rollback

“Our philosophy at that point was, ‘Customers are never going to be easier or cheaper to acquire as they are today’ and we, as a small company and board, said we have to step on the accelerator to build this out,” “We literally bet the company and went through 12 months of runway in a couple of months because we thought that the time to own the market was right.”

I'll leave the googling as an exercise for the audience.

Pretty common to do this for apps where people might want to copy/paste into the app.

That's nice! Seems like the first thing to do is ensure that workers live in a bikable distance from their workplace.

Hint hint. Either scale up in SF, or elsewhere where there's a hope of people NOT using cars or busses to get to work.

Commentary about the silliness of the avalanche of IOT devices being created right now aside (99% of consumer internet startups are based on dumb ideas and fail, but that doesn't mean there is no market or trend!), it's inevitable that this stuff is going to get traction in the market and it's a vast market. I doubt it's going to happen based on a bunch of edge-case $99 devices though.

The big trend here is the cost of wifi enabled microprocessors dropping down to nearly nothing. Last year we were excited about raspberry pi dropping prices down to $30 for sensor-enabled hardware on the network.

This year you can buy a wifi-enabled microcontroller for _$3_ (search esp8266). And that's not even in volume. At that price, pretty much anything consumer electronics companies build can be addressable on the network.

Add to that voice control, which is crude but usable and built into every phone already and improving quickly. The idea of walking into your house and looking for a light switch is going to feel like walking up to your TV to change the channel did 30 years ago when the remote went into wider use.

I find the economic arguments about not saving money using IOT devices a little amusing, on HN especially. My guess is that almost everyone reading this forum spends a shitload of money buying techno gadgets for reasons beyond "it saves me money."

There is a whole ecosystem that is funding these lawsuits. It also operates somewhat anonymously, with funding sources working directly with law firms and indirectly with inventors (if they are even involved anymore). I've seen emails between law firms and the inventor that literally title the investors as "the funding source." The original inventor need not put any money at risk, and the law firms and funding sources do their own diligence to decide if it's worth proceeding to file suits. In most cases, the entity filing suit is created for each series of attacks so that if they actually lose a suit and are supposed to pay out, there are no assets from which to pay. Therefore, low risk and potentially very high reward.

The biggest factor for that is not the validity of the patents, but the breadth and ability of the patents to be filed against "juicy" targets with a lot of cash. The cost of filing a suit is literally in the hundreds of dollars (I think ~$750) and most of these cases get settled out fairly early because of the immense cost of the defendants to complete the discovery process.