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The platform they built is really amazing, but there was no sense of how they could start making money in any reasonable period of time considering their costs. I'm sure everyone who was working there will be fine as they had some tremendously talented engineers.
Famo.us’ 15 minutes of open source fame have come to an end. JavaScript rendering engine Famo.us has pivoted away from its hardcore open sourced engineering platform which had raised over $31 million. It’s now refocused on commercializing the idea of powerful mobile web apps with a content management system for branded marketing apps. Yikes. If ever I wanted a paragraph printed on a poster to scare me into working ha…
I would be wary of assuming the problem was that they didn't work hard enough.
> What makes our product offering unique is that our apps can be built without coding Oooh... that's going to be a tough argument to sell to people.
Will it take over like they said it would ten years ago? Hell no. Will it gain more market shares as people apply it to the right problems? I think so.
Famo.us to me was always a platform/framework or even a language more than it was a product or service. I have no idea how they could have raised $31M on that. This could have been an amazing framework built by the open source community instead it's now just another growth before revenue scheme that went wrong. Sad.
Famo.us founder was a Powerset co-founder, which had an highly successful exit to Microsoft. This pattern often explains generous funding of outlandish ideas.
I am quite baffled by all this. I heard of Famo.us, but didn't give it more than 1 thought. I thought it was just another framework, I would have never thought that they had employees, let alone that many and raising that much money. I watched the video in the article, and I can't believe that people are throwing money at someone with a pitch like that. I feel like everything about Famo.us is all the wrong things tha…
Famo.us’ 15 minutes of open source fame have come to an end. JavaScript rendering engine Famo.us has pivoted away from its hardcore open sourced engineering platform which had raised over $31 million. It’s now refocused on commercializing the idea of powerful mobile web apps with a content management system for branded marketing apps. Yikes. If ever I wanted a paragraph printed on a poster to scare me into working ha…
I never understood how they could claim "this is not html5" and "we have a direct conversation with the GPU", when it appears to be just a bunch of s with style="transform:matrix3d(0,1,2...)"?
I am quite baffled by all this. I heard of Famo.us, but didn't give it more than 1 thought. I thought it was just another framework, I would have never thought that they had employees, let alone that many and raising that much money. I watched the video in the article, and I can't believe that people are throwing money at someone with a pitch like that. I feel like everything about Famo.us is all the wrong things tha…
The problem, though, is that building a new platform is really, really, really hard, and they didn't succeed. One of the biggest problems that I see that people underestimate is that most (not all, but most) great native mobile app engineers _don't_ want to build cross-platform apps. They tend to be "platform partisans", either loving Apple or Android, but not usually both. They always want to become experts in the latest and greatest platform technology. Perhaps more importantly, Apple and Google aren't particularly interested in cross-platform technology either. If you want to be featured in the App or Play Stores, you've got to have a native app that uses the latest iOS or Android features.
I see lots and lots of cross-platform mobile solutions on HN, but I rarely see people considering the incentives of both Apple and Google, and the mobile developers, when it comes to evaluating these solutions.