Ubuntu Edge - Ubuntu Smartphone Announcement?

[kingoddball]

Oh well.... At least my money will come back... Buy toys!

 

[EssoAir]

they "broke it" but Pebble is still the largest /successful/ project

 

[b_o_b]

I have understood they might extend the project another x days if the goal is not reached.  

 

[WizardStan]

That's up to Indiegogo. They've done it before, extended other projects by a week, but only when really close and the extra week might actually make a difference. I do not believe for a second that anyone genuinely thinks an extra 7 days will suddenly bring in $20 million.

 

[b_o_b]

Hmm.. I didn't know that. I even doubt another month will be enough. Oh well.. 

 

[vcoleiro1]

If it's possible, they might extend it for the very big reason that Indiegogo stand to make $3 Million if it's successful.  Pretty powerful incentive.

Speaking about Indiegogo wanting it to succeed ,  I just got an email from Indiegogo that looks like it went to everyone registered to the site.  Basically saying the Edge had broken the KS/Indiegogo world record and praising it, then with a link to the campaign.  
They are pushing it hard. I've noticed that the backing has gone up considerably in the last 15 hours.

Here's a link to the online Indiegogo newsletter that went out to everyone (let me know if you cant read it) : http://us4.campaign-archive2.com/?u=9e8b6cadd22dfef20841a79fb&id=0b687b21b6&e=ae3abef2f2

 

[ghostpatch]

+ theres still a chance to get a boost from a major investor or Mark Shuttleworth.

I wonder if its a possibility to lower the goal and cover the rest with investment from Cononical, Mark Shuttlewoth and/or an industy inverstor. Because someone inversting millions wouldn't want to pay 5%(I belief) to Indiegogo.

 

[comradekingu]

I got it too.

 

[vcoleiro1]

Only 19 hours remaining, they are currently at $12.2 million. There is talk of a last minute buyinor an extension which Mark S mentioned might be on the cards if he thought the campaign had enough energy at the end.

 

[vcoleiro1]

Well the campaign has just ended . It finished with $12,809,906, well short of the $32 Mill target.

From reports in the press, it looks like that's it, no extensions and no plans to build it on their own. They have said they will focus on getting Ubuntu touch on manufacturers phones.

 

[ghostpatch]

the campaign faild at $12,809,906  ..mMmMMMmmMMmm...... -.-

DAMN!!! it was hard to put up that much money...

 

[comradekingu]

I think the biggest downfall was paypal, its a barrier of entry, and doesnt do well with the market the edge is intended for. Then there was the absolute lack of clarity. There should have been more videos of actual usage. 12.8million is not chump change though. It makes it a way bigger success than the kin for example x_O.

 

[b_o_b]

I think the biggest downfall was paypal, its a barrier of entry

Not so sure about that. I think lots of people use paypal and like it more than credit cards. I know I do.. 

I think it was just too ambitious too soon and the price too high for a lot of people. Maybe they just wanted to show companies like Samsung, Huawei, LGs etc. people are willing to pay a premium price for an Ubuntu Phone. Probably hard to come into this market right now as a newcomer and this project certainly helps. 

 

[comradekingu]

Well, im more concerned about the people who dont.

 

[sebt3]

The goal have never been to actually create the product but to show that there is more interest in that than in WP8.

So Canonical succeded completly. The 32M$ was not reachable and that's the very reason why the target was so high.

Canonical is a software company not an hardware one. I'ld guess they did not attract as much company to work with them than the mozilla projet. So without partner the project was sinking, this crowdsourcing effort have been to show off the public interest to gather partners and that's about it. (and no, a simple pool wouldn't have been acceptable for the parners, they needed to see enough of customer ready to take the risk of half a month a work in something they arent sure that's going to be delivred)



BTW, I was about to "buy" one of those to show my support in the lasts days and decided to not to 'cause I dont want to loose the paypal commission and i'm kind of broke anyway...

 

[comradekingu]

finding a cell phone manufacturer is easy, there are many labs. Sourcing the parts is easy enough when you have 32 million. Its not like you need venture capital on a risk investment once the market is lined up and prepaid.

 

[ghostpatch]

payment was an issue! Cause I don't have a credit card and I couldn't find proper information about the payment process beforehand - making it really really hand and annoying for me!

I'm once again pissed at Cononical. The goal was too extreme from the beginning and it leaves a bad impression like somebody you, you can't go see Disneyland and no ice cream!  -.-

I'll probably settle for a Sailfish device from Jolla (as annoying they might be with their "your secound half - its so great bla bla")

 

[Batou456]

+ theres still a chance to get a boost from a major investor or Mark Shuttleworth.

I wonder if its a possibility to lower the goal and cover the rest with investment from Cononical, Mark Shuttlewoth and/or an industy inverstor. Because someone inversting millions wouldn't want to pay 5%(I belief) to Indiegogo.

That assumes the intent was ever to produce a product, or that Canonical actually was setup to deliver what they were implying they'd deliver on the software side of things.  What they showed was that they can use LinuxonAndroid and could run Ubuntu on a handset.  That basically says they can take advantage of the work of other projects.

The fine print on their Indiegogo made it clear the ability to switch between desktop and handset desktop environments is currently not production ready and would have been made available months after hardware launch.  The nature of KDE with its Plasma desktop environment and Plasma Active touch environment appears to be much further along for contextual environment switching then Canonical is with Unity for similar purposes.  Nevermind that a Qt5 based Wayland based KWin should be in distos before the time period Canonical was talking about the Edge getting a software update for such functionality, and my understanding is the KDE guys do have the infrastructure for environment switching setup.

Android apk compatibility under a Linux environment wasn't actually demonstrated, and Canonical has kept shifting around on their talk about that every time it has come time to actually deliver, which points to a project being nowhere near production ready.  That they've also remained dodgy on how they intend to go about this doesn't help their case.

The goal have never been to actually create the product but to show that there is more interest in that than in WP8.


So Canonical succeded completly. The 32M$ was not reachable and that's the very reason why the target was so high.


Canonical is a software company not an hardware one. I'ld guess they did not attract as much company to work with them than the mozilla projet. So without partner the project was sinking, this crowdsourcing effort have been to show off the public interest to gather partners and that's about it. (and no, a simple pool wouldn't have been acceptable for the parners, they needed to see enough of customer ready to take the risk of half a month a work in something they arent sure that's going to be delivred)

Windows Phone 8 has been selling hundreds of thousands of units, which pales versus 10s of millions iPhones and the the larger Android volume.  The Edge didn't attract even a paltry 20 thousand, the interest for the Edge borders on irrelevant next to Windows Phone 8, or the Mer based Linux Jolla phone slated to be released later this year.

The apparent point of this was to help shore up the party faithful in the face of them losing install base to Mint, suddenly decrying DistroWatch's statistics now that they're not in their favor, and otherwise trying to maintain mindspace relevance.  That would make this similar to their publicity stunt nonsense related to Mir and trying to decry Wayland, all while strategically ignoring that they based Mir on Wayland code and were promoting things expressly designed for Wayland by groups like Jolla's little trick to use Android GPU drivers while pretending it was their work.

 

[Klumpen]

https://insights.ubuntu.com/2015/10/20/ubuntus-path-to-convergence/

 

[comradekingu]

http://maruos.com or sailfish should increase their deployable handsets, so it will be interesting to see who does this first, at scale.