Lily Drone Files for Bankruptcy
droningon.co
droningon.co
Next had terrible sales.. even jobs said so. The factory they built was so underutilized, they assembled the computers by hand instead of using the equipment because it was less work than doing the maintenance on it. It was designed to produce 150,000 machines a year... next sold 50,000 machines total over 6 years (an average of 700/month).
After 6 years, Next abandoned the computer market, focusing on software. They tried to sell the factory to Canon, who pulled out of the deal. They laid off 2/3rds of their employees.
On multiple occasions, investors were forced to put in more funding just to keep Next solvent.
Just a couple of years after abandoning hardware, they agree to merge with apple.
I wasnt able to find an exact number, but the amount of money apple paid for next may actually exceed the total revenue next pulled in during the 12 years they were in business.
A better, if flawed, comparison to Lily might be the Apple I: entering an established, growing market with a product which lowers the threshold for adoption in very specific ways. (I'll defer to more informed, educated, and insightful individuals to carry this comparative analysis any further...)
Even if the technology is feasible and there's a working prototype, there's still a lot of work to do to get it mass produced, and problems and unanticipated expenses can crop up all along the way, especially for people who've never gone through the process before.
There is still a big step to make it cheap, reliable and appealing enough to be commercially successful, but "X is possible and we know how to do it" demo is good base to build from. My 2c.
See WaterSeer [0], SolarRoadways [1], Fontus self-filling waterbottle [2], ...
[0] https://www.waterseer.org/
That being said what we are seeing here is a education problem. The masses of people who (including government officials) who seem to be so gullible and lack basic science skills and critical thinking to understand how some of these technologies might work is astounding. And with the 3 efforts listed above it has slowly come out that the minds behind the idea did not know how it would all work either. A good example of that is fontus. This as dream big art design project. How awesome is that? We can make a 3d model of this cool device! A year later confessing to taking apart dehumidifiers to "understand" how they work as if it was some mistry. As if they could somehow crack this alien technology then they too could build one!
At the rate these too good to be true ideas are coming out one has to stop and think that maybe, just maybe, somebody is gaming the system.
Anybody can come up with an product that if made would change the world. The hard part is coming up with a feasible idea that will change the world.
Not a single one of the projects listed in the parent ever produced a viable working prototype. They sold a promise they could not keep. Yet keep taking money.
http://www.space.com/26713-impossible-space-engine-nasa-test...
In space where flight also wasn't supposed to be possible -
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13556-10-impossibilit...
"Impossible" has been wrong before.
NASA and others are still testing those drives so last year might be a bit premature to write the idea off?
Your example busts your point wide open!
The 3 projects in the parents flat out don't work, and we know why they don't work -- or at least know to what extent they will work.
By the logic you have presented then we should be funding projects that wish to compress all 8 bit connotations into 7 bits. I can go make a nice video of how awesome it would be if we could do this. How it would change the world. Literally, if somebody could compress every 8 bit combination into 7 bits it would change the world overnight. Should we fund a product that advertises it could do this with a nice video and a website?
I'm not sure if the people responsible are even aware that it won't work - they might be 'scamming' without knowing, due to lack of common sense. It's really sad and enrages me more than it should.
Pedlars of snake oil have featured in cautionary tales since time immemorial.
"Are you sure that the GoPro lens does not create a unique deformation/pattern on the image? I am worried that a lens geek could study our images up close and detect the unique GoPro lens footprint. But I am just speculating here: I don’t know much about lenses but I think we should be extremely careful if we decide to lie publicly." - an except from an e-mail by a Lily founder. [1]
There's optimism, there's prototyping, there's proof-of-concept demos... And there's plain, old deception.
[1] http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2017/01/consider-lily.h...
On an entirely unrelated note, this is an early contender for "most ungrammatical sentence I hope to read today".
(1) It should be "who", not "whom". I find that hypercorrection immensely annoying.
(2) But actually, since Lily is a company, it should be "which", not "who".
(3) But even "which despite raising […] has filed" is wrong. It actually should just be "Lily, despite raising […], has filed" or "Lily, which raised […], has filed". "which despite raising" subordinates "has filed […]", so the whole sentence turns into a noun phrase missing its verb phrase.
As another poster has said, your point 2 is not a universally agreed rule. See http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001874.h...
