I'm lucky enough to have an original Pets.com sock puppet still in my possession
Dead Startup Toys
81–90 of 211 posts
Re: Dead Startup Toys
#82I almost backed the Coolest Cooler, until I saw the built-in 'ice blender' and realized I didn't want a cooler that required a power supply. Sad to see so many people get taken for a ride :/
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).
Re: Dead Startup Toys
#83Seems 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
Is it astroturf, though? I think this is genuinely hilarious. Elizabeth Holmes as the patron saint of the website is the cherry on top.
thanks, I didn't notice that small image!
Re: Dead Startup Toys
#84Where’s the Frye Festival toy tent?
Re: Dead Startup Toys
#85They could add the CueCat to their list. I seem to remember that Wired got all excited about it at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat
Is this the one by the Cyber Ninjas guy?
Re: Dead Startup Toys
#86Did 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).
Agreed. This site is laden with cynicism.
Re: Dead Startup Toys
#87Man, that Jibo toy makes me sad. I feel like Amazon realized that they didn't need the screen or the character movement to accomplish 95% of what consumers were interested in: voice-controlled task automation. The Echo and similar devices make more sense, but I would have liked to see what Jibo could have become. In some alternate reality the world is full of expressive robots... and probably doors that sigh when you…
There was a great little video on twitter I can't find where someone took one of those little robots with big on screen eyes and had it reading output from gpt-3.
It was cool since you could basically ask it anything - I'd buy one of those.
Re: Dead Startup Toys
#88I was expecting a well-researched collection, instead there are a whopping six items. This website is like a startup: promises something exciting, delivers a dud. Feels more like a grudge page. Also, a friend of mine was lucky enough to get a Coolest cooler. It's actually well made and still works. EDIT: I'm a dingdong: this site is actually selling scale-model replicas. Duh.
I mean, they had to somehow procure stock from startups that are long out of business. Items nobody actually wants, so what's the point of having _more_ items nobody actually wants?
(EDIT: oh. whoops. they're miniatures haha)
Re: Dead Startup Toys
#89Did 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).
>Did One Laptop per Child truly fail as a startup? I'd say it kind of did (as did Netbooks as a technology for the most part as well). It's smartphones really that won the segment that OLPC was primarily targeted at. Chromebooks became fairly big in education but primarily AFAIK in developed countries.
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Re: Dead Startup Toys
#90Did 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).
The trackpad had terrible bugs that pinned the cursor to the side of the screen. That's as far as I got using it. I'm sad that some kid probably ended up with one on account of me.