Stuff Younger than TechStuff

since we started this show ten years ago. If you haven't heard part one of this series, you should probably do that because we're gonna start right back up where we left off and away we go. Another thing that is younger than tech Stuff is Kickstarter, and boy, this is a big one. Kickstarter launched in two thousand nine. It was co founded by Yancy Strickler, Perry Chen, and Charles Adler, and the concept behind it is pretty simple.

Creators pitch a project and set a financial goal, and if it's picked by Kickstarter, if it meets the the requirements that Kickstarter sets and doesn't violate any rules, it can then go up on the page and you you choose a fundraising campaign duration typically a month is very common. They then invite people to come and contribute money. To this campaign for whatever it might be, and often it's

in return for promised deliverables should the campaign fund. Campaigns are an all or nothing affair on Kickstarter, so if the campaign funds, Kickstarter takes that percentage of the overall campaign and the rest goes to the creator. If it does not fund, then people are not charged for their pledges. Ideally, the creator would use the money generated from their Kickstarter campaign to complete his or her project and then send

the deliverables to the appropriate backers. That's not always how it works, unfortunately, and there's no shortage of Kickstarter camp aims that funded successfully but failed to deliver a product. Now, someday I'm gonna have to do a roundup of some of the more notable failures in the tech sector on the Kickstarter, whether they were true failures or hoaxes, because I've backed a couple of them and I'm still a little salty about it. On a similar note, there's Patreon,

and that's another way creators can fund their work. This is an ongoing means of funding work, as opposed to an all or nothing campaign. It involves rewarding backers or patrons with various rewards backers select an amount of money they wish to contribute every month to the creator, and creators can make tears of rewards for different levels of monthly contributions. So you could say, for a dollar a month, you will get access to this exclusive content that no

one else has access to. For five dollars a month, I will make content for you for ten dollars, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And Patreon is used by people who continue to make something typically, so it ten to be ongoing projects as opposed to a one and done affair. So it might be a podcast, it might be artwork, it might be a cosplay, it might be photography, it could be any

sort of creative endeavor. Really. In January two thousand nine, Maker Bought launched uh Bray Pettis, Zach Hoken, Smith, and Adam Meyer were the co founders a Maker Bought back in New York City, and it was a company aimed

at bringing three D desktop printing to consumers. So three D printers had been around for a bit already, and additive manufacturing had proved its usefulness in the industrial world several times over, but very few folks in the consumer world had very much experience or even knowledge of three D printers. Back in two thousand nine, Maker Bought founders wanted to change that. In two thousand thirteen, Stratusists Incorporated acquired Maker Bought in a stock deal worth six hundred

four million dollars, another princely sum. So wow. Now, in recent years, the company has had to weather some pretty difficult times, including layoffs, the departure of the founders of the company, and backlash from the maker community that had loyally supported this company in its earlier years. And I'll have to do a full episode on maker Bot someday. In Spiro was under development and it was first shown off at ce S two thousand eleven. I was actually there that year. I got to see it, even got

to drive one of the little things. It was pretty cool. The original Sphiro ball robot is ball shaped, has some electronics inside it, including a little motor that allows the ball to roll around in a controlled way, and you would send commands to Spiro through an app on a smartphone.

It would turn your smartphone into a controller. Spiro's designs got the attention of Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, who saw the potential to do a licensing deal in which Spiro would make a remote controlled version of a little robot that would feature in an upcoming Star Wars movie. And that robot was, of course b B eight, and the spher O b B eight is absolutely adorable. UM, two of us here at the office, at least two of us have one of those. Holly Fry would be

one and I'm the other. The Verge and Polygon are both younger than tech Stuff. These are two related websites. They are owned by a company called Vox Media, and The Verge covers tech news and Polygon covers video game

industry and pop culture news. Joshua Topolski was the founding editor in chief of The Verge, a job these days held by Kneeli nil Patel, who uh is a really fascinating person to Topolsky left his previous position as editor in chief of Engadget after Engadget's parent company A O L released a document that stressed profitability metrics over other concerns, and he just felt that the integrity of reporting under A O L was in dire jeopardy, so he and

several of his former Engadget coworkers left to go try and do something else, and ultimately they founded The Verge, which launched in November two thousand eleven. Polygon grew out of the Verge and launched in October two thousand twelve with a primary focus on video games, though in recent years the site has expanded to cover lots of areas of pop culture. And two other companies that are actually younger than tech Stuff are Uber and Lift. Both of

these car hailing services launched after tech Stuff did. Uber launched in two thousand nine, Lift in two thousand twelve. Then I've covered Uber and tech Stuff, but haven't done the same for Lift yet. But these car hailing services, which sometimes are referred to as ride sharing services, but longtime listeners know I have a problem with that particular way of describing them. They have been incredibly disruptive businesses.