Your point 3 is totally valid, I assumed you were quoting a wannabe noun phrase. I wasn't paying enough attention.
[1] https://pdf.inforuptcy.com/pacer/debke/167122/dockets/2/1-A0...
"68. Second, the Debtor will pursue a competitive auction and work to close a sale transaction. The Debtor intends to file a sale procedures motion shortly after the Petition Date to initiate that process. The Debtor has received indications of interest from a number of potential buyers of its intellectual property portfolio and believes that its planned 363 sale will realize value from the portfolio. Due to the potential loss of value to the IP if it goes stale, the Debtor hopes to expedite the closing of any transaction. "
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/02/01/dron...
They deliberately lied about what they had and sought to exploit the misconceptions their company perpetrated for personal gain.
If people who do this aren't sent to jail, isn't the system encouraging more people to try stuff like this?
> That is one of the first videos I've seen in a long time where I've thought "wow we can do that now?"
I thought it was funny they were using an existing product from a competitor to simulate what they claimed their future product could do.
It seems the Mavick tracks objects by image recognition from the camera. I'm not sure the stuff shown on the Lily video where you track a presumably radio transmitter from a small device is actually a thing that exists. I was trying to figure out how to do it for tracking kids if they run off in stores etc and it's not easy. You could probably do it with a several feet across receiver so you could detect the timing differences.
In the Lily faked video the Inspire was flown by a human operator.
Guess it the tracker and drone both had gps receivers and communicated that could work although it still might be hard to get the altitude right.
There are a couple of companies with a camera tracking system like this, Soloshot is one I've seen in the press a couple of times:
That said, it looks like they're not shipping the second version anymore and are taking preorder money for the 3rd version so this company could be under duress as well. But the tech exists and is at least somwhat commercially viable.
Also it seems to just rotate a camera tripod mount and so doesn't have the altitude problem. Having mucked about with gps the lat and long are fairly accurate - typically off by 10m whereas gps altitude is often off by 200m which is easily enough to send your drone into the ground. I guess if it did differential timing between the two gps's that could work or they could measure ground altitude some other way. Dunno if Lily cracked that. Conventional aircraft in fog use barometric altimeters corrected for weather conditions. And that's only accurate to ~100ft.
I didn't quite crack the finding kids in a shop problem. Satellite gps wouldn't do it but I was thinking maybe ultrasonics - radio signal makes the tracker beep then you could use loudness / timing to a few microphones a few inches apart like human hearing locating sounds. Not sure if anyone's built something like that.
Update:
Googling, it seems cheapish full differential gps is becoming available from Reach gps http://www.directionsmag.com/entry/finally-affordable-high-p...
and has been used in a one off island mapping with a fixed base station http://gpsworld.com/l1-receiver-uav-help-discreet-survey-of-...
dunno if that sort of thing has been got working in a Lily type setup though. And it's still $600+
The only things it is missing are waterproofing and throwing it up in the air to take off.
But if you want to create a project that literally breaks the laws of physics, something which a high-school science student could demonstrate is physically impossible, Kickstarter will proudly slap their editor's recommendation on your project and help you pimp it to the media so you can widen your net and catch more suckers to siphon money from.
Stuff like Water Seer, Fontus, Solar Roadways, Triton Artificial Gills - that's all I think of when I think about Kickstarter now. Their brand is utterly toxic to me, and don't even get me started on Indiegogo!
Expect the IP, if any, to be near worthless.
Who knows the reason(s) why, but it doesn't seem like they had very good engineers or leadership if they burned through all that time and money and couldn't even get basic flight working.
How in the holy crapping hell did they manage to burn so much cash with NOTHING to show except a fraudulently-produced pitch video?
Is there criminal investigation happening? This smells very bad.
edit: removed capital letters of outrage and replaced with asterisks
Yes.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2017/01/31/failed-drone...
>According to a different unnamed source, the company who made the video, CMI Productions, has also not been paid in full for its work. A CMI employee did not respond immediately to a request for comment. CTO Bradlow did not respond to questions about the video payments before hanging up on FORBES. A Lily spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit to FORBES, though the company is expected to file a response to the district attorney on Thursday.
I'm not sure how many failed devices they made which could easily eat millions in material, manufacturing, and design costs.
