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Another Crowdfunded Startup Takes Customers' Money, Then Shuts Downs (mercurynews.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Bay Area Newsgroup:
A Bay Area startup that promised to give music lovers state-of-the-art wireless earphones is instead closing its doors, becoming the latest in a string of crowd-funded companies to take customers' money and shut down without shipping a product. San Francisco-based Kanoa ran out of capital and shut down this week, leaving in the lurch scores of customers who paid $150 or more to pre-order high-tech earphones they never received. The company emailed customers on Wednesday to break the bad news, directing them to a letter posted on the Kanoa website...
Kanoa is just the latest local crowdfunded company to disappoint customers. Last summer San Francisco-based startup Skully imploded, to the dismay of 3,000 customers who paid $1,500 each for high-tech motorcycle helmets they never received. In February, Lily Robotics, another San Francisco-based startup, filed for bankruptcy. Unlike Skully and Kanoa, Lily promised to reimburse the more than 60,000 customers who paid for but never received its camera drones.
In a letter online the company claimed they are "in negotiations" with potential investors, "and also large tech companies on an acquisition" -- but unless and until funding materializes, "we do not have enough capital to stay operational..."
"We know you are disappointed, and can only ask that you understand that we genuinely tried."
Kanoa is just the latest local crowdfunded company to disappoint customers. Last summer San Francisco-based startup Skully imploded, to the dismay of 3,000 customers who paid $1,500 each for high-tech motorcycle helmets they never received. In February, Lily Robotics, another San Francisco-based startup, filed for bankruptcy. Unlike Skully and Kanoa, Lily promised to reimburse the more than 60,000 customers who paid for but never received its camera drones.
In a letter online the company claimed they are "in negotiations" with potential investors, "and also large tech companies on an acquisition" -- but unless and until funding materializes, "we do not have enough capital to stay operational..."
"We know you are disappointed, and can only ask that you understand that we genuinely tried."
It's a well-known risk of crowdfunding and backers are warned about this risk a gazillion times.
This shouldn't be shocking to anybody even remotely sane.
If you're outraged by this, you should instead be outraged by the psychiatrics wards' inability to keep you locked up inside.
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Crowdfunding is not a game that promises to deliver. Realistically, it is a 50:50 thing and people need to understand that and need to stop complaining that it is not a 100% thing. On the plus side, you get a 50% change of getting something you would otherwise have a zero chance. If you take the probability of failure into account, it is actually a pretty good deal in many cases (if you want what is being promised). Also, if you are somewhat realistic in your expectation, you can recognize campaigns that have only a very low probability to actually deliver.
That said, if you expect it to be a 100% thing, then stay away from it as you have _not_ understood what this is about.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
People confuse crowdfunding with pre-ordering. In crowdfunding you sponsor someone's attempt to achieve something, because you want it to happen. Perks are just an additional incentive. Sometimes a perk happens to be a product, but it's still a perk for your sponsorship, not something you bought or pre-ordered.
KANOA send headphones for review, this guy THOROUGHLY reviewed them and SLAUGHTER the product, shortly after they closed their web page
https://videosift.com/video/Re...
Investors invest in the founder, someone with the vision and the skills to get the job done.
No, they seem to invest in someone with a vision and a willingness to follow it. In many cases the "visionary" is just an ideas guy and they then have to find engineers to actually make the thing. Engineers also have the habit of saying "nope". For example...
When I was in the medical industry as a startup, we kept on getting compared to these guys:
https://www.indiegogo.com/proj...
and that device was somewhat more capable (on paper) and not dissimilarly priced. Although the market was different people still wanted to compare. Now, I spent about an hour looking at it and decided it would never work.
For example, by a cursory look at the hardware, they have a ECG (can work, but would be inaccurate on the forehead), reflectance pulse-ox (definitely can work, potentially more accurate but calibration isn't settled yet), a thermometer and a few bits and bobs, like a thermometer. They claimed to able to measure *internal* body temperature which is clearly a lie to anyone who thinks about it for 3 seconds. They also claimed to be able to measure blood pressure. This is not clearly a lie unless you know about medical devices. The only remaining option is pulse transit time. That works, but needs frequent recalibration, i.e. half hourly measurements using an oscillometry cuff. Even then I don't know off hand if there's actually a certified machine on the market.
Anyway a brief investigation to me demonstrated beyond doubt that it would fail. They raised about $50 million and the FDA has told them to remote brick the devices.
Anyway as an engineer trained in the field, it was obvious from me that it was utterly impossible with state of the art technology. It's also kind of obvious that a startup which isn't centred around some leading engineers in the field is going to be able to quickly surpass the state of the art when many people have already tried.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I think the reason that high tech crowdfunded products are so popular isn't due to the inherent foolishness of the people who back them, but because of the failure of established technology companies to actually meet market demand.
