Panono Makes Decision To Hold Its Camera Customers Hostage Behind a Paywall (diyphotography.net) 120
John Aldred, writing for DIYPhotography: We all know the risks when we back a crowdfunding campaign. Although the risk is typically that the project will fail, the company goes bust, never delivers on the products and all the backers are out of pocket. What backers don't expect is that a successful campaign backed based on set terms suddenly decides to start charging extra for part of that service way down the line. Panono launched on Indiegogo way back in 2013. It's a "Panoramic Ball Camera" offering 360-degree views with a whopping 108-megapixels. Even today, that's mighty impressive. You need to utilise their cloud service for processing the images, which was included in the purchase price of the camera. Now, they've decided to start charging for it. The campaign raised over $1.25 million with a goal of $900,000, and even had the support of former Leica CEO, Ralf Coenen. Bringing things to the current day, an email was sent out to Panono users stating that the previously free service was, from September 1st, 2019, going to cost $0.88 per image to process and stitch using their cloud platform.
And ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:And ... (Score:5, Informative)
Unless the raw format is painfully proprietary, Hugin can stitch pretty much anything into any projection you like
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So time for someone else to figure out how to stitch together the multiple piggy. Maybe they can crowdfund it? Or they can just charge $0.50 instead.
Yes. Someone else should step up being phase one.
Phase 2 is that these idiots should be sued into oblivion as a warning to others for the large scale bait and switch campaign they just executed.
Sounds about right for that company (Score:5, Interesting)
They didn't even send out cameras to most of the people that backed them.
I'm out the $500+ I paid to back them and I never received anything from them...
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Re: Sounds about right for that company (Score:2)
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The possibility for a stake exists in angel investing. In crowd funding there is no arrangement for providing a stake in the company.
Crowdfunding is where you gamble on a purchase. If you win, you get the good or service. If you lose, you can get less than the original agreed to terms including getting nothing.
Getting nothing in exchange for money is not a valid contract in the United States and nearly every other jurisdiction. Theoretically you can send a collections agency after them for the debt, you'll
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Oh yeah... I'm completely done with any kind of crowed funding.
I'm not as mad about loosing my initial investment as I am that they used some german legal BS to essentially get away with not fulfilling their commitment to send out the rewards. If they had gone out of business I would have just decided that I had bad luck.... I really pisses me off that they are still in business!
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In most such cases, the company's liabilities are declared null and void, including the obligation to send you a camera.
Not null and void... but temporarily stayed until their case is settled, and then their assets and/or proceeds of selling assets are distributed to their creditors according to a priority list
Generally with secured creditors first; Unsecured creditors next, and Equity holders last.
A customer who paid for merchandise would be secured, but for a crowdfunding campaign where the "merc
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It's a classic case of vastly under-estimating the cost to produce their product. Maybe they intended to charge much more once the product was off the ground.
After they went bust the company that bought their assets will charge an extra $1100 to the backers if they want the camera. So offering it for â500 to backers was at best half the price they need to charge to make money, maybe even one third.
https://www.theverge.com/circu... [theverge.com]
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So offering it for â500 to backers was at best half the price they need to charge to make money
Well, that's fair enough, but I can't help but think the courts don't do enough to protect
the vulnerable parties, which in this case are people who paid money thinking they would
be receiving a product -- the level of discount don't really warrant them being subjected to
the level of risk they were put to.
My thought is that in such situations the collateral and intellectual property related to product
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You didn't pay them $500. You gave them $500. In exchange, they promised you that to the best of their ability they would deliver certain finished products to you.
Important difference. Crowdfunding is not like shopping in a retail store. It's more like investing in stocks. Losing your entire investment is always a possibility, and you should have been prepared for that. People who didn't realize this until too late inv
Let the "buyer" be where? (Score:3, Insightful)
"whopping 108-megapixels." Or you could say it has 36 x 3-mp (cheapo) regular old-bin cam chips, whichever sounds more impressive? Caveat emptor, Kendalls.
HaHa! (Score:1)
Remember kids, if you don't own the keys you don't really own your data.
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You need to utilise their cloud service for processing the images
Tell your friends to learn from your recent lesson in dependency, John Aldred.
WYZECAM NEXT ???? (Score:1)
When you buy a product depending on the "goodwill" of the seller,
you should be prepared for ultimate disappointment.
If you don't have a binding contract, you only have your hope.
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We all know the risks when we back a crowdfunding (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently someone doesn't, because TFA and the summary are whining about a crowdfunding service that got off the ground now charging for the service.
>> going to cost $0.88 per image
Isn't eighty-eight for a price a little strange in today's hypersensitive political climate? (I think I saw a headline article about someone complaining about the president raising flags on August 8 because reasons.)
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Crowd funding is essentialy an investment, and investments are risky. I think a lot of people confuse crowd funding with pre-orders.
