Hacker News Reader

Comment by muaddirac | Hacker News Reader

> Despite such demonstrations, Perlman has been unable to tempt venture capitalists with the technology. “They invariably bring in experts who say it doesn’t really work,” he says. “I am showing them a demo, but they remain convinced that it’s something else.”

Then it's not an adequate demo?

View on HN

Maybe

But they said that of the iPhone as well.

There's always going to be skeptical people, even if your demo is perfect and your product is a machine that turns "crap into gold"

The ratio of rejections to acceptances unfortunately is very high even for a great product (and it's possibly very low for bad products as well)

Are you actually claiming that subject-matter experts argued the technology in Apple's original iPhone was impossible and that the demos at its unveiling were just tricks? If so, your claim is pretty hard for me to believe, as I don't remember reading articles arguing anything like this at the time.

Here is one: http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/12/27/rim.thought.ap...

http://www.redmondpie.com/blackberry-maker-rim-thought-apple...

To be fair, the first iPhone demo didn't "really work". The order in which things were presented was determined by what was least likely to crash on stage. Longish article, but it's an interesting read:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/and-then-steve-sa...

It was demoable in a lab setting, but you certainly couldn't have given one to a consumer and expected it to go well.

The demo: http://vimeo.com/86746051

sure makes it look like he is broadcasting 6 QPSK modulated video streams on the same frequency.

1\ it requires ridiculously precise location feedback from the receiving device

2\ it probably requires ridiculous amount of synchronized transmitters

3\ + lots of computation

Experts claiming it works, but not the way he sells it makes me think there is something fishy with the demo, like maybe he isnt really broadcasting on same freq or something.

I think that's the issue. The technology is cool and his demo is probably real but rolling this out in an urban environment seems like it would require massive computing power in addition to lots of new antennas.

you would think the military would love something like this, they could just blanket an area with easily disposable transmitters to keep their troops connected. With the processing power held behind safe lines the could even possibly determine who should have what information

Reply on news.ycombinator.com