from the hamburger-Tuesday-ifs-you-pay-me-today dept.
Pando Daily has a story on the problems of the Kreyos Smartwatch, which raised $1.5 Million through the Indiegogo crowdfunding site. It references an earlier Gizmodo story.
Kreyos promised that the first batch of 5,000 finished products would go out to backers in November 2013, a mere five months after its Indiegogo debut.
Nearly a year later, the first units are finally trickling out, and getting abysmal reviews. Two understandably disappointed and incensed backers, Andrew Wright and Kenneth Larsen, have written what reads almost like a thesis, an exhaustive text devoted to all the ways in which the Meteor is a total disappointment. It's wonderful and horrifying in its detail.
Pando has previously come out with stories on other IndieGogo campaigns for Healbe, TellSpec and Ritot, and has taken a critical approach to the responses of Indiegogo when campaigns go bad:
The scary thing is, through all of these stories, all of this backlash, Indiegogo hasn’t displayed a single moment of contrition, or the slightest inkling to change. It still trumpets being the platform that doesn’t say no! when yet again, this openness has left it tens of thousands of dollars richer, and its customers paying out for broken promises.
So are these just cases of buyer beware, or is Pando right in suggesting that Indiegogo itself should be more careful of the campaigns it accepts?
(Score: 2, Informative) by silverly on Sunday September 07 2014, @02:23AM
Indiegogo and kickstarter and the like is NOT A SHOP.
I repeat ITS NOT A SHOP.
People shouldnt be treating this as a shop but rather a place where you can
commit some money for a mere promise that a high quality working product comes
out in the end.
Sure there might be a bunch of successes but your always taking a risk of
getting something terrible.
If you were wanted to err on the safe side of life, wait until the product is
out for a few months. Let it gets some reviews and then grab one. Risk is gone
and you can trust for a working product as intended.
By then they are most likely running a V2 version anyways of the same product on
the same crowdfunding site...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 07 2014, @02:58AM
Wooooosh!
Typical geek black-and-white thinking. Hardly anything in life is a binary choice between 100% risk or 0% risk and crowd-funded projects are no exception.
The question is whether or not IGG should provide some sort of risk evaluation rather than leave it as a nearly complete free-for-all.
I think they should. That doesn't mean they have to turn down projects, but they could do a little bit of the "due dilligence" work and assign some sort of risk rating to each project. Even the highest risk projects could still be hosted on IGG, but they would get a big label up front spelling out that IGG thinks they are very high risk. Kind of like the way food inspectors in places like LA and NYC put ratings in the windows of restaurants -- even a "C" rated restaurant can still be open for business, just the customers are more informed about what they are getting in to.
The reason it makes sense for IGG do some sort of risk rating is that they are in the unique position to have a ton of experience doing it. Expecting investors, especially low-dollar crowd-funding investors, to do it all on their own is, at best inefficient. You can have 1000 inexperienced people all doing the same research work themselves or 1 experienced employee of IGG doing it and sharing the results with everyone.
After all, it is the investors who ultimately pay for IGG's services, they should be entitled to the best possible service in return for their money.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Tramii on Sunday September 07 2014, @03:34AM
Indiegogo isn't going to do any sort of "risk evaluation" because it doesn't make any sense to do so. They only thing it could do is get them into trouble. Right now they can sit safe behind their disclaimer. Once they start giving projects ratings, they expose themselves to trouble. What happens when they rate something as 99% safe and it goes horribly wrong? Lawsuits. And if they rate something as like 30% safe or lower, why not just block it in the first place? People will complain if they say "yeah, this is probably a scam, but we are letting it go through anyways because we like money." Either way they expose themselves to unnecessary danger and risk and for NO BENEFIT.
Sure, it would be nice for the users if they did a risk evaluation, but not for IGG. Their business plan is basically to pick up the projects that are too shady for Kickstarter. Seriously, people need to learn that these websites are NOT STORES. They are basically donations for crazy ideas. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. You are basically throwing money at random strangers and hoping they deliver something. But there are no guarantees. Honestly, I feel like you are lucky to get ANYTHING, even if it's nothing like what they promised.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 07 2014, @03:45AM
Your argument boils down to "fuck the customers" and ignores the fact that the customers are the ones paying the bills. If IGG can't figure out how to negotiate the legal perils of offering risk assessments then they may well find themselves without a customer base.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Hannibal on Sunday September 07 2014, @03:56AM
The customers - who aren't actually customers - aren't "paying the bills" from altruism, they're making an investment in the hope of getting a profit, be that a Widget 3.0, or for slightly more, a Widget 3.0 and a T-Shirt. I am a huge fan of consumer law and so much of it is there to protect the naive, the poor and the poorly informed. In this case though, people aren't being "buyers" they are being consumers. Maybe the "crowd funding" platforms should be more obvious about this but they are essentially agents for investors seeking venture capital. I could go on and on about this, but when people leave the comfort of consumerism and move into investment, they need to have their wits and their lawyers about them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 07 2014, @05:40AM
You miss the point - "investing" $100 is categorically not the same as other kinds of investment. Do not confuse yourself with the fact that one word can have two related but different meanings. An investment of $100 can not justify the due diligence that traditional investing requires - it would cost more than the $100 just to do the research. Don't be that black-and-white guy, it doesn't help you see the world for what it really is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 07 2014, @07:01AM
if you're dumb enough to put your financial details into an internet page, you deserve what's coming to you
(Score: 3, Interesting) by wantkitteh on Sunday September 07 2014, @11:29AM
You miss the point yourself - it is up to the speculator to judge whether the risk involved justifies the return on the investment. The scale of the investment doesn't change that relationship whatsoever, the feasibility of due diligence costing is just as much a judgement call for the speculator in small investments as it is in large ones. You fail to realise that the black-and-white nature of investment never was black-and-white but is entirely down to how grey the investor is prepared to go.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 07 2014, @03:13PM
> You miss the point yourself - it is up to the speculator to judge
And there is zero conflict between that idea and with such "speculators" demanding that IGG make that judgement easier.
