I backed the project at $600. Here are some thoughts:
1. It's getting wishy-washy. I don't know any campaigns that have changed around rewards this much (both pricing and what you get) and for many people that may be a turn off. Why would someone get the phone at $695 when it could go down more? Obviously the said the price won't go down but they had said that previously when they were above $700.
2. $695 immediately withdrawn from your PayPal account prior to tha campaign succeeding is a hard pill to swallow for many even if you are refunded 100% if (when?) the goal is not reached.
3. May 2014 is a pretty long time from now and I bet the wait will end up being longer (I waited almost 1.25 years for my Leap Motion and they had significant VC backing). Too many people may not be able to think this far ahead.
Why did I back the project? Well, I liked the idea of making a custom hardware device and thought crowdfunding the creation was interesting. I've never actually used Ubuntu (or Android for that matter) but the scale of the goal and the precedent it could set for people doing very capital-intensive projects with crowdfunding was what motivated me to back it.
> Why would someone get the phone at $695 when it could go down more?
Because everybody that paid more is being refunded. See the notes on each of the events. It won't go down anymore, but even if that happened, you'd not be screwed for supporting the campaign earlier.
> the scale of the goal and the precedent it could set for people doing very capital-intensive projects with crowdfunding was what motivated me to back it.
I'd also support it just on that basis alone, but I'm also looking forward to have a well supported and familiar Linux distribution on a phone.
I agree strongly about #1. I can totally see where they were coming from (and frankly they are truly in uncharted waters with this funding campaign -- nobody has really ever attempted a crowd funding initiative quite like this one), but you're absolutely right. $600-800 is a lot of money for most people, and the constant fluctuation and uncertainty about pricing and the fundraising effort is definitely hurting their cause, I believe.
What they should have done, perhaps, was go to Bloomberg et al before going public with this. Starting out with $500k in the pot and strong corporate backing locking the price (or at least making the tiers predictable) would have gone a long way.
In regards to #1, it's abnormal because Kickstarter doesn't allow you to change or remove rewards once they are created, you can only add new ones. I've run into some campaigns that did some pretty creative things with their reward tiers on Kickstarter to be able to get around this issue.
I find it a little disturbing they're claiming it will work on Verizon (my current carrier for the past 10 years) and Sprint for a few reasons:
1) It's unlikely Verizon will have VoLTE on day 1 that the phone comes out. Even if so, one has to hope they become more liberal with what they allow on their network. Since it does not have any CDMA radio, that could also be a problem as LTE is not universal yet on their network as well.
2) Sprint does not let users actually know they have sim cards. My friend's Sprint Galaxy Nexus has the sim card embedded directly in the device and cannot be seen/removed. If that continues to be true with newer Sprint Phones, it seems like it would be hard to get a sim card compatible with Sprint's network.
3) #2 Assumes that Sprint has VoLTE, let alone much of an LTE network. As far as I know, it's still in testing at best and not ready for mainstream use.
I can just predict a lot of angry Verizon and Sprint users come early next year when they try to pop in the sim card to their device or call their carrier and find out they cannot use the phone on their desired network. Canonical really should be more up front with their claims of the networks that it will (realistically) work on.
1. Backing this project is using your dollars to "vote" for this device to exist. It's not as unimaginative as "buying a phone", it's about helping to establish a new mobile device os as a real alternative.
2. This type of fundraising rarely follows a linear growth curve, so there's nothing to infer about the ultimate success of the project by projecting that way.
I have not backed the project, and I'm not sure if I will, but I really appreciate that others are trying to make this happen.
Mmh, 14 days remaining and only 27% funded, it doesn't bode well. I wonder if they'll be able to build momentum this late in the campaign.
Maybe this kind of expensive, high volume devices shows the limits of crowdfunding? Have there been similar projects crowdfunded already (similar price/target)?
I saw that as well, its not very realistic to expect them suddenly make up the difference. Perhaps having people dedicated to spamming popular tech and related sites might get them a bump.