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Generally indigogo is scams
Not necessarily. I got six Cnct "IoT plugs" for ten bucks each on Indigogo. They're Alexa-compatible. 10 bucks is far and away the best prices I've seen for anything comparable. (Cnct is currently charging $30 for 'em.)
So, I lucked out, but there is substantial risk involved.
Re:We all know the risks when we back a crowdfundi (Score:5, Informative)
NO! Crowdfunding is NOT an investment! An investment gets you an ownership share of the thing you're investing in, which could go down in value, maybe even to zero, but it could also go up. It also gives you at least some say in how the money is used, even if only a fraction of a vote. With crowdfunding, you'll never get the 'up' -- the company could walk away with billions but you don't get any piece of that, and you get no say in how your money gets used.
Crowdfunding is more like buying raffle tickets from a charity. You may walk away with nothing more than the satisfaction of helping a cause you believed in. If you're lucky, you might walk away with something worth a bit more than you put into it, but probably not by a lot.
Re:We all know the risks when we back a crowdfundi (Score:5, Insightful)
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Investors expect 9 out of 10 ventures they back to fail but the 1 that succeeds to make 10 times the amount invested and hopefully more.
You're not talking about investors as a class here, you're talking about venture capitalists funding startups which are a small and atypical subset of investors. Most investors are just plain stockholders, part owners of small businesses, etc.
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Unlike investing in start-ups it's actually quite easy to tell if crowd funded projects are going to fail. Red flags include:
- No working prototype that is close to the finished product
- Violating the laws of physics
- Cloud of logos from websites that mentioned them
- No proven track record in business
- Magical new technology
- Not asking for enough money
- Rewards priced too low
- Already for sale on Alibaba
Using those simple rules I've backed half a dozen things on Kickstarter and received them all. The most
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Not entirely agreeing here. It's in investment except tha the payout is a relatively small one time dividend that's a product and not cash. To the people building the product however, the crowdfunding absolutely is an investment, it's money coming in from investors to help fund their business. Unlike a pre-order, there is no guarantee that you get the product or your money back, because with crowdfunding that money coming in is being spent to fund the development from start to finish. For pre-orders usu
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Crowd funding is essentialy an investment, and investments are risky. I think a lot of people confuse crowd funding with pre-orders.
Crowdfunding isn't investment, it's a donation. If you are lucky, you might get a tshirt or tote bag.
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I'm afraid to ask but why are we hating on 88 now?
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Your guess is as good as mine. I don't have the time or inclination to keep up with all the manufactured indignation these days.
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I'm sorry to say it's not well-known enough for me or that other guy to have ever heard about it until now. Maybe if you're that up to date with the internal lingo in white supremacist circles you should take a long hard look at the people you surround yourself with?
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So because he (and me) knows about this simple thing we should change who we associate with? Are you always a childish prick or only when someone reminds you of your ignorance?
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8 is the Hth letter of the number scale.
FTFY
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The political part comes about because President Trump authorized the flying of the USA flag at half-mast because of the recent killings, going by federal law and custom the day to raise them is on August 8 (aka 8/8) cnn or msnbc had some of their reporters saying that Trump had ordered them raised on 8/8 as a sign to hitler and national socialists.
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It was an analyst on MSNBC who made the tepid connection. The person was a former FBI assistant director.
It was not a reporter.
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Do you think all the Democrats in 2016 threw away their vote by not voting for the guy that ended up winning?
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I'll likely be indulging my usual "A plague on both your parties" vote for the Libertarian candidate in 2020.
Awesome way to throw away your vote. Libertarians are almost as bad as Trumptards.
If I lived in a state that was remotely in any sort of contention, you might have a point. In that case, I'd have had to do some serious soul-searching.
But seeing as I live in the Peoples Democratic One Party Socialist State of California, I have no meaningful vote whatsoever anyway. I still vote, but realistically, voting anything at all but Democrat is strictly a protest vote.
Re: We all know the risks when we back a crowdfund (Score:2)
Camera? (Score:5, Funny)
More like scamera, am I rite folks?
The company has no-no on the name (Score:3)
What did you expect, if the company has no-no on the name. More or less the same as a company named Takata (in spanish, is an onomatopeia for a hit or a knock) making airbags.
but all kiding and puns aside, I hope someone reverse-engineers the RAW format of the cameras, and allows GIMP and/or other imaging SW to do the stiching localy.
Software (Score:5, Interesting)
Hugin [sourceforge.net] is the "or other" software you're looking for.
It can pretty much stitch anything together into any shape/projection, as long as you feed it the individual pictures, and info about the lens and sensors (either from the EXIF metadata or manually).
So the only necessary thing is getting the unprocessed pictures out.
