BY TEAM KAIROS
Episode #15: Jibo is dead, and other tech products that probably made you 🙄
First, some housekeeping: This is last time we’re posting to Medium. The next episode of the world-famous The Identity Economy™ column will be welcomed on our fancy corporate blog.
We’re moving to the big leagues! — It’s like that time Wayne and Garth infiltrated a satellite station to get a record exec’s attention.
So, yeah, Jibo eh?
Billed as “the world’s first social robot for the home” —Jibo recently started telling ‘his’ owners of its imminent demise.
Yes. This actually happened.
Poor little thing —
“In December, it was reported that Jibo Inc had sold its assets to an investment firm.” — BBC News
Something tells us Amazon’s Alexa & Echo dominance in the home IoT space impacted Jibo’s adoption. It’s a tough racket out-there folks.
Anyway, here’s 3 other tech products that didn’t set the world on fire…
#1 — Google Glass
One of tech’s great promises was Google Glass. Launched in 2013, it became a major status item amongst tech elitists and wannabes alike. Yet, when you dig into how Google brought it to market, it reveals a fascinating mis-fire.
In short, they should have focussed on business users; not consumers.
Which — *checks Internet* — it looks like they have now figured out, so good for them.
#2 — Juicero
This infamous fruit-squeezing startup raised $120M — but, early customers quickly figured out the $400, Wi-Fi-enabled machine was no more effective at extracting the tears of fruit than using your hands. Launched in 2016; ran out of juice early 2017. Yikes.
#3 — Clinkle
Clinkle was a mobile payments company founded in 2012. It had a very public collapse that betrayed the hype around the product…
“If you know the name ‘Clinkle’ it’s certainly not because of the product. It’s because it’s become synonymous with the evils of backing a young, arrogant, inexperienced, founder and giving him way too much money for an unproven idea “— from Pando’s post-mortem.
It’s easy to bash the failures…
So, we leave you with the wise musings of 4x founder Jason Cohen:
“All startups are screwed up. Even when they’re succeeding they are screwed up. (HT Mike Maples Jr) Corollary: A startup has to be so excellent at one or two key things, that they can screw up everything else up and not die. Sometimes that’s airtight product/market fit. Sometimes that’s defensible distribution channels. Sometimes that’s product design so thrilling that every customer spreads the word to five more. Sometimes that’s a market insight that takes competitors five years to understand. Sometimes that’s a dream team that weathers the storm that sinks the other boats. The bad news is, you don’t know ahead of time what that thing will be. The good news is, it’s OK that most things are screwed up.”
What’s your Kung Fu?
The Identity Economy™ is written and curated by the team at Kairos.com.
If you want to learn more about Kairos and how Face Recognition can transform your business — drop us a line 😃