They also both have a reputation for not being too terribly concerned with playing by the rule book, with Uber in particular gaining a reputation for a somewhat cavalier business practice attitude, not to mention a corporate culture that until

recently sounded pretty toxic. And then we have one last one I want to talk about before we go to break and that is Soilent, which really isn't a tech company, but a lot of folks in the text here kind of glammed onto it when it launched in two thousand thirteen.

It was originally sold as a powder, and now you can find in a few different forms, including liquid bottled forms, and it's a meal replacement product and cleverly called named after the fictional soilent that appears in a short story, but is mostly known from its appearance in the movie Soiling Green, where we find out it's made from people. Soiling Green is, anyway the other versions of soilent, we're not, but I think most people think of Soilent as it's

made of people. The company has backed off the messaging that you could have soilent for every single meal of the day and get rid of quote unquote real food and still maintain a healthy lifestyle. They kind of retreated on that a little bit, but it's supposed to contain everything you need to keep bond trucking, and the fact was it was it is a very convenient and fast way to get some calories and maintain the basic nutrients

you need. And people who are working ridiculous hours in tech companies started using the stuff like crazy because it was convenient. As for me, in August of decided to experiment by only having Soilent for breakfast and lunch for a month, and it was the beginning of my weight loss journey. And while I no longer regularly drink Soilent, I do still have the occasional bottle when I need

something convenient and fast. Now that's all these companies and services that have launched since tech Stuff, and of course there are tons more. I just grabbed a selection that I thought were interesting. We're gonna go into a break, and when we come back, I'm going to talk a little bit about some companies that launched after tech Stuff but aren't around anymore. But first let's take a quick

break to thank our sponsor. Okay, so let's talk about some stuff that launched after tech Stuff and now don't exist no more. Go boom. First, we're gonna start with Vine, and I have to do a full episode on Vine at some point because that story is also really interesting. But in short, the summarized cliffs Notes version. I don't even know if cliffs Notes still exist. A Cliff's Notes

still exist. It used to summarize stuff anyway. Vine was created in two thousand twelve by russ yusup of Dom Hoffman and Colin Kroll, and the apps started out as a program that would let people cut videos together using a mobile device, so you could edit together a video, and it wasn't terribly stable, and it had no time limit attached to the videos. You can make very long videos, but that meant the videos were very difficult to share because the file sizes were so large, it was difficult

to send it to someone else to watch. That's when the co founders figured that if they created a time limit, if they made sure that the videos could only be a few seconds long, they could make it a share double experience because the file sizes would not be too large to send over cellular networks or WiFi. Sort of the video version of what Twitter was, where you could record short social videos for your friends. And Twitter loved that idea. They presented it to Twitter and Twitter said,

this is a great idea. We like it a lot, and they purchased Vine, reportedly for around thirty million dollars. And Vine had not yet launched yet, and just as Twitter had started out as one thing in the minds

of its creators and then turned into something else. If you're familiar with the story of Twitter, you know that they originally were thinking about a service where you could send out a text message to a group of friends, and that was really the only use case they were thinking of with Twitter was just I'm gonna go do something. I wanna let my friends know what I'm about to do, so I'm gonna blast us them all with this Twitter message.

It turned out the Twitter turned into something much different where you had celebrities, news outlets, brands, all these different entities that were blasting out information to the general public and creating a new means of communication. It was not that was not Twitter's mission at the beginning. The same thing was true for Vine. They wanted to create a way for people to make very short, socially UH focused

videos that could be easily shared. But people began to take that six second limitation as a challenge to create interesting, super short form video stories. But Vine didn't stick around UH. Instagram and Snapchat both took a lot of wind from vines sales. Instagram did it by creating longer form videos and by longer formament that at first they were fifteen seconds long than they ended up being a bit longer.

Snapchat did it by making it easy to share videos with friends that would later those videos would disappear, and it would keep it very social and timely, And so Twitter chose to shut down Vine in two thousand and sixteen. It is no longer a thing. Although you can still watch previously created Vine videos, you can't make new ones because the service doesn't exist anymore. Or how about cool cool as in c U I L I remember doing an episode about this way back in the day. In fact,

before it launched. Cool launched in July two thousand eight, just a month after tech Stuff went live. Maybe it was shortly after Cool launched when we did our episode, but Cool was the search engine that claimed to have the largest number of indexed web pages among all search engines. So, in other words, they said, hey, if you want to find the information on any topic, trust us. We're gonna have it because we've indexed more pages than anybody else.