So far the only argument as to why IGG should not do that is because IGG might assume some liability. Well tough fucking noogies. He who has the gold makes the rules.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Hairyfeet on Sunday September 07 2014, @02:49PM
This is why it needs to be made clear to the clueless that this is HIGH RISK INVESTMENT, no different than playing the penny stocks or even putting some money on the roulette wheel, and that if they want safe go buy something off of Amazon. Sure it would be nice if you get a killer album or product or whatever at the other end those people playing the penny stocks or hoping that the wheel lands on their number are likewise desiring a positive outcome but its high risk which means failures WILL be high no matter how much you try to minimize the risk. After all if they had a proven track record and a rock solid business plan they wouldn't need IGG would they?
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 07 2014, @03:16PM
> This is why it needs to be made clear to the clueless that this is HIGH RISK INVESTMENT
And here we are back to black and white - different projects will have different levels of risk. They may all be higher than risk than a money market account, but there is still significant variation as proven by the variety of outcomes. Pretending that they are all the same level of risk is just over-simplification for the sake of rhetorical laziness.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 07 2014, @12:45PM
This is the point: people who give money to igg projects are not customers. They're not customers of IGG, who are not selling anything, and they're not customers of the projects, who have only promises. This is the widely understood problem of funding development projects: you have no way to know if they can actually achieve their objectives. If they fail, they have already spent all your money. Kickstarter and indiegogo are entirely about transferring the risk of development from starry-eyed designers to the credulous public.
Right now, people seem to be confused over whether the money they give represents a pre-order, an "investment," or charity. It is charity. IGG is a fancy form of panhandling, with no legal obligations in either direction. Eventually, there will be enough spectacular failures in these projects that people will realize the developers are under no obligation (except public shaming) to deliver on any of their promises.
(Score: 2) by khallow on Sunday September 07 2014, @11:24AM
Hell no. Any such thing opens them to liability. No matter how good or bad their risk evaluation is, someone will figure out how to game it. Then IGG is open to lawsuits from the angle of didn't do enough diligence to catch the scammer or conflicts of interest with the scammer. Even stock markets don't do any risk evaluation. They'll make sure the company can do basic demonstration of fitness by jumping through a few hoops, but that's it.
OTOH, you could provide such a service, kind of how the accounting firms do. An independent auditor doesn't trigger the same conflicts of interest.
The former will do a better job. And they'll have to do the dirty work anyway.
(Score: 2) by halcyon1234 on Monday September 08 2014, @10:18PM
Sounds like a good idea. I'll be that 1 person. First order of business, start an Indigogo campaign to fund a crowdsourced vetting service...
Original Submission [thedailywtf.com]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 07 2014, @03:41AM
You do realize this isn't 1970 anymore and we aren't reading on 80 char wide screens, right? Stop inserting line breaks at random points as it makes your post hard to read.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 07 2014, @03:49AM
> this isn't 1970 anymore and we aren't reading on 80 char wide screens
Right, it is 2014 and we are reading on 40-char wide phones now!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 07 2014, @04:22AM
GP must've composed the post in Windows Notepad, or maybe vi, and then cut and paste to a browser to post.
Why bother? Because when you're composing a long post directly on a web form, it's all too easy to click the wrong thing and hit the wrong keystroke and lose all your work. I've done this many times and had no idea afterwards what I did wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 07 2014, @04:35AM
Notepad does not insert linebreaks unless you hit enter.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 07 2014, @07:16AM
Notepad does not do word wrap by default either.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 07 2014, @07:07AM
Who
gives a fuck?
really?
If you're having *that* much trouble reading his post,
go
back
to
skool
.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Rich on Sunday September 07 2014, @06:05PM
Heck,
actual shipping goods, only a year late, and sort of doing what's been announced would be billed a "success" in any corporate scenario. Should one expect that a polished consumer product including all custom soft- & hardware can be done with a budget of around 15 man years? In an area where Steve's Apple has set the bar for quality perception (which includes throwing out like 4 out of 5 prototypes)?