Specs today promised for 2014 don't mean much to me, its a seven hundred dollar bet against what other smart phone makers are doing. Considering the speed at which that segment moves its not a bet I am willing to make.
If they manage (somehow) to hit their 30m goal it will have raised 9.4% of the entire 2012 total pledges on Kickstarter and the entire year pledged amount for Technology projects. So it may blow anything that Kickstarter has had out of the water. All these numbers are for Kickstarter because I couldn't find a convenient list of numbers for Indiegogo.
It's a downward spiral. A lot of people would not invest because they know that the target amount won't be reached. I think the collection rate will slow down further.
Most funded project on Indiegogo seems to be Scanadu Scout with $1,664,176 while Kickstarter has some watch called the Pebble with $10,266,845 and OUYA got around the same amount of pledges which the Ubuntu Edge has so far.
Can anyone explain why there is no open hardware phone at this point? During a recent trip to Shenzhen, it was clear that all the components are readily available.
I have had one person suggest that it was the cost of FCC approval that was the holdup and not the technology. Any company that could afford the approval process would not want to open their design. I am not technically versed enough to know if this is correct, however.
Does anyone else have a clear perspective on the issue?
Can you give more information on the FCC approval process? What requires approval exactly? If people designed open-source hardware plans, then made the hardware, then shipped it, at what point is FCC approval necessary?
The components may be available, but that doesn't mean they are actually open. Low end phone makers just get their software from the SOC OEM, and they just want to ship a phone, not provide a platform for developers, so they don't need liberal licensing conditions.
I like the idea, and the hardware seems good, and I could afford it, but the real turn-off for me is that it's just a one-time thing. If I am going to commit myself to another mobile platform (although I use Xubuntu on the PC), I want it to have some future. If the thing breaks after 3 years, what I am going to do? I will have to change the platform again when I buy a new device.
I actually question what the Canonical is doing when it comes to this. I bought Asus EEE with preinstalled Ubuntu 12.04 recently, and it's great. However, you cannot upgrade to 12.10 because the proprietary video driver for X is missing. So what they're thinking? If they want people to switch to Ubuntu (and I would love that, that's why I bought this netbook), then they have to commit to it as a long term goal.
It seems that everybody is so impatient nowadays that if success doesn't happen in one year, they kill the project.
They sure are getting a lot of attention by having time sensitive prices and changing prices. To some degree eyeballs equals cash. What they need is a lot of orders, though, to make the funding goal and get any money at all. They really need to drop that price down to be competitive with Google's Nexus 4, Nexus 7, etc.. I know OEMs that dropped device projects at the Edge's price point when those came out and it was smart.
The whole thing was ill-advised. Even if they reached $32M it would be the equivalent of a pre-order for a few tens of thousands of phones. That's not enough to launch a viable handset business.
They should have gone to an ODM or lower-tier OEM and piggybacked on an the unit volume for some other customer. They could have launched with 20k units pre-sold.. They also could have had a far shorter lead time, so the risk in pledging would be much lower.
If they think they can change the world with hardware, they've got that wrong. The interesting thing about an Ubuntu phone is Ubuntu.
The reason why I'm not jumping at the Ubuntu Edge is that it's vaporware. Things like "Fastest multi-core CPU" doesn't fill me with much (well, any) confidence. That says to me that they haven't done any of the thermal engineering, or the battery life calculations. And they don't know this information now, 9 months before launch?
If they reach their funding goal, but then miss their delivery date, or the device has a pathetic battery life, or the device overheats in your hand and shuts down the moment you try to use the "fastest CPU", what then? Or if the CPU /GPU ends up being so slow (to prevent thermal meltdown) that you can't run interesting desktop-class applications, as opposed to using an OS and applications optimized for embedded/mobile hardware, as opposed to laptop class hardware, what then?
Despite what they say about getting lower price deals on components, it looks very preplanned "strategy".