And it would present search results with longer entries about those specific results, as opposed to maybe the sentence or two you might get from Google. You would get longer ones, and also you would get thumbnail pictures of various sites that were supposed to be relevant to whatever the search results were. But things were rocky for cool from the start.

One month after it launched, the head of the technology department, essentially the person in charge of the search technology, quit the company after getting into disagreements with the CEO about the company's direction. It made a bit of a splash when it debuted, but it didn't gain momentum and by the fall of that year. By the fall of two thousand eight, and had already dropped to nearly no traffic at all, the amount of traffic going to cool Head

gone to a tiny, little trickle. The company continued along until September and then cool unceremoniously shut down, laid off all the employees who were told there would be no more checks, they would not be getting paid for their last few days of work, and the servers all went offline. This despite the company raising more than thirty million dollars

in venture capital over the course of its existence. Also, it gained a reputation for irrelevant search results, sometimes presenting very inappropriate images in response to search results, and other major problems. And like I said, did an episode on cool back when it launched, but maybe a full story could be an order. I might. I might revisit it because it is again another interesting study in how tech can go wrong. Next, I want to talk about Pebble,

and this one hurts. I was a fan of the idea of Pebble all the way back to when the Kickstarter campaign launched in the spring of The campaign was a wild success and it raised more than ten million dollars. It made it the most successful Kickstarter campaign up to that point, and unlike lots of other tech crowdfunding campaigns,

Pebble actually shipped their promised watches starting in January. So, in case you aren't familiar with it, Pebble is sort of a semi smart watch with a connect via Bluetooth to a smartphone and you could get notifications on it. You could run certain apps on it, you could change the face on it. It had a very ultra low power l c D screen that was monochromatic, so it had a really good battery life. It was water proof

or at least water resistant. Um it was neat. It would vibrate whenever you would get a notification, so you could actually read things like Twitter messages or emails on your watch, and uh it was. It was a kind of a low cost smart watch. But Pebble wasn't able to make a profit, and in sixteen the company had to file for insolvency. Fitbit ended up acquiring most of Pebble,

though not the actual hardware. Fitbit got the software and the assets, meaning the programmers and developers Pebble as a company closed shop at the end of Another piece of hardware that doesn't exist anymore is uh Yeah oh u y a launched in This was originally a micro console running on the Android operating system, a gaming micro console,

that is. It was crowdfunded and reached its goal in just eight hours on Kickstarter, and finished the campaign more than above its goal, with a final tally of more than eight and a half million dollars. The games on the console were largely in that casual gaming category, and it could run a few other apps in addition to running games, but sales of the uh Yeah didn't do

very well outside the initial crowdfunding campaign. Reviews of prototype builds were mixed or some of them were mildly negative, but those reviews improved significantly once the retail version of the Uyah was ready to ship for customers. They said, oh well, yeah, paid attention. They listened to the problems we had with this and they addressed it, and the

new build is much better. Even so, it never really cut on in the marketplace, and Uyah accrued debt, it could not pay, it could not renegotiate, and eventually it was forced to sell off its assets to Razor Incorporated. The hardware was discontinued and Razor put the employees of Uya and the software assets to use elsewhere under its own umbrella, and Uya was no more. Now we have more to say about these companies and services in just a moment, but before we get to that, let's take

a quick break to thank our sponsor. Now, just before the ad break, I talked about Ouyah. Now let's talk about on Live, which was first discussed at the two thousand nine Game Developers Conference. Users would buy hardware that would allow them to access games online, and they would pay a monthly service fee for the opportunity to play

numerous games from an on line library. So instead of buying a game, you would pay this monthly fee and you would have access to a library of games and it would stream to your machine, then you could play in the cloud. This is very similar to what was pitched as the Phantom console back in the day, except this one really had intent behind it. People were really determined to make a working service and a working product.

