Genuine off-topic question: why didn't they go through Kickstarter, to potentially reach more users (although a $32M goal is huge)?
I believe Kickstarter requires more upfront for hardware projects (prototype, etc)
Ubuntu Edge fails to raise goal
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Re: Ubuntu Edge fails to raise goal
#12What now?
Re: Ubuntu Edge fails to raise goal
#13raised just over 40% of their goal - $12,809,906 / $32M. was certainly an interesting experiment edit: s/raised/were pledged/
Indiegogo take the money and then refund if unsuccessful, so in a way they did raise the money, at least people were willing to part with it immediately.
Re: Ubuntu Edge fails to raise goal
#14Speculation: they didn't want the money, they wanted the buzz.
They didn't even have all their parts picked out, did they? But they'll be able to use this for leverage with manufacturers/investors/whatever.
12 million in "sales" in a month with no marketing (or product)!
Re: Ubuntu Edge fails to raise goal
#15Genuine off-topic question: why didn't they go through Kickstarter, to potentially reach more users (although a $32M goal is huge)?
I believe Kickstarter requires more upfront for hardware projects (prototype, etc)
They had a design prototype, that might have been enough. I suspect pricing might have been a part of it, after all, on $32m, even a 1% price difference is a very large amount.
Re: Ubuntu Edge fails to raise goal
#16I hope this isn't unfair but..
Does this mean that Canonical either don't believe enough in Ubuntu Edge to raise the $20m difference themselves or that Canonical do believe in it but are not able to raise $20m?
I have to admit I am skeptical about the commitment of a large, established, company to a product that they are not willing to put their own skin in the game to develop.
However, I can understand and have participated in crowd-funding for smaller companies who are trying to play a bigger game.
I just wonder which one Canonical is.
Re: Ubuntu Edge fails to raise goal
#17I liked the idea, but I refuse to use a phone without a landscape physical keyboard. Virtual keyboards are awful. All of them. They take too much screen real state away from me, yet they're small enough to make me struggle when trying to write something complex like my secure password ... Swype and similar options are not an option either, because I write in different languages, and no matter how good the text predic…
Likewise. My N950 has an incredible keyboard -- it even have a proper control key -- but its operating system is completely dead in the water. There don't seem to be any modern Android phones that run on GSM and have physical keyboards. The Phonon Q has its SIM card soldered to the phone. I just ordered a Galaxy S Relay off ebay, which is last year's hardware and its physical keyboard is supposed to be kind of bad anyway. The state of physical keyboards in phones these days is terrible. The [overpriced] Blackberry Q10 is tempting for its hardware, and the fact that it comes with an Android runtime, but I don't really want to run QNX or have a smartphone running a bunch of obscure HTTP servers with pf managing the security between them -- or whatever bizarre model they're using.
I wish Shuttleworth would have added the physical keyboard and advertised it as the natural progression of the N900/N950. I would have purchased a few of them.
Re: Ubuntu Edge fails to raise goal
#18I liked the idea, but I refuse to use a phone without a landscape physical keyboard. Virtual keyboards are awful. All of them. They take too much screen real state away from me, yet they're small enough to make me struggle when trying to write something complex like my secure password ... Swype and similar options are not an option either, because I write in different languages, and no matter how good the text predic…
That's getting more limiting all the time.
Re: Ubuntu Edge fails to raise goal
#19Unrealistic goal, crazy prize for specs that should be widely available when phone is finally shipped after almost a year. I wasn't that surprising :)
Re: Ubuntu Edge fails to raise goal
#20What now?
Firefox OS!