Either way the next couple of days will be make or break, if this last price change doesn't get any significant contribution in short time, I don't think they can reach the target anymore.
> Despite what they say about getting lower price deals on components, it looks very preplanned "strategy".
I was there. I've overlooked the spreadsheets with component parts, and people having phone calls and debating about how to possibly lower the cost even more. I can also say that getting to $695 wasn't straightforward at all. We all love a bit of conspiracy, but please allow a bit of credit to the people trying to pull it off.
If it is planned it's a very cynical way of meeting a target by effectively lowering mid-campaign.
Having thousands donate at $800 and the refunding the difference down to $695 means that the "target" is met but the actual net amount is lowered by that amount that needs to be refunded.
It doesn't actually help them meet the lowered target either, it simply lowers the target while getting them no closer to the target by lowering their effective amount raised at the same time.
That's why I don't think it was planned. It feels to me less planned and more reacting to not meeting their target but reacting in a not so clever way.
The thing is, if they can't keep steady during the fund-raising part I don't trust them to deliver on the hard part of building the hardware.
Either way I also don't believe this is in any way really connected to lower component price deals, this is marketing but in my opinion it's not clever marketing.
Am I the only one that sees this as some kind of lean startup applied to industry?
I mean. With nothing but a few renders, they have reached more than 8 millions in backup.
This is a HUGE point in terms of marketing, and more than a lot of free advertisment.
All of that for free.
I want to know one thing about this phone that the page did not mention.
Can I `gcc-arm -o MyApp main.c` on my PC and run MyApp on any Ubuntu Edge phone, without having to unlock them or enable them for dev or any other nonsense? Or is development restricted to QML and HTML5?
you can use C++ for most things in your app and QML for UI only. or you can use C++ for everything. You're not required to use QML and HTML5 for your app, but in most cases (though not all) doing the UI in QML will be a good choice
I keep wondering whether they still have something up their sleeve, but judging by them dropping the price, its not the case. This is the pinnacle of Mark Shuttleworth's "convergence" dream, I wonder whether he will carry the rest of this campaign if it looks like it will not get funded in the end? Also if it does fail, it is going to look mighty bad for Canonical.
I predict that this will lead to a spike in backers from all of the people who wanted to back it but thought $800 was too expensive, but it will quickly level off. Why?
Dan Ariely did some studies[1] showing that people are much more likely to pick something when there is a strictly worse option available. $830 vs. $600 for the exact same thing is just easier for our irrational minds to compare than $695 for a phone next year vs. phones today. I think this was a major motivator for people to "buy" in the early stages of the project, especially since it was a time limited option.
I personally backed at the $600 level, and while I have a lot of reasons for why it was a good idea, I suspect that I was influenced my own irrational behavior and I am just good at justifying my decisions.
A 64GB model at $595 from the start probably would have gone a long way toward boosting the numbers. And a $32 million funding goal is really pushing the envelop regardless. I would love to have one but $700 upfront? For a phone? That's pushing the envelop too.
$830 with a limited $600 early bird option.
Later they added several tiers ranging from $625 to $820 with limited slots in each. I think $625 and $675 sold out.
I would only fund this on the last day if I knew it was going to make it.. $695 is a very steep price, especially for a college student. I would love to back the device, but to have that much booze money disappear would be a shame.
If I had the money, I'd be ordering one now. A high-spec android phone that can also dock into a full desktop ubuntu machine? I'd love to be able to have a development setup in my pocket whereever I go.
[+] [-] weisser|12 years ago|reply
1. It's getting wishy-washy. I don't know any campaigns that have changed around rewards this much (both pricing and what you get) and for many people that may be a turn off. Why would someone get the phone at $695 when it could go down more? Obviously the said the price won't go down but they had said that previously when they were above $700.
2. $695 immediately withdrawn from your PayPal account prior to tha campaign succeeding is a hard pill to swallow for many even if you are refunded 100% if (when?) the goal is not reached.
