SynthOrange posted:

Holy gently caress that remote had to be done with the pilot in the chase cessna because it only has a 50 meter range

Al! posted:

Kickstarter sent me a reminder that the stupid aliexpress copper sphere Kickstarter is ending soon because I looked at it you fucks

Al! posted:

Kickstarter sent me a reminder that the stupid aliexpress copper sphere Kickstarter is ending soon because I looked at it you fucks

Underwear posted:

The comments from backers are infuriating

"I'm anticipating that a lot of people will want to pick up these shiny spheres on my desk, which will mean lots of fingerprints. It would be nice to consider adding an inconspicuous microfiber cleaning cloth to the mahogany case so that we can keep them sparkling."

Underwear posted:

The comments from backers are infuriating

"I'm anticipating that a lot of people will want to pick up these shiny spheres on my desk, which will mean lots of fingerprints. It would be nice to consider adding an inconspicuous microfiber cleaning cloth to the mahogany case so that we can keep them sparkling."

keyboard vomit posted:

people using objects to make up for their lack of personality

surebet posted:

well tbf the google translate app looked like loving witchcraft when it launched, so it's not like it's completely out of the realm of reason

now i'm curious to know how they'll bullshit their way through a nearly impossible form factor, hilarious battery capacity, insane translation lag and poo poo audio capture

online friend posted:

if you're gonna touch my big balls... you best be prepared to clean em

Agile Vector posted:

Agile Vector posted:

Agile Vector posted:

Agile Vector posted:

quote:

The thing that is most irritating is the lack of updates and truthful answers!! Tell us truthfully what is going on! Tell us when we can expect the survey and when shipping will start after we receive that! Tell us when we can expect to have OSX and IOS ready!

quote:

@Stephane Talbot Good luck! haha. Been trying to get an update for months, but all we are getting is VERY vague info! All I want is the truth! If it’s gonna be another two months then tell us. Don’t give vague answers and tell us it’ll be shipping soon. Seeing as how you’re several months passed delivery date, soon does not mean much.

quote:

We may have to get a grip on this that this product not even exist and the founder made this up to enrich himself. The question for myself would be why, for a little bit of money to enrich himself. I personally wrote my money already off.

quote:

(5,000 words of burying the lead)
As of right now, we estimate that Everykey will ship in the summer.

quote:

I wish I had never invested KICKSTARTER EVERYKEY do not seem to be progressing I was to understand they would be posted out in February 2015 I feel I will loose my investment.

quote:

We are pleased to inform all of our backers that we remain on schedule to ship our product by late September.

quote:

You have to be kidding me... You are on time with your late September shipping date?? Since when was this late September shipping date designated? As far as I remember the original was what seems like a year ago. You guys have unrealistic expectations to your backers and are doing a very poor job at even attempting to keep those promises. Very disappointed

quote:

Hello backers! We’ve made some significant strides since the last update.

We are proud to inform you, our loyal backers, that the time for shipment of Everykey is upon us. We have worked tirelessly over the past year since Everykey was funded on Kickstarter to bring a concept that was born out of a college classroom to life in the real world. We believe in our product, and your help and belief in our team is what has brought this technology and product to life. Together, we will make peoples' lives easier and more enjoyable, so that everyone can get back to what really matters while worrying less. A 200 unit pre-production run will be manufactured on September 28th, and shipping to backers will commence. The following units will continue to ship throughout October, so be on the lookout for your Everykey!

quote:

We've began testing these circuit boards for reliability, and we're happy to say that things are looking good for a first attempt. At this point, the circuit boards seem to have no defects with the exception of the USB connector.

quote:

John McAfee Joins Everykey Team

John McAfee, founder of the McAfee Antivirus Company and 2016 Presidential Candidate, has joined the Everykey team!



John has assumed the role of Chief Evangelist of Everykey. His experience as a pioneer in the security industry will be an invaluable asset to our company. With the addition of John McAfee and renewed marketing efforts following the completion of our Version 1 product, we seek to continue to spread the word about Everykey, as we want everyone to benefit from our unique technology.

quote:

McAfee picks a bullet off the floor and fixes me with a wide-eyed, manic intensity. “This is a bullet, right?” he says in the congenial Southern accent that has stuck with him since his boyhood in Virginia.

“Let’s put the gun back,” I tell him. I’d come here to try to understand why the government of Belize was accusing him of assembling a private army and entering the drug trade. It seemed implausible that a wildly successful tech entrepreneur would disappear into the Central American jungle and become a narco-trafficker. Now I’m not so sure.

But he explains that the accusations are a fabrication. “Maybe what happened didn’t actually happen,” he says, staring hard at me. “Can I do a demonstration?”

He loads the bullet into the gleaming silver revolver, spins the cylinder.

“This scares you, right?” he says. Then he puts the gun to his head.