Too many products are crippled by their parent company or VC financing MBAs who look at the product and figure out how it can be manipulated into 5 years of new models and revisions, which features can be withheld or turned into vendor exclusive options or upgrades, and so on.
The high tech landscape at all levels from consumer to enterprise is littered with good technology corrupted by relentless marketing and financial scheming to extract the maximum amount of money from the buyer, and quite often with the side effect of not fixing bugs or making basic functionality or features completely reliable.
It seems like so many kickstarter projects are attempts to fix broken products with accessories that ought to be built in features or produce a variant of a product that wasn't crippled at birth by its maker for whatever marketing or long-term pricing games they have.
My general rule is:
NEVER PLEDGE MONEY TO A KICKSTARTER
This rule hasn't failed me yet.
"His name was James Damore."
Okay, please explain.
You want a product. You want a product so bad that you finance the company to make it before it even exists. Your reward for doing this is to receive the product.
Is this not just pre-ordering something that doesn't exist? If it works and is successful, you'll be able to pick one up not long after they make them anyway, whether you invested or not. If it doesn't work, you're going to lose money or receive a substandard product.
What's in it for you to crowd-fund that kind of thing?
Now, I have crowdfunded things. Literally, they were all limited run, support-for-the-creators projects, where the product wouldn't exist afterwards and/or the product wouldn't get made otherwise where the creators had a proven history of success.
For example, Defense Grid 2. It couldn't have happened without the kickstarter. The people behind it had proven themselves already. There was in fact already a substantial amount of the game complete. They weren't reliant on just the kickstarter. And actually I profited quite heavily as AMD gave them some graphics cards to give away to backers, I got the game, and all kinds of other stuff. Even then, that kickstarter really worried me, as it's not how I normally do things. I've only ever backed four or five small projects with a tiny percentage of my disposable income. Four succeeded, delivered the product, after having proven they could deliver a product before they even started. One stopped the kickstarter and never took the money because they found investment, and the game came out anyway (and backers got a free copy).
But... at no point did I put money, into an unknown company, with no track history, promising to make something that didn't exist, that you'd just be able to buy normally later even if you hadn't funded it.
I'm afraid I have to apply my normal rule here. If it doesn't exist, in a shop, to buy, today, then it's all hype and hyperbole. For anything from fancy battery technologies and electric cars, to Half-Life 3, to the latest iPhone, or even a movie.
All the pre-hyping stuff just flies over my head, because it's all irrelevant if you can't actually buy that product yet.
You can "invest", but what you're really doing is "donating" - to be honest I'm quite happy donating to a project where I'm enjoying the fruits of their previous labours so much that I think they deserve more. If I get something else out of that too, cool. If not, I've paid them back for something they gave me (yes... even if I have paid more than I needed to, I'm fine with that if - say - a computer game cost me almost nothing but ended up giving me hundreds of hours of entertainment.
I've been known to buy second copies for friends, even if those friends likely won't play that game, etc. It's the only reason I'll buy DLC too... to support the original game).
If you can't buy it today, but you could buy it tomorrow no matter what, then why would you lay down money today instead of just waiting?
I am pretty sure you can't have blue tooth device having signal go through your body. When it is my back pocket, I cannot hear any signals. Having tried with two different manufacturer I was told that if there is nothing to bounce the signal off, e.g. outside, it does not go through the body and that is why it gets interrupted, and they recommend a front pocket. Now i don't know if it is a load of crap, an EE can chime in, that would be interesting to know, my front pocket in the mean time being too loaded ;).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
OK, so I see everyone saying "you know what your risks were" but that doesn't account for things like this: Qube Smart Lights were funded 540%. I ordered 4 bulbs well over a year ago and despite not receiving anything, the lights were being sold on a number of online site including Amazon and their own site. In fact, THEY ARE STILL TAKING ORDERS ON THEIR OWN SITE!! We're not talking about crowdfunds that for one reason or another, never get to the actual product stage; we're talking about a company that produced enough product to sell on multiple outlets yet DIDN'T SEND THE PRODUCTS TO THE BACKERS **FIRST**. Now, after 3 months of no updates they are claiming that they 'Running out of cash flow as the development time for Qube took much longer than we anticipated" among other things. They also claim "We understand the disappointment that may arise from such a decision and would like to assure each and every one of you that we remain committed to our obligations and will continue to source for new funding." yet they dissolved the LLC in California so chances of that ever happening are slim. So tell me again how this should be allowed? Tell me again how I shouldn't expect anything in return for my investment? I paid for shipping on a product I will never receive - how am I not at least entitled to a refund of the shipping?