3. May 2014 is a pretty long time from now and I bet the wait will end up being longer (I waited almost 1.25 years for my Leap Motion and they had significant VC backing). Too many people may not be able to think this far ahead.
Why did I back the project? Well, I liked the idea of making a custom hardware device and thought crowdfunding the creation was interesting. I've never actually used Ubuntu (or Android for that matter) but the scale of the goal and the precedent it could set for people doing very capital-intensive projects with crowdfunding was what motivated me to back it.
[+] [-] niemeyer|12 years ago|reply
Because everybody that paid more is being refunded. See the notes on each of the events. It won't go down anymore, but even if that happened, you'd not be screwed for supporting the campaign earlier.
> the scale of the goal and the precedent it could set for people doing very capital-intensive projects with crowdfunding was what motivated me to back it.
I'd also support it just on that basis alone, but I'm also looking forward to have a well supported and familiar Linux distribution on a phone.
[+] [-] aroman|12 years ago|reply
What they should have done, perhaps, was go to Bloomberg et al before going public with this. Starting out with $500k in the pot and strong corporate backing locking the price (or at least making the tiers predictable) would have gone a long way.
[+] [-] timdorr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yareally|12 years ago|reply
I find it a little disturbing they're claiming it will work on Verizon (my current carrier for the past 10 years) and Sprint for a few reasons:
1) It's unlikely Verizon will have VoLTE on day 1 that the phone comes out. Even if so, one has to hope they become more liberal with what they allow on their network. Since it does not have any CDMA radio, that could also be a problem as LTE is not universal yet on their network as well.
2) Sprint does not let users actually know they have sim cards. My friend's Sprint Galaxy Nexus has the sim card embedded directly in the device and cannot be seen/removed. If that continues to be true with newer Sprint Phones, it seems like it would be hard to get a sim card compatible with Sprint's network.
3) #2 Assumes that Sprint has VoLTE, let alone much of an LTE network. As far as I know, it's still in testing at best and not ready for mainstream use.
I can just predict a lot of angry Verizon and Sprint users come early next year when they try to pop in the sim card to their device or call their carrier and find out they cannot use the phone on their desired network. Canonical really should be more up front with their claims of the networks that it will (realistically) work on.
[+] [-] RRRA|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevando|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jt2190|12 years ago|reply
1. Backing this project is using your dollars to "vote" for this device to exist. It's not as unimaginative as "buying a phone", it's about helping to establish a new mobile device os as a real alternative.
2. This type of fundraising rarely follows a linear growth curve, so there's nothing to infer about the ultimate success of the project by projecting that way.
I have not backed the project, and I'm not sure if I will, but I really appreciate that others are trying to make this happen.
[+] [-] simias|12 years ago|reply
Maybe this kind of expensive, high volume devices shows the limits of crowdfunding? Have there been similar projects crowdfunded already (similar price/target)?
[+] [-] Shivetya|12 years ago|reply
Specs today promised for 2014 don't mean much to me, its a seven hundred dollar bet against what other smart phone makers are doing. Considering the speed at which that segment moves its not a bet I am willing to make.
[+] [-] bad_user|12 years ago|reply
That's pretty impressive in my opinion and meeting the deadline is hard, but it can still happen.
[+] [-] rtkwe|12 years ago|reply
source: http://www.kickstarter.com/year/2012#category
ps: There's a lack of a good verb tense for something that could happen but it is unlikely, there's no good pessimistic subjunctive future.
[+] [-] nish1500|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vonskippy|12 years ago|reply
Maybe having a billionaire with his hand out holding a tin cup shows that people aren't such big suckers as Shuttleworth anticipated?
[+] [-] coffeeaddicted|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gregpilling|12 years ago|reply
I have had one person suggest that it was the cost of FCC approval that was the holdup and not the technology. Any company that could afford the approval process would not want to open their design. I am not technically versed enough to know if this is correct, however.