Hardware is hard!
in http://www.droningon.co/2017/01/12/lily-drone-project-cancel...
Apparently their original footage was from a DJI inspire.
Is this true ? Or did the prototype atleast work ?
http://www.droningon.co/2017/01/15/san-francisco-superior-co...
1. Build slick marketing pitch. 2. Collect $35M in pre-orders. 3. Apologize after a year of "trying" and return the principle. 4. Make $1.75M in interest.
The bankrupcy filing posted above in the thread https://pdf.inforuptcy.com/pacer/debke/167122/dockets/2/1-A0... largely bears this out. On page 13, they declare that they still have $25.6M in their bank account, and a bit more than $31M of current assets in total.
By Kickstarter standards, this looks like a fairly responsibly run company.
Setting up a reliable manufacturing line and test procedure typically takes about 6 months from the time your engineering team begins handoff to the contract manufacturer. Moreover, as much as we'd like it to be, manufacturing is not agile. All of that work is very change-intolerant. So, if you begin the handoff with a half-baked design (which most startups do, in my experience) that you have to change as you proceed through the setup process, you can easily blow away that nominal, 6-month timeline with tooling changes, contract renegotiation, supplier verification, etc. as your engineers scramble to work with the factory to make the design manufacturable and cost-effective.
Jumping straight into a full-blown manufacturing effort is not a cash-effective way for a startup to prove a complicated design. You can force it to work, but it's really expensive. Apple, for example, parallel-paths a lot of stuff. They can afford to discard a million-dollar tool and move on if it doesn't work out. They also send huge engineering teams to Asia for months at a time. Instead, I'd suggest that startups begin with more manual domestic builds in the low hundreds of units until the engineering team is confident in the manufacturability of the design and the manufacturing requirements are understood. These will, of course, have much higher per-unit costs, but you can iterate way, way faster because you're not constantly flying overseas to battle the inertia of a manufacturing line.
Unfortunately, Kickstarter--while still qualifying as an early adopter market--is driving first-run numbers way higher than they should be for the average startup, which is causing them to jump too quickly into scale manufacturing efforts. Because of this, I think we are seeing some spectacular failures such as Lily.
tl;dr: Manufacturing is expensive. Kickstarter is driving hardware startups into manufacturing too soon.
Functionality X at $500 has a very different market than the same functionality X at $1500; if a startup is aiming to check for product-market fit, then the expensive manual domestic builds would be aimed at a different target market that also requires and uses different features, requires different marketing and sales channels, etc with requirements and preferences that often are entirely opposite of what the "real" product should have.
Such an iteration would help in handling the actual manufacturing, but would not help in building all the other parts of the business as intended as it would drive all of them in a wrong direction.
Furthermore, who funds the very large fixed costs of design and development? If they had chosen "more manual domestic builds in the low hundreds of units" then they would have saved money/scale in manufacturing but would not have the funding needed for the engineering team to make the actual product, whatever they had was funded essentially by pre-sales.
It's also reasonable to have products that are totally unviable if the volumes are low, because to get an adequate price you need economies of scale. A business plan that clearly states "we either go big or go bust" can be a valid business plan; many real industries have a situation where selling just 1000 units is worse than selling 0 units, you either manufacture at scale or close up the shop.
Edit: Also, to your point about going big or bust--I think that's fine as long as the reason for bust is market powers beyond your control. But to bust before launch because you didn't have a viable plan/resources to get through manufacturing is just a shame.
Edit 2: I should mention that I see small domestic runs as one way to deal with the manufacturing problem. Another is to simplify the product for your first run. Another is to raise more money. They all have tradeoffs and I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all solution. I didn't mean to imply that.
Shameless plug: a friend of mine is one of the founders of a competing startup making a self-filming drone that has more than twice the top speed, so is actually usable. They've been shooting on location with top athletes using pre-production models for the past year, first production models are going to final assembly these days.
Edit: s/full disclosure/shameless plug/ as per discussion below.
This wasn't the reason they failed, though. They sold plenty of units, they just never delivered them.
The cool thing about Lily was the waterproof aspect. There are very few of them that aren't toys and aren't very expensive at the same time.
It's especially grueling when people preface it with stuff like "shameless plug" or "not to push my own product, but..."
Still, I'm sure that you're right about the vast majority of action sports.