Sense bedroom monitor via the crowdfunding site in 2014, and went on to attract a further $40.5m. Private backers included Singapore's sovereign wealth fund Temasek and Facebook Messenger chief David Marcus. Hello confirmed it would "soon be shutting down", via Medium's news site. The equipment produced a unique score for the previous night's sleep and aimed to wake the owner up at the best point in their sleep cycle.
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If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
$2.4m (1.9m pound)
So, 0.0024USD, and 0.0019 Pounds? No wonder it failed, you can't buy anything with less than a penny!
This amazes me.
Apps that tell us when to drink water, devices that track our sleep, measure our heart rate, tell us when to pee, poop and have orgasms*, what the fuck is going on?
use all those apps and devices and instead of dying at 50 because you smoked, drank and partied too much, you'll die at 50 of boredom.
Live a little, for fuck's sake.
(*) some of those are not yet available, but just wait a few years
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Over the years I have watched Kickstarter projects rise and fall. Some receive very limited funds and go on to succeed. Some receive massive funding and go on to succeed. Some receive massive funding only to fail. This marketplace of ideas is strange, but a good thing. Someone has a great idea, and they are able to receive funding by people who appreciate the idea without any technical understanding as to why it may or may not fail. Regardless of some very expensive and spectacular fails, people continue to throw money at great ideas that are at least nothing more. This does not seem to slow the whole machine down. Through such services as Kickstarter, we do not know what great innovations are to be hatched and realized that may have otherwise never seen the light of day over those great ideas that will fail. You can argue that it is a model for throwing money at a wall to see what sticks, but in this case I think that is a good thing for those things that may come but otherwise would not have.
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It's more newsworthy when one actually succeeds. I've been in 5; one of which was the fabled Kreyos Smart Watch massacre (which I recently found when cleaning up and promptly threw away), two which were DOA and got cancelled before production (at least I got my money back), one which turned out to be a repacked speaker from a Chinese company (for twice the price). The last debacle was the Qube Smart Lights which are over a year late and new lies everyday. Never again. I see "crowdfund" in an article and I don't even click anymore.
You just have to be careful what you choose. Look at the goals, are they realistic? Look at the people involved. Are that raising enough money? Do they want too much money?
I've only backed one crowdfund, the Veronica Mars movie. It had the original show runner, the main cast members (and ended up with almost all of the huge original cast). They wanted a reasonable amount of money. The production values could have been low, but it wasn't something that was a concern. If they produced a TV-episode like movie, I would have been ok with that.
The goals were not over the top, and the people had a track record of success.
Tech products from people that have never mass produced something is a bigger risk than TV episodes or indy games (unless it's a wing commander successor games).
"The best part? I became an ordained minister while not wearing pants." -- CleverNickName