That being a crowd-funded startup you can bet two things:
- the company itself will tell you that it uses a proprietary protocole to transfer the pictures from the to the smartphone app, which they spent months engineering , which is considered business intelligence and to be kept secret at all costs and they'll never reveal any of their highly sophisticated tech!!!
- some guy spending a few minutes with nmap scanning the ball's wifi will notice that it's a plain webserver hastily duck-taped together under Node.js, filled to the brim with vulnerabilities and easy to fetch the JPEGs from.
Re: Software (Score:4, Funny)
Somebody needs to crowdfund an open source reverse engineering effort.
PT Barnum (Score:4, Insightful)
said it so long ago, there's one born every minute that you know.
In this case, the modern word for "sucker" is "crowdfunding"
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Re: No cloud (Score:1)
What was the initial justification for this to be hosted on 'the cloud?'
And how did so many people get duped into accepting that?
Is this really a big deal? (Score:3)
Free service offering to hook customers. Years later they realize it costs money and needs to charge for it.
Kind of like offering Free Battery Charging with purchase of a car. And discovering "free for life" only applies under certain conditions.
I've had many things where the program conditions change. I had a "all updates included" product once where the company decided they needed to charge more. So they offered a new product with new terms and discontinued the one I had...while continuing to offer free updates to me...and never made any. But if they ever do -- it'll be free!!
Makes sense to me (Score:2)
When the incoming money stream has dwindled and the cost of the service remains present, there comes a decision point: switch to a paid model, or go under.
Should they ask for money, or turn off the service?
Seems like they did their best for a long time. I don't expect anything that costs money to be "free for life".
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Because the software only runs on a one-of-a-kind trinary computer given to them by aliens from Alpha Centauri?
They COULD substantially perform on their promise by giving the software to the people who were promised lifetime service for free and see if they can make a go of it selling cameras. Instead, they have chosen to see if they can squeeze a few more bux out of the last customers they will ever see before folding their tent.
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Seems like they did their best for a long time. I don't expect anything that costs money to be "free for life".
Well, I expect people not to lie through their teeth, knowing full well that offering anything "free for life" is a completely unsustainable business model, instead just using the promise of a free service to bolster sales. The only other explanation is that they're too stupid to realize that "free for life" services are financially unsustainable. It can really only be one or the other, and honestly, I'm not sure which is worse.
The fact that this is a proprietary system, and wasn't made available as an of
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Reminds me of eye-fi (Score:5, Informative)
So back a few years ago there was an amazing product which was an SD card with a wifi chip. So your camera could upload files directly somewhere, a fileshare, a cloud service, whatever.
Worked great for a few years. Then suddenly they decided that they would no longer support the cloud platform that you used to register the card. The card worked fine, the software to manage it was local, but for some reason to register the card you needed a web service that they discontinued.
People freaked the fuck out. Some people had only just purchased the card months before they made the announcement. They dialed it back, and maybe allowed people who were currently registered to continue using it, but the damage was done. No one would trust any new product from the company after that. This killed the company. And while their website is still active, i dont think they have updated it since 2016.
I assume a similar thing will happen here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I had one of those cards. It worked okay for quick connections from a Nikon DSLR. Now that the newer cameras come with onboard Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, it would be a solution in search of a problem. Camera bodies are semi-expendable nowadays (though the lenses are not) and I upgrade to a newer model every 3 - 5 years, as opposed to 35mm film cameras that I only upgraded once in 20 years.
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Ugh, like HP printers and iPhones.
The accessory that thinks it's the centerpiece, and everything needs to revolve around it.
Just follow fucking standards and work with others!
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I guess you didn't read the article, as it actually made this exact comparison as well. But you (and the article's author) are correct, as it does seem very similar.
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Oh wow. I remember using those cards before I got a camera with WiFi built in. I had no idea they ended up shitting on their customer base.
Relevant quote (Score:1)
“I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.”—Darth Vader
Or you can just use off line software that appears (Score:1)
Could someone explain to me crowdfunding? (Score:2)
I don't get it. Honestly.
I do get venture capitalism. A high-risk venture where I get equity in the company for my investment. 9 out of 10 go bust, ok, but the 10th makes it worth it by taking off. I can understand that.
With crowdfunding, I get similar odds but in the end I get ... the product they want to sell anyway.
Question for 100: Why don't I just wait 'til they have a product to sell? Between all the scams and half-baked ideas that never get to take off because they are impossible and all the other id
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I do get venture capitalism.
Yes, but venture capitalism is investment - a bit on the scorched-earthy greed-is-good side (those 9 out of 10 failed companies cause a lot of collateral damage, but not to your collateral - so that's OK - and even the 1 in 10 that succeeds you probably want to sell to BigTechCorp ASAP for IP asset stripping before it turns into a pumpkin) but, nonetheless, investment of the turn-money-into-more-money sort. Crowdfunding (as a customer) isn't for turning money into more money.
The best you should hope for f