Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Automatic (Car Adapter) Shutting Down

automatic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 95 posts

Re: Automatic (Car Adapter) Shutting Down

#41

Post by rhacker »

ricardobeat wrote: post #35

> With fewer consumers purchasing and leasing vehicles and drivers on the road, we unfortunately do not see a path forward for our business. Said like nobody will ever drive cars again. I'm perplexed at how quickly these businesses are deciding to fold.

Most startups rely on industry growth. If you have 100 drivers today and 110 tomorrow, you will have the climate for startups. If you have 100 drivers today, and 90 tomorrow, you only have room for the entrenched players.

Re: Automatic (Car Adapter) Shutting Down

#44

Post by LeifCarrotson »

rohansingh wrote: post #31
cordite wrote: post #4

They made my unit end of life, and then found themselves at end of life. This is IoT.

I'm working on a IoT device and this is something that my cofounders and I have discussed a fair bit. While we want to succeed, we know that most businesses fail, and we don't want to put out products that become waste. We're working on mitigating this by having an open hardware platform. The idea being that, even if our cloud service isn't up, you can re-flash the hardware to do anything you want. And you can use ou…

Do you think that Automatic needed to have a cloud service? Their primary use case seems to have been uploading mileage data to a variety of expense reporting systems. I don't see any reason that has to go from the OBDII dongle through the now-discontinued Automatic servers, and only then pass to the actual endpoint.

These IoT devices (and especially the phones and PCs that typically act as intermediaries) are abundantly capable of storing the configuration data and doing the API calls necessary to communicate with online services.

Is it just about the control?

Re: Automatic (Car Adapter) Shutting Down

#46

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

blakesterz wrote: post #30

I'd imagine that domain name is worth some serious case. Automattic (WordPress) and many others would probably love to scoop that up. I wonder if that's their most valuable asset now?

Automattic probably derived from "Matt" (The name of the founder) so probably better to keep using the brand.

Re: Automatic (Car Adapter) Shutting Down

#48

Post by ianwalter »

kirillzubovsky wrote: post #39

Perhaps next time someone on HN is complaining about "yet another subscription" business, send them to this and 10k other posts as a reminder how good businesses die without proper revenue.

Couldn't that go both ways though? Why would I want to sign up for "yet another subscription" when they can just go belly up and render my investment worthless (vs an alternative with a one-time payment)?

Re: Automatic (Car Adapter) Shutting Down

#49

Post by ardy42 »

rohansingh wrote: post #31
cordite wrote: post #4

They made my unit end of life, and then found themselves at end of life. This is IoT.

I'm working on a IoT device and this is something that my cofounders and I have discussed a fair bit. While we want to succeed, we know that most businesses fail, and we don't want to put out products that become waste. We're working on mitigating this by having an open hardware platform. The idea being that, even if our cloud service isn't up, you can re-flash the hardware to do anything you want. And you can use ou…

> We're working on mitigating this by having an open hardware platform. The idea being that, even if our cloud service isn't up, you can re-flash the hardware to do anything you want. And you can use our documentation to do it so you don't have to reverse-engineer everything from scratch.

I think that's absolutely great. I've had enough IoT products brick on me that I avoid most out of principle now. I'd change my mind for a product that make it clear they've implemented a customer-friendly plan for when the servers inevitably are shut down.

That said, I think your plan really only seems to help tinkerers. There may be no way around that for what you're building, but I think graceful degradation in functionality is preferable, such as having a maximally-functional no-cloud mode. The few smart products I buy have a mode like that.

Post reply on HN