My heart rate kicks up; it takes me a second to respond. “Yeah, I’m scared,” I admit. “We don’t have to do this.”

“I know we don’t,” he says, the muzzle pressed against his temple. And then he pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. He pulls it three more times in rapid succession. There are only five chambers.

“Reholster the gun,” I demand.

quote:

Yes, Everykey considered the many accusations against McAfee before deciding to work with him, but in the end decided that his security credentials “far outweigh his checkered past,” Everykey CEO Chris Wentz said via email.

quote:

As we’re gearing up to begin shipping we want to share some details about our final manufacturing steps and fulfillment process along with some quality issues that we’ve been experiencing and the impact this will have on shipping.

We are very close to delivering your Everykey wristband and we are aiming to ship by February 2016.

quote:

After reviewing all of the timelines for the remaining tasks, we are projecting a March shipping date.

quote:

Hello Backers,

I am very pleased to announce that tomorrow we will begin shipping Everykey!

We’ve tested the Everykey user experience extensively. But as a new product, we realize that areas for improvement may crop up when four thousand people begin using the product for the first time. For this reason, Everykey will be primarily targeted towards Windows and Android operating systems when it first ships. Mac, Linux, and iOS compatibility will follow soon thereafter.

quote:

Everykey had shipped about 150 fobs as of May 8, according to CEO Chris Wentz.

SolTerrasa posted:

Pierogi posted:

Herr Doktor Kreig posted:

SolTerrasa posted:

Everykey: Your Only Key.
https://everykey.com/

Everykey is a bluetooth wristband. When you bring it close to your phone or computer, your device unlocks without a password. It's a hardware kickstarter run by a bunch of amateurs, so obviously it's massively in debt, several years late on its goals, and genuinely terrible communication. Here's three randomly selected backers complaining about it:




Maybe skip the rest of this post if you don't want to hear the long story of why these people suck and how they've found themselves here.

I actually know the entire sordid story of this terrible kickstarter. It is not made up by the founder to enrich himself, it's just made by a bunch of incompetents and amateurs. I went to college with the founder, and I've been following the whole thing since the beginning, about 3 years ago. Effortpost incoming.

This is Chris Wentz:


He's exactly like he looks.

Chris is the consummate Ideas Guy. Lots of broad but vague plans which he's sure would come off perfectly, if he could only find someone to do all the work for him. I'm sure you know the type if you've ever worked in or near a startup. The asshat once made our professor sign a fuckin' NDA before he would present his class project. There is only one thing you need to know about Chris: he is constitutionally incapable of owning up to a failure. As far as he's concerned, he shits gold.

So, they launched a Kickstarter in October, 2014. They've been incubating the idea since January, 2012. They've won pitch competitions and raised a few thousand dollars; they press-ganged some kid into building them a prototype for free (Chris is a Business Student; he doesn't write code or make hardware or know anyone who does. This will cause him problems later when people start expecting things other than blog posts and promises).

He posted this timeline:



If you know anything about hardware manufacturing, this is the part where you start laughing. They have planned 1.5 months from finalizing the design to having a working unit in-hand. This is not just hilariously optimistic, it's practically malpractice. If Microsoft or Google wanted to release this product, they'd plan 6 months from design to release, with a team of 20, minimum. These guys have not only never designed hardware or worked with manufacturers before, they have never laid out a PCB before. It's 2 finance majors, a business major, and a press-ganged part-time CS guy who read up on how to use EAGLE.



Here's what they've promised.

It goes "well", at first: they meet their goal, but only barely and only on the very last day of the campaign. In the days of 6000%-funded hardware projects, this doesn't look great, but still, that's $117,000 raised.

Then they go silent. The first milestone, manufacturing designs finalized, passes and they don't say anything.

The second milestone, beta testing, passes without comment. Kickstarter is starting to get angsty at this point, but politely: "Update please" and so on. The third and fourth milestones pass with no comment either.

In February 2015, one month away from the planned ship date, they finally post something. I'm sure you know what it says.


Burying the lead is a pattern for these guys. Remember, utterly incapable of admitting failure.

In June 2015, 3 months after their original ship date, they post that they have some pre-production units ready, but the colors aren't quite right and they'll be sending them back.



At this point they say that they are 5 weeks away from shipping (in the middle of the last paragraph of the update without further comment).

By this time people are really mad:


In August 2015:


Pleased. On schedule. (5 months late.) At this point they are totally out of money. They take out a loan for another $100k.

Kickstarter is getting madder:


September 23, 2015 ("late September"):


Did you read that word salad? It says they're shipping! But, wait, it says they're doing their first pre-production run? Hm. I think they tell you in entrepreneurship class that it's a good idea to pretend that everything is going well regardless of reality.