Does anyone else have a clear perspective on the issue?
[+] [-] yafujifide|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skeletonjelly|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asgard1024|12 years ago|reply
I actually question what the Canonical is doing when it comes to this. I bought Asus EEE with preinstalled Ubuntu 12.04 recently, and it's great. However, you cannot upgrade to 12.10 because the proprietary video driver for X is missing. So what they're thinking? If they want people to switch to Ubuntu (and I would love that, that's why I bought this netbook), then they have to commit to it as a long term goal.
It seems that everybody is so impatient nowadays that if success doesn't happen in one year, they kill the project.
[+] [-] lnanek2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zigurd|12 years ago|reply
They should have gone to an ODM or lower-tier OEM and piggybacked on an the unit volume for some other customer. They could have launched with 20k units pre-sold.. They also could have had a far shorter lead time, so the risk in pledging would be much lower.
If they think they can change the world with hardware, they've got that wrong. The interesting thing about an Ubuntu phone is Ubuntu.
[+] [-] tytso|12 years ago|reply
If they reach their funding goal, but then miss their delivery date, or the device has a pathetic battery life, or the device overheats in your hand and shuts down the moment you try to use the "fastest CPU", what then? Or if the CPU /GPU ends up being so slow (to prevent thermal meltdown) that you can't run interesting desktop-class applications, as opposed to using an OS and applications optimized for embedded/mobile hardware, as opposed to laptop class hardware, what then?
Call me unconvinced.
[+] [-] arjie|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavs|12 years ago|reply
Either way the next couple of days will be make or break, if this last price change doesn't get any significant contribution in short time, I don't think they can reach the target anymore.
[+] [-] niemeyer|12 years ago|reply
I was there. I've overlooked the spreadsheets with component parts, and people having phone calls and debating about how to possibly lower the cost even more. I can also say that getting to $695 wasn't straightforward at all. We all love a bit of conspiracy, but please allow a bit of credit to the people trying to pull it off.
[+] [-] eterm|12 years ago|reply
Having thousands donate at $800 and the refunding the difference down to $695 means that the "target" is met but the actual net amount is lowered by that amount that needs to be refunded.
It doesn't actually help them meet the lowered target either, it simply lowers the target while getting them no closer to the target by lowering their effective amount raised at the same time.
That's why I don't think it was planned. It feels to me less planned and more reacting to not meeting their target but reacting in a not so clever way.
The thing is, if they can't keep steady during the fund-raising part I don't trust them to deliver on the hard part of building the hardware.
Either way I also don't believe this is in any way really connected to lower component price deals, this is marketing but in my opinion it's not clever marketing.
[+] [-] jlengrand|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] null_ptr|12 years ago|reply
Can I `gcc-arm -o MyApp main.c` on my PC and run MyApp on any Ubuntu Edge phone, without having to unlock them or enable them for dev or any other nonsense? Or is development restricted to QML and HTML5?
[+] [-] niemeyer|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dharma1|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justincormack|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonchalance|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cleis|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Joeboy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sarreph|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madmaze|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vishvananda|12 years ago|reply
Dan Ariely did some studies[1] showing that people are much more likely to pick something when there is a strictly worse option available. $830 vs. $600 for the exact same thing is just easier for our irrational minds to compare than $695 for a phone next year vs. phones today. I think this was a major motivator for people to "buy" in the early stages of the project, especially since it was a time limited option.
I personally backed at the $600 level, and while I have a lot of reasons for why it was a good idea, I suspect that I was influenced my own irrational behavior and I am just good at justifying my decisions.
[1] http://realityswipe.wordpress.com/tag/dan-ariely/
P.S. If you haven't read any of Dan Ariely's stuff before, he does some fascinating studies showing how irrational humans are.
[+] [-] transfire|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] knocte|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] henrikgs|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zakarum009|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tehwalrus|12 years ago|reply