Why do so many Googlers on HN have such unpleasant personalities? "Did it ever occur to you" that you make your employer look even more awful?
I've seen this claims so many times, people claiming some investors took their deck and gave it to their portfolio companies, people claiming another company copied them. The instances where this actually happens usually occurs when an already proven market product is copied (e.g. look at FB copying Snapchat recently), I've never seen it with a pre-success product.
Think of it this way, if I had the idea for capacitive touch smart screen phone in 2004 and met with Apple, could I claim they stole the iPhone from me? There is so much more to an iPhone than just the 'idea'.
Now, if you have some non-obvious algorithm, which if you asked a senior engineer to design, could not come up with it in a few weeks, my opinion would be different. Like if you invented a fundamental new type of homomorphic encryption, which, could be explained on a single page, but enables a fundamentally new type of distributed computing.
There are indeed, some ideas which are very 'dense' in value purely by their description alone, but they're few and far between.
In any case, online forums are rife with people making conspiratorial claims, in economics, in politics, everywhere, and I think a technical community like HN should demand a higher degree of evidence.
I made up this NDA I signed https://ryanspahn.com/motorola-google-Expired-NDA2013.pdf and this letter when Google absorbed ATAP https://ryanspahn.com/google.JPG .
Ive got emails from the jerk who invited us out there .. who baited us then said here is the door and by the way the race is on..goodbye.
I met with many others too ..like Samsung and that guy was an upstanding gentleman. Google was awful... treated us like dogs!
I have no reason to lie only to tell my story to warn others and highlight that Google no longer follows it's motto "Don't be evil."
I'm sorry to hear you had that experience. Where I part company is the added interpretation. If I was in your situation, and had a negative experience, I'm pretty sure I'd be angry, and feel wronged, and feel 'used', it's only natural.
I mean, Dropbox tried to sell themselves to Apple and Steve Jobs didn't like the price, he went on to say 'you dont have product, you have a feature', actually worse than that:
"And so he started trolling us a little bit, saying we're a feature, not a product, and telling us a bunch of things like that we don't control an operating system so we're going to be disadvantaged, we're going to have to figure out distribution deals, which are risky, and sort of a bunch of business-plan critiques. But then he was like, 'Alright, well I guess we're gonna have to go kill you, basically.' Maybe not in those words, but pretty close."
But do I believe Apple "stole" Dropbox? nah, cloud based backups, sync, etc are pretty straightforward, and although there is innovation at the UI and syncing protocol layer, iCloud is not really a Dropbox clone.
BTW, I encourage you to continue to try and innovate around your idea. There may be a use case beyond 'speakers', like emergency alerts, security, think "California earthquake imminent in 10 seconds!". There could also be a use case for synchronized sound based gaming at parties. There's loads more to do, and having had some bad experiences shouldn't discourage you, it kind of comes with the territory of presenting ideas and startups, you really get shit on a lot.
Indeed we have not given up and the recent news that Google was awarded patents for SpeakerBlast type technology has lit a fire under us even more.
Well I'd enjoy learning what you do at Google. Are you on the Chrome Audio team ;-)
*Edit: weird your first post here was flagged.
I'm not on the Chrome audio team, but I have had experience with Chrome Audio, as I implemented an OpenAL layer for GwtQuake and the web version of Angry Birds for Chrome using it. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_sbusEUz5w for example PlayN, a cross-platform (Web, Android, iOS, Flash) library I worked on in 20% time, and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aW--Wlf9EFs which details some early experiments with image processing, and the porting of Quake to Chrome in 2010.
Looks like you lived in Maryland too at one time. I grew up in Towson(now in Bel Air in Harford County) and all my family is here. I’d move out there for a dream job; inventing/building/designing interesting tech for a FANNG company. The road to there looks to be thru an acquisition.
Well it was nice chatting with you!