But oh no! In an outcome that absolutely could never have been predicted, the first attempt of a bunch of amateurs has gone wrong!


I had to read that three times when I first saw the update. "The USB connectors don't work consistently" is the sane, non-business-school way to say that, I think. A month after that, in mid-November, they post again and delay to December 14, but that's not important. What matters is that in December, it gets really weird.


loving John McAfee. John McAfee, who famously fled Belize to avoid questions in a murder case, alleged narcotics trafficker, public liar, creator of an antivirus program.

This John McAfee:


https://www.wired.com/2012/12/ff-john-mcafees-last-stand/ (He doesn't reholster the gun.)

They picked that guy. And you've gotta think "Well, they're just a bunch of idiot kids; maybe they only remembered seeing the name on an antivirus once, hard to blame them."

http://www.crainscleveland.com/article/20151228/NEWS/151229905/controversial-security-pioneer-john-mcafee-invests-in-everykey

No, no loving way, no they didn't. There's no way that they "considered the many accusations against McAfee". And this tiny local paper gave you a really good out! "Oh, gosh, sorry, no, we had no idea we went into business with an alleged drug trafficker who's wanted in Belize in connection with a murder investigation". All you had to fuckin' do was say "we hosed up". Just once.

Ugh. The same day, they launch their IndieGoGo campaign. I think it's against some rule someplace to launch a campaign on IndieGoGo if you've already been funded on Kickstarter, but who cares.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/everykey-your-only-key#/story

On IGG, without updating their Kickstarter backers, they promise to have production done by January 22 and to ship by March 14. They raise another $100,000, which brings them to a total income of $200,000, a loan of $100,000, and an "investment" of $500,000 by their old business school professor. $900,000 cash available to them in total.

There's a few more delays / failures that go completely unacknowledged:

December 22, 2015


February 19, 2016


But then! The big news!

March 30, 2016, a full year late, they post excitedly.


So. A year late, they claim success and in the fifth paragraph note that they're dropping support for 3 of their major OSs. I also know that their product requires you to jailbreak your iPhone, but they've never explained that to anyone; I'm looking forward to them explaining that. And you see there where it says "small batches".

We're now 2 months away from that post. Not a single backer has acknowledged receiving an Everykey. There aren't any reviews online. The app isn't in the Play store. Mac / Linux / iOS support hasn't been announced.



But have they come back with a mea culpa? Or acknowledged this at all? Hell no! This is a great success!

http://www.crainscleveland.com/article/20160513/NEWS/160519897/everykey-moves-into-university-circle-office-starts-shipping-device

At this point you've got to assume the guy is just lying out his rear end. It's like he's trying to gaslight 2,000 people who tried to buy something from him.

It gets worse. Remember how they were targeting Android 4.4? That was the most recent version back then. In the 2 years since they've been developing this, Android has added Smart Unlock, which is just a better version of their entire product. You can unlock your Android phone with anything now. An NFC ring that costs $5 on Amazon. A fitbit. A wifi network, a geofence, and even more stuff. So Android is out. Windows has dropped the BTLE driver from their desktop image, and Everykey refuses to guarantee compatibility with any BTLE chips except the one that they're selling on their website (not included with purchase, of course).

There's a bunch of other funny stuff with these guys, like they have 12 employees and 6 of them are C-levels, with another 2 Vice Presidents, or that Chris's LinkedIn proudly lists his gray market reselling of iPads on eBay as his only previous employment, or the time they leaked their database credentials in a PHP error message (and the password was "peyush is the best"), but whatever, I feel like I've covered the gist of it and no one has time to read a post even longer than this one.

exploding mummy posted:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1194215598/pant-alone-the-worlds-first-individual-pant

exploding mummy posted:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1194215598/pant-alone-the-worlds-first-individual-pant

exploding mummy posted:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1194215598/pant-alone-the-worlds-first-individual-pant

Sagebrush posted:

i don't trust anyone working on hardware who doesn't know the difference between silicon and silicone

A Pinball Wizard posted:

The products not pleasant to look at but they have a great server rack

NoneMoreNegative posted:

Spaghett!

NoneMoreNegative posted:

Spaghett!

unpacked robinhood posted:

yea thanks

Al! posted:

I still can't loving understand the top thing

Agile Vector posted:

circular logic

enotnert posted:

I've seen that damned starry thing all over facebook. It obliterated the ads I was getting for days.

"INTERNET WITHOUT WIRES"
"SHOWS EFFICIENCY OF YOUR NETWORK AT ALL TIMES"
"SHOWS INDIVIDUAL DEVICES AND THEIR CONNECTION STRENGTH"
"WILL DESTROY THE TRADITIONAL ISP"
"COMING TO BOSTON. . . and maybe other places, we didn't really think the whole thing out where we'd have to make an urban wireless mesh network"