Comment I may swim against the flow here, but ... (Score 1) 448
Actually I didn't see anything outrageously scammy in this incident, neither the linked reports were whitewash and bad science any more then the "excellent dissection" of the claims.
So the "dissector" did some back-of-the-envelop order-of-magnitude calculation and found that 1 minute "rope" function cannot be sustained unless the tag is within 50cm of a router. I thought the matter of fact here is not 1 minute "rope", but 5 minute "rope", which would supposedly require 5 times less energy and can be placed 2 times further away. Using the same number the dissecting article uses, their tag in 5 minute rope uses just about 2-3 microW of power, as much as the counter article itself calculates is available at 4 m distance.
What more, the second linked report openly shows how tag can sort off maintain its energy at 1-2 m from emitters, but looses charge at 3m, which maybe very sloppy experiment, have to give it that, but IN NO WAY CONTRADICTS with anything the "critics" say, actually.
I can agree that 1-2m range in lowest ping mode is not practical, as the critics seized upon, however, people THIS IS A PROTOTYPE not a final product. If they had already polished and awesome device, why the fk would they need a kickstarter campaign???
That said, I can see a ton of ways they can try and improve their product to be more practical after collecting the funding: they can try to further reduce power consumption of the circuit, if they just used off-the-shelf components now, the possibility of this is quite quite plausible; they can try to work out some software tricks, such as remembering the location of the tag the last time it handshake'd; they can try to register a freq band and sell dedicated RF charging stations for charging their tags at home; they can ask people to re-charge their tags every two weeks by placing them in 1-2m radius of a wifi router -- any one of these is better than having a batteried device that needs change of battery or be plugged into a charger every time.
As for Dr Paul McArthur identity, it is clearly stated that he is a research professor at U of Utah, and he may not in fact have a sizable footprint on the "internet". I know a ton of professors who do not use LinkedIn or FB, or even if they do have such account, keep in nominally. That's because these people are too busy with teaching, advising students, doing research, and managing universities to also deal with the self-masturbation called social networking. Besides, they already have an outlet to connect to the people they need, it is called peer-reviewed journals and academic publications. So it is quite possible the guy wouldn't have a ton of blogs, twitter streams and yada yada. Where his footprint should be searched is in academic journals and patent office, where he does have hits as some people here already pointed out.
I agree that the project description is overly optimistic and may not quite correspond the final product they will be able to put out, but to call it a complete scam it is just another mass hysteria driven by know-it-all nerds feeling empowered by self-published blogs and modern social networking, who think they know it all but but really don't know shit.