After a few months of its launch, the company announced it would move to a free service model, but you would have to pay to access specific games, so you no longer have to pay a monthly subscription fee to access it, but you would have to pay money to either rent a game, meaning you would have access to that game for a given amount of time, or I believe you could actually quote unquote purchase a game, which just meant that you could access that game whenever you

wanted from that point forward. But in August two thousand twelve, the company laid everybody off. Everyone got hired, The company sold all its assets off, and then formed a new on Live company. So essentially it was like a do over. It was a control alt, reset, control delete, where you you you say, well, we had this company, We're getting rid of everybody. We're dissolving the company. We're forming the new company and the Louder Partners l A U D E R. We're the new owner of on Live. That

company continued on until two thousand fifteen. Then Sony Entertainment swept in and bought up most of the company's assets and online service shut down in April, so not a big success. And I remember talking about on Live back in the day with Chris Billett two where we were both kind of skeptical about the prospects of a cloud based video game company at that time. These days, I would actually think it'd be not that difficult to do, and in fact, Microsoft is doing this over on Xbox.

You can pay to be part of a Microsoft service where at least the Microsoft games, you can have access to those month to month as long as your service subscription is active, so it does still kind of exist, although you are downloading at least part of those games to your Xbox console, so it's not exactly the same thing, but we're seeing some similar business practices that are in

place today. Next, I'll chat about yik Yak. This one hits a little close to home because I once had to um to uh moderate a panel with the yik yak founders. That would be Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington and yes those are their actual names, and that service

launched in twenty thirteen here in Atlanta. It was a location based anonymous messaging service, So you would log into yik yak and you could read messages written by other people that uh are in the same general location that you were in same general region of your city or town. So um as you moved around the city, the messages you could read would change because it was all proximity based. So if you happen to be near a college campus, you could read the messages from that college campus because

you were close enough to it. But as you moved across to the other parts of the city, you would see messages from other areas. Users could post about just about anything, and again, because it was anonymous, at least at first, you didn't really have a lot of accountability there, and that caused a lot of issues. It got a lot of criticism from people who said the platform enabled

harassment and bullying. Yek yek used geo fencing techniques to create blackout zones around places like middle schools and high schools, So if you were an administrator of a high school, you could use that to black it out the service around your high school so that students wouldn't be able

to use it while they were on campus. UH there were a lot of issues with with students using this um while in school and causing issue use, and critics pointed at instances of mean spirited pranks, destructive gossip, and hate speech on the platform. K attempted to respond to these issues in a few different ways, including creating mandated handles so you no longer could be completely anonymous, but saw its user numbers decline and eventually the company shut

down the service in the spring of tween. Then there's r d O or r d i O, the online music streaming service that one launched in twenty ten, very similar to other streaming services like Spotify or in some cases like Pandora. There were two main tiers of r d O service. There was a free tier that was AD supported, so you could listen to music and occasionally

an AD would be inserted in between songs. And then there was a subscription add free tier that you could uh subscribe to and so you'd pay a monthly fee and you'd be able to listen to music without ads. But the service failed to survive in a very crowded space and eventually had to file for Chapter eleven bankruptcy and so selling off some of its assets to its former rival Pandora as a result. Then let's talk about Juice a Row. Juice a Row is one of those

things that kind of makes me scratch my head. Sometimes venture capitalists irritate the heck out of me, and that's the case with juicer Row. It was a WiFi enabled

juicer that relied on a subscription service. You would subscribe and receive single serving packets that had cut up fruits or vegetables or both, and you would put this packet inside the juicer, which would squeeze the packet and produce a fresh glass of juice for you, which all in itself doesn't sound that bad, but there are other issues.

So the company received more than a hundred million dollars in venture capital funding I think a hundred and twenty millions since it's founding, but in the company said it would suspend sale of the juicer and repurchase juicers that had been sold to customers up to that point while looking for a buyer for the company. The juice packets all had QR codes on them, and you were supposed to scan your juice packet QR code before you pressed it, and the company said this was to make sure that

you never were getting juice from expired products. You would scan it and the juicer would say, oh, well that was put in that packet just three days ago, so it's still good. You should be able to use it. Or no, that's a month old. It's bad. They'll make you sick. Don't use it. That was what they were saying it was for, but other people said, no, this

is really a method of digital rights management. In other words, it was a way to prevent you from using your juice a row from pressing any other juice packets made by anyone else. So it's kind of like the idea of a Curig, the Curig coffee makers that use those single canisters to make a a single cup of coffee. Other manufacturers started making canisters that could work with Curiggs, and then Curig wanted to change its design so that only its packets would work in its machines, and other

people said, well, you can't do that. That's you know, it's anti competitive and it's a type of DRM that I'm not comfortable with. People were making the same claims about Juicer Row, although the company denied that was the purpose, and Bloomberg published a pretty damning report in two thousand seventeen that said, you can get the same result as the Juice Row if you just took the packet