I remember Ben Horowitz singing praises for this company. Must be a good pay day for A16Z.
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Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M
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Re: Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M
#12I remember Ben Horowitz singing praises for this company. Must be a good pay day for A16Z.
From the article, the sale price is estimated at $40 million, whilst the company had raised $200 million, most recently at a $360 million valuation. Most likely not a good pay day, definitely a significant haircut for some of the investors to say the least.
Agree, and given the standard "liquidity preference", the founders are likely to net $0, except for the Google bonuses for the engineering (Jack Barker-like Rosenthal is not likely to stick there).
It's sad, really. It's one of the really innovative companies, but it's not easy to sell tech ahead of its time. Yet another incident that will encourage to pick copycats over real innovation.
I guess Google is no longer as generous with the acquisitions.
Re: Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M
#13Well that was the logical outcome. Their technology was interesting but it clearly wasn't viable as a stand-alone compact camera. Everyone expected it would eventually be integrated into smartphones.
Or, as is often said in the Valley: "Is it a product, or a feature?"
Re: Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M
#14Lytro has really cool technology but never really found a good use case for consumers. I owned both the 1st generation and 2nd generation camera, as much as I hated the UI of the software and usability of the hardware, I can clearly see the team has tried really hard to make it usable. They tried building an editing app, a community, a community 2.0, multiple hardware batch revisions. I wonder why they didn’t stop so…
They are buying them to make dash cams for self driving cars is my guess... That tech in dash-cam video is priceless
It's likely for VR, the 'reverse' of the Lytro allows projection to the eye at multiple focal points.
Re: Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M
#15Well that was the logical outcome. Their technology was interesting but it clearly wasn't viable as a stand-alone compact camera. Everyone expected it would eventually be integrated into smartphones.
It could be smartphones, i also think the technology would be interesting for streetview.
Re: Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the article, the sale price is estimated at $40 million, whilst the company had raised $200 million, most recently at a $360 million valuation. Most likely not a good pay day, definitely a significant haircut for some of the investors to say the least.
Agree, and given the standard "liquidity preference", the founders are likely to net $0, except for the Google bonuses for the engineering (Jack Barker-like Rosenthal is not likely to stick there). It's sad, really. It's one of the really innovative companies, but it's not easy to sell tech ahead of its time. Yet another incident that will encourage to pick copycats over real innovation. I guess Google is no longer a…
> It's sad, really. It's one of the really innovative companies, but it's not easy to sell tech ahead of its time.
This glorifies failure quite a bit. One major objective of tech companies is to produce products that customers value and like. Lytro failed to do this. Just because the underlying science is complicated doesn't make the tech "ahead of its time" due to the fact that maybe the tech, as implemented, just isn't what people want, now or in the future!
Having complicated science underlying a product certainly doesn't excuse a company from producing products that people want.
Re: Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M
#17Lytro has really cool technology but never really found a good use case for consumers. I owned both the 1st generation and 2nd generation camera, as much as I hated the UI of the software and usability of the hardware, I can clearly see the team has tried really hard to make it usable. They tried building an editing app, a community, a community 2.0, multiple hardware batch revisions. I wonder why they didn’t stop so…
They are buying them to make dash cams for self driving cars is my guess... That tech in dash-cam video is priceless
Why would it be priceless?
With dash-cam video you can just chose a fixed hyperfocal distance and have everything in good focus.
You certainly don't need creative DoP and bokeh...
Re: Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are buying them to make dash cams for self driving cars is my guess... That tech in dash-cam video is priceless
Why would it be priceless? With dash-cam video you can just chose a fixed hyperfocal distance and have everything in good focus. You certainly don't need creative DoP and bokeh...
Just spit-balling, but could it be used for cheap depth perception, like a LIDAR alternative?
Re: Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the article, the sale price is estimated at $40 million, whilst the company had raised $200 million, most recently at a $360 million valuation. Most likely not a good pay day, definitely a significant haircut for some of the investors to say the least.
Agree, and given the standard "liquidity preference", the founders are likely to net $0, except for the Google bonuses for the engineering (Jack Barker-like Rosenthal is not likely to stick there). It's sad, really. It's one of the really innovative companies, but it's not easy to sell tech ahead of its time. Yet another incident that will encourage to pick copycats over real innovation. I guess Google is no longer a…
Good points. Lightfield tech will be common on day but that's probably at least 5 years from now
Re: Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree, and given the standard "liquidity preference", the founders are likely to net $0, except for the Google bonuses for the engineering (Jack Barker-like Rosenthal is not likely to stick there). It's sad, really. It's one of the really innovative companies, but it's not easy to sell tech ahead of its time. Yet another incident that will encourage to pick copycats over real innovation. I guess Google is no longer a…
> It's sad, really. It's one of the really innovative companies, but it's not easy to sell tech ahead of its time. This glorifies failure quite a bit. One major objective of tech companies is to produce products that customers value and like. Lytro failed to do this. Just because the underlying science is complicated doesn't make the tech "ahead of its time" due to the fact that maybe the tech, as implemented, just i…
>Lytro failed to do this. Just because the underlying science is complicated doesn't make the tech "ahead of its time" due to the fact that maybe the tech, as implemented, just isn't what people want, now or in the future!
As we speaking abstractly? What theoretically could be if we didn't know anything about the tech?
Because otherwise this specific tech is very much an "ahead of its time" technology, whether consumers adopted it or not.
Besides, consumer adoption is a BS test for a technology being ahead of its time.
Failure in the market can simply be because the implementation was not good, or the marketing wasn't, or the support was lacking, or the price too high, or 200 other reasons, that don't depend on the technology not being ahead of its time.