Nick Statt at the Verge on the Coolest Cooler Kickstarter disaster:

Coolest, the company behind a popular Kickstarter-funded cooler, is now selling its product for $499 on Amazon in an effort to raise enough money to continue producing new units. The news may frustrate Kickstarter backers, who were promised the product in February of this year. Coolest said today it now plans to deliver the last shipment of coolers to Kickstarter backers by April 2016.

In a video uploaded to YouTube, CEO Ryan Grepper said the Amazon sale is to “keep the lights on” and “make certain that every single backer’s Coolest can get made and shipped.” The problem lies in the cooler’s blending motor, which is made by a supplier that’s currently on strike, he said. Coolest has been unable to find a viable replacement.

As I’ve said before, making things at scale is not something you want to take lightly.

User interpol in the comments makes a great point:

Uhh, so $12,000,000 in funding — take off $1mil for Kickstarter fees — divided by 60,000 units is only $200 per unit.

This seems like a vastly underfunded project.

My two successful Kickstarter projects, Bicycles for Our Minds and Charms, Quivers, and Parades both involved two ingredients: paper and ink. Once your project involves electronics and moving parts it takes the complexity to a much higher level.

This doesn’t mean poster and book projects can’t be highly complex. Then can be.

NY to SF in 5 minutes shot entirely on an iPhone 6+ by Tom Harman.

via kottke

At Re/code, Noah Kulwin on investor Fred Wilson:

Last week, Silicon Valley freaked out when Fidelity lowered the value in its stake of Snapchat, Zenefits and other startups in which the investment conglomerate holds equity. In Snapchat’s case, it reduced the company’s worth from $16 billion to $12 billion. Zenefits’ $4.5 billion valuation was cut in half.

Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, a longtime venture capitalist known for his early bet on Twitter, says in a blog post that these write-downs are going to keep on coming.

He argues that the “blurring of the lines between the public and private markets” means that as the economy slows down (or the air gets let out of the tech bubble, take your pick), the valuations of unicorns like Snapchat and Zenefits that have taken funding from late-stage growth giants like Fidelity are going to continue going down.

As Alan Kay best put it, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

If angel investors want to pop the bubble, or let air out the bubble or do whatever the fuck they want to do with the bubble, all they need to do change the amount of money they’re putting into these ‘unicorns’.

Also, can we stop using the word, ‘unicorn’?

Armin Vit posted some heart felt words for ExxonMobil regarding their constantly suing anyone using interlocking x’s in their logo.

This week (recorded 11/1/15) I rant to myself about San Francisco’s crap subway (aka BART), the bicycles on BART, dicks that don’t give up their seats for ladies, the lack of hustle in SF commuters, spineless SF drivers, people not wanting to pay for good design, the World Series, and New Jersey. This episode opens with a clip from A Streetcar Named Desire.

Listen Now

via little animal gifs

LOS ANGELES — When Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” is released in a special roadshow version (with overture, intermission and additional footage) on Dec. 25, it will represent a feat worthy of the heist in the director’s “Jackie Brown.”

The film is scheduled to open on 96 screens in the United States and four in Canada, all in 70-millimeter projection, a premium format associated with extravaganzas of the 1950s and 1960s.

Yet from a theatrical standpoint, the technology is nearly obsolete. Last year, “Interstellar” opened in 70 millimeter at only 11 comparable locations. There were only 16 in 2012 for “The Master,” which renewed interested in the format. No film has opened with 100 70-millimeter prints since 1992. According to the National Association of Theater Owners, 97 percent of the 40,000 screens in the United States now use digital projection.

Over a period of a year and a half, the Weinstein Company, which will distribute the film, arranged for old projectors to be procured, purchased and refurbished and new lenses to be made for theaters.

NYTimes: Tarantino’s ‘The Hateful Eight’ Resurrects Nearly Obsolete Technology

Tarantino is so obsessive. I love it.

When news of a massive illicit photo ring run by a high school football team in Canon City, Colo., broke this week, parents around the country were left scratching their heads.

How could a scandal involving at least 100 students and hundreds more nude photos go undetected for so long?

The answer: photo vaults.

Disguised to look and function like an innocent smartphone app, photo vaults — also known as “ghost apps” — allow people to conceal photos, video and information in plain view on their phone. They’ve been around since at least 2011, but have grown increasingly common as smartphones have gained popularity. The App Store and Google Play are littered with apps designed to help users hide their activity and camouflage sensitive information.

“If you look at your kid’s phone, everything looks normal, but one of the apps turns out to actually be some way to send messages to and from others that aren’t meant to be permanent,” George Welsh, the superintendent of Canon City school, told NBC affiliate KKTV.

—How Colorado teenagers hid a massive nude sexting ring from parents and teachers

Michael Lopp has added drones to his list of “holy shit” moments:

I’ve written about this topic before, but as it’s been a few years since I’ve experienced a Holy Shit, it bears repeating. A Holy Shit moment is when you first discover a new idea that drastically and forever changes your perspective. You know when you’re having these moments because you stop, you stare at the new idea or thought with your mouth half open, and you say – out loud – “Holy shit.” Here are three from my life to help you calibrate:

Telnet – Sitting in the computer lab at UCSC as Frank explained, “Type telnet 81.201.83.45. Ok, now enter this user name and password. Great, you are now logged into a computer in Germany.” Pause. I’m what? Pause. Holy shit, the whole world is eventually going to be connected.

