41–50 of 144 posts
sometimes i get tired of all the fakeness in the world. it seems to corrupt every part of society and makes me sick thinking about it. theranos, magic leap, and a lot more. everything seems to be overhyped bs, while the only successful things are essentially avenues to cram ads down your throat and brainwash you to spend money you don't have.
The problem is honesty isn't rewarded anymore. Someone working hard will be beaten by someone who tells all the fancy stuff...I know a lot of startups that raised millions, but their tech and growth is totally non-existent. I did some research and a lot of companies have little to no social media presence, yet are "growing" crazy. How do people find them? Add network effect and you get overly hyped stuff that don't d…
Raising millions is not a reward. I understand why you think that way since I used to think that way too. But I learned the hard way that raising money is nothing more than the price you have to pay to get to somewhere you want.
So what IS reward? Obviously, if your business does well and "growing" crazy, that's your reward. That way you didn't even have to give up your control over the company and still managed to outsmart others who wasted tons of money and didn't even get anything done.
That's the reward you get for working hard honestly. I also used to think that honest people never get rewarded, and that was a couple of years ago when I was looking at all the pointless apps getting funded. Now if you look back, none of them are alive. Even the ones that were growing like crazy all die off, because most of the ones that grew like crazy were designed to grow like crazy in a synthetic manner instead of organically growing based on the value they provide to users.
So the lesson is, just look at your customers. If you see that more and more people are using and buying your product, that means you are doing something right. You don't need validation from investors and the press.
p.s. You can buy press anyway. Once you have enough money and traction just hire a PR agency and pitch a story for a guaranteed spot on relevant publications. This is much better than these VC funded startups wasting money doing the PR piece when they have no substance.
Sounds like Magic Leap developed schpilkaz in their genektagazoink. The demo was like buttah. Like a big stick of buttah. I love Rony Abovitz, but he's a little ibaboodled in the kebbie. Talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic: Magic Leap is neither magic nor leaping. Discuss. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiJkANps0Qw
Benedict Evans doesn't seem like the kind of guy to fall for BS though, let alone defend it. And surely at least one of their investors had the technical due diligence capability to investigate how much computing power is in the demo "rigs" and be able to know if such power can be "miniaturized" into a consumer product by year X, perhaps allowing for a little software optimization on the way too.
The first video was known to be fake back in 2015, when they released another video that explicitly stated no visual effects were used. And my guess is the second video isn't fake, but it's using their non-miniaturized technology. This is not news. Unlike Theranos (where people's health was also at stake), if/when Magic Leap fails, their investors will lose their money and capitalism will go on - this is how things a…
No - the information from ML boils down to falsehoods - this is not how 'capitalism' should work :)
Granted, it does sometimes happen this way.
More limited investment, with reasonable hype, a longer time frame might have worked better - as a lot of the $$$ spent on ML today will be on marketing, overhead, unecessary staff.
Granted, even if they do go bust, they'll have made some tangible progress that will be leveraged elsewhere.
Google is a big investor - it could be that if ML goes bust, the Google can take hold of the IP, and probably end up hiring a bunch of people and carrying it on. That said, since Alphabet they operate differently.
That these guys are a bunch of snake oil merchants has been obvious from day zero. Sometimes the overwhelming stench of bullshit is a little too difficult to ignore.
But one wonders why there has yet to be an exodus of talent from Magic Leap. I suspect the work is interesting for the engineers but nobody has the heart to tell the C level execs that what they are trying to sell the public is bullshit.
Mostly because they are getting paid :).
And it's not entirely implausible that they get 'something' to work, and are able to sell that.
It doesn't matter if their tech doesn't yet work. Augmented reality is inevitable and someone will make it happen. Now, the logic is that whoever pours the most money into it will win the race and with patents be in a monopoly position. It's a gamble, but they have a likelihood of succeeding with money and hard work. That's what they've sold to their investors.
It doesn't matter if their tech doesn't yet work. Augmented reality is inevitable and someone will make it happen. Now, the logic is that whoever pours the most money into it will win the race and with patents be in a monopoly position. It's a gamble, but they have a likelihood of succeeding with money and hard work. That's what they've sold to their investors.
True.
"Now, the logic is that whoever pours the most money into it will win the race and with patents be in a monopoly position."
This is not quite true :).
My bet is that the quality of AR that we see in their hype videos will not be possible on a consumer scale until after the core patents have run out :).
This is a 'disruptive' technology but it's still way behind practical applicability.
We see this in every industry - and sometimes it takes quite a long time for products to come to fruition :)
I think this article suffers from an overly binary view of technology -- if it isn't market ready, it's vaporware. No, there's probably some real tech there (aforementioned demo), but miniaturizing / productizing is still a risk. I think the blowback has something to do with the marketing itself, and Abovitz's amazing idiosyncracies. Neither of those indicate anything about the tech, but (absent any public information) it helps fuel the hate.
And from what I understand about their likely approach, it's definitely more aggressive than the HoloLens. I don't personally think that nearfield focus in a headset is that valuable, but that's just a guess. If light field displays are the tech that takes AR over the top -- from curiosity to a new computing platform -- then Magic Leap is really well positioned, vis a vis a large lead and big IP portfolio.
Also, with ~$1.4 bn raised, they're too big to fail.