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Dead Startup Toys
201–210 of 211 posts
Re: Dead Startup Toys
#202Did One Laptop per Child truly fail as a startup? It was always a nonprofit, so of course it didn't make money. While the technology was lacking in many respects, it did serve a lot of children at the time, and proved the market that Chromebooks came to later dominate with a similar approach (linux-based OS with minimal resources at $100-300 price point).
A key element of the project was their custom Sugar Linux desktop environment which would have wireless collaboration and data sharing as a central feature, and a suite of custom educational software to run in that environment. The OLPC Foundation never fully delivered on that promise -- the software they shipped was buggy and incomplete, with few applications available and many of the promised features stubbed out or completely absent. The only real saving grace was that their desktop environment included wrappers for Firefox and OpenOffice, and that was enough to make the systems useful to students.
The OLPC Foundation went on to create a series of increasingly ridiculous design renders of future projects -- dual-screen laptops, tablets with solar cells on the back, ultra-thin tablets... none of these were manufactured. Most of them weren't even technologically feasible!
The OLPC project did jump-start interest in ultralight laptops, though, and probably led to the development of early netbooks like the Eee PC. So there's that.
Re: Dead Startup Toys
#203Is „one laptop per child“ really as bad as the other vaporware/fraudware in the list?
Not necessarily. The list is actually two different categories mixed together: 1. Products which failed because they were targeting their niche poorly (e.g. Juicero, OLPC) 2. Products which failed because they were outright scams (e.g. Theranos, Coolest) However, I do think the failure of OLPC is still interesting enough to deserve a mention on this list. With OLPC in particular they were trying to be like three diff…
> And at one point they were even going to have a handcrank on the thing so you could charge the laptop by hand if necessary.
They had to drop that feature when they realized that 1) there was no way to anchor the dynamo into the laptop chassis without making the laptop substantially larger, and 2) a child couldn't provide enough power to charge the laptop at a useful rate. They made some external dynamos, but I don't think those were widely used either (again, too slow to be useful).
> It even had a view source button on the keyboard!
And it didn't do anything. The button was baked into the hardware before the software was written. There were a couple of other nonfunctional buttons on the keyboard.
There was, at one point, even a proposal to include a disassembler in Sugar to let students reverse-engineer the (closed-source) wireless card firmware. I don't think that one ever got off the ground.
Re: Dead Startup Toys
#204Did One Laptop per Child truly fail as a startup? It was always a nonprofit, so of course it didn't make money. While the technology was lacking in many respects, it did serve a lot of children at the time, and proved the market that Chromebooks came to later dominate with a similar approach (linux-based OS with minimal resources at $100-300 price point).
I've had a 200$ eeepc long before that. Not sure if they actually changed the market in any way
Re: Dead Startup Toys
#205[deleted]
Re: Dead Startup Toys
#206Is „one laptop per child“ really as bad as the other vaporware/fraudware in the list?
Not necessarily. The list is actually two different categories mixed together: 1. Products which failed because they were targeting their niche poorly (e.g. Juicero, OLPC) 2. Products which failed because they were outright scams (e.g. Theranos, Coolest) However, I do think the failure of OLPC is still interesting enough to deserve a mention on this list. With OLPC in particular they were trying to be like three diff…
> OLPC also was built around it's founder's pet theories about constructionist learning. If you don't know what that means, well, then you're probably not a Hacker News user; because constructonism is how most techies learn a new system. We play around with it.
I have roughly an associates degree in education. (I don't actually have it, but I have more than enough credits.) This is a massive misrepresentation of the importance of constructionism. It's not a tech-bubble fringe theory. It's the only respected idea in pedagogics since at least 30 years. Every mainstream idea in the academic sphere about education is constructionist. Poststructuralism has had no lasting impact. C/ism is the only surviving school of thought in this field.
Re: Dead Startup Toys
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
The packs were pre-juiced, the Juicero Press just squeezed the juice out of the packs. The advantage of the packs is that they can lock you into their ecosystem and charge you more money for the convenience of using the machine. Razor-and-blades is a common, worthwhile business model... if the razor can be made cheaply enough to give away, and the whole package actually solves a problem. The idea was to basically be…
Hehe, charitable to not call i a outright scam :) > and the whole package actually solves a problem The problem of having to carry one less item from the supermarket? Soda stream is kinda the same, a machine which produce a easily available product directly in you home. But the soda cartridge doesn't expire after a week and can produce alot of fresh soda. So you save alot carrying and it's easy to always have soda si…
soda stream is a lot cheaper than buying bottled sparkling water, and you can make a very good analog to your favorite mineral water / soda / energy drink for even cheaper if you buy the right additives online. They did do a good job of making their luxury version waste most of the CO2 tank because it's impossible to make a good airtight seal.
you can homebrew your own though, and use a much larger/cheaper CO2 source than what they sell at grocery stores, which I'll probably be doing soon.
Re: Dead Startup Toys
#208Seems prudent to point out this isn't the product of a disgruntled's weekend project with fancy webdesign. This is a product from MSCHF which is a $100M+ startup [1] (feels like they're getting a bit of an astroturfed free ride of prime PR on HN because folks may not realize who is behind this) [1] https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/279769-42
> This is a product from MSCHF which is a $100M+ startup [1]
Where do you see a $100M+ startup?
On the page linked, I see a $12.5M Series B...
I would call them a small contraversial ultra-modern art company. A caricature more so than a startup.
Re: Dead Startup Toys
#209[deleted]
Re: Dead Startup Toys
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
A friend of mine got hers and loves it. She uses it multiple times per year, it is a staple at her parties. I understand not all backers were so lucky, but it seems to be more a situation of the company not being able to execute on something that a lot of people actually did want (judging by the # of backers they had).
Interesting, cool to hear that it wasn't all bluster. So now I must know... how's that blender?
It has made plenty of iced cocktails, so it seems to work well enough for her!