Doom – Playing Doom primarily on the promise of Castle Wolfenstein 3D. I distinctly remember walking around a corner in the game and having an Imp leap out at me. I jumped out of my chair, Holy shit, the computer will eventually be able to render the world as I see it and I’ll be able to walk around.

iPhone – Writing my first email of significance where it wasn’t an absolute mobile chore to do what I did effortless on my desktop. Wait. Holy shit, a computer is not just a bulky something that sits on my desk. Computers are going to disappear by being everywhere.

You are unable to un-see a Holy Shit moment. It is burned in your brain because the world as you knew it is now forever different. This brings us back to drones.

I too have a father who’s an engineer and I too want to buy him a drone.

Ok, I want a drone too.

I just don’t have an extra $700 to drop on one.

Ben Bajarin on Android’s “good enough” problem:

One of the most interesting observations about all of this is that the Innovator’s Dilemma was supposed to impact Apple. This was a fundamental tenet of most bear cases. When the market for smartphones became filled with good-enough devices at very low prices, why would anyone buy an iPhone? Yet this is impacting Samsung exactly according to the guidebook — but not Apple.

The fundamental lesson to learn here is that the Innovator’s Dilemma, in this case, only applies to Android land, because all the hardware OEMs run the same operating system. As I’m fond of saying, when you ship the same operating system as your competition, you are only as good as their lowest price. This is the curse of the modular business model.

What about Apple?

One of the most interesting observations about all of this is that the Innovator’s Dilemma was supposed to impact Apple. This was a fundamental tenet of most bear cases. When the market for smartphones became filled with good-enough devices at very low prices, why would anyone buy an iPhone? Yet this is impacting Samsung exactly according to the guidebook — but not Apple.

The fundamental lesson to learn here is that the Innovator’s Dilemma, in this case, only applies to Android land, because all the hardware OEMs run the same operating system. As I’m fond of saying, when you ship the same operating system as your competition, you are only as good as their lowest price. This is the curse of the modular business model.

Which brings us to today in late 2015 with Microsoft pretending to drop their modular business model.

This is the telegram that broke news of the American Civil War.

via The Combustion Chamber

Dan Goodin at Ars Technica on the data plundering going on in iOS and Android:

Apps in both Google Play and the Apple App Store frequently send users’ highly personal information to third parties, often with little or no notice, according to recently published research that studied 110 apps.

The researchers analyzed 55 of the most popular apps from each market and found that a significant percentage of them regularly provided Google, Apple, and other third parties with user e-mail addresses, names, and physical locations. On average, Android apps sent potentially sensitive data to 3.1 third-party domains while the average iOS app sent it to 2.6 third-party domains. In some cases, health apps sent searches including words such as “herpes” and “interferon” to no fewer than five domains with no notification that it was happening.

Well fuck, this is awesome.

via The Awl

These startups-finding-their-way stories blow my fucking mind. Maybe they shouldn’t but they do. How people can raise tens of millions of dollars without shit to show for it is beyond me (maybe this is why I’ve never started or worked at a startup).

Take Javascript platform, Famo.us:

Famo.us’ 15 minutes of open source fame have come to an end. JavaScript rendering engine Famo.us has pivoted away from its hardcore open sourced engineering platform which had raised over $31 million. It’s now refocused on commercializing the idea of powerful mobile web apps with a content management system for branded marketing apps.

Pivot. A brilliant word Silicon Valley loves to use. Wouldn’t it be nice if we non-entreprenuers could pivot on things in our lives? Like if those pesky rent payments aren’t working out, just pivot on them. The rent-paying world is ripe for disruption. Be innovative and begin paying your rent with a new currency you come up with yourself.

Back to Famo.us:

Famo.us’ ambitions were always lofty and a bit tough to explain. During the company’s debut on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012 Startup Battlefield competition, rather than giving a traditional pitch, Famo.us CEO Steve Newcomb spent his whole six minutes asking people to imagine what could be done if apps were 3D instead of 2D and demoing a floating periodic table.

The judges seemed baffled, as you can see below. That’s in part because just days earlier, the team made its first pivot away from what it called BenchRank, a ranking system for people, into an HTML5 development platform. Newcomb and then-intern Mark Lu found they couldn’t build what they wanted with HTML5’s limitations, so they set out to fix them. That led co-founder Dan Lynch and much of the team to depart, leaving Newcomb and Lu to handle Disrupt.

Pick a pivot and go with it, guys.

One more nugget:

I spoke to Newcomb, who confesses that for six months the company struggled to come up with a way to actually earn money. A source close to the company tells me Newcomb pushed the engineer-heavy company into “ideation mode” that made some employees feel like the startup lacked direction. They described engineers as being “fed up.”

Newcomb himself admits it was a “divergent brainstorming process,” saying “We tried everything…we tried everything so we could create a business model around open source. And at the end of the day, we just couldn’t do it.”

Just couldn’t come up with a way to earn money. Classic.