> Smartcar’s team has worked _day and night_ over the past few years
Maybe this is karma for being willing to work people to death?
Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
41–50 of 637 posts
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#42Welcome to the world of startups: I hope you developed some secret sauce!
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#43I got stuck at "Developers can read our docs and use our API to locate or even unlock a car’s doors with just a few lines of code"
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#44That is pretty egregious, and its also par for the course.
And that is why startup companies go through all the hoops of being "stealth" and having NDAs and what not. There was a German VC firm that was, as I recall, very upfront about this. Clone a successful US company before it got to the European market.
On the one hand it is great to have validation of the idea, on the other its a pain to have someone with more money in the bank able to spend it on marketing and spinning the narrative in their favor.
Since the ability to get a foreign company (in this case Israeli) to do anything is limited, your best bet is to out execute them. Also, love them or hate them, having patents helps in situations like these.
The reality is that if an idea is really good, the people who came up with it know it better than anyone and that gives them a tremendous advantage in terms of knowing what is important and what isn't. Companies have been known to talk about expensive and complicated features or options in order to get people trying to copy their success to waste time and money on something for which there is no actual demand. It is no doubt worth investing in understanding how one's enemies are getting their information and shutting that off if possible.
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#45You can't copyright an API, right? What are you asking them to stop doing in the c&d? Copying the website and documentation?
See Oracle vs Google.[1] It's not as simple a question as it might seem. Google is currently appealing to the Supreme Court.
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Goog....
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#46Wait, I can make an app that unlocks my car??
Yep! Just check out our docs: https://smartcar.com/docs/ Would love any feedback you may have!
The documentation only has a screenshot of the brands supported. Would be nice to just be able to lookup my car brand and make support in the docs instead of having to make an Auth flow first...
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#47That is pretty egregious, and its also par for the course. And that is why startup companies go through all the hoops of being "stealth" and having NDAs and what not. There was a German VC firm that was, as I recall, very upfront about this. Clone a successful US company before it got to the European market. On the one hand it is great to have validation of the idea, on the other its a pain to have someone with more…
> German VC firm that was, as I recall, very upfront about this
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#48Can you not use a DMCA and contact their hosting provider? One per offense. Also, if the docs are registered copyright, willfull infringement per offense is over $100k per instance. $50mil/$140k = 357.14 Thoughts?
A bit naive. I am sure the DMCA can be used to put some fire on their ass to rewrite the documentation though but not much more than that.
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#49Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#50Holy crap. The only way forward for Bessemer et al. VCs is to immediately withdraw their funding for this “company” and cut all ties in order to prove that they had no forewarning that this is how their money was being used. There are so few actors this visibly bad that if they didn’t do anything they would become “that guy” everybody avoids, in both the deals and funding space, when orgs do their due diligence. So t…
Bessemer & Co. would not spend this kind of money without doing DD to the point where their competitive review would have snagged the OP's efforts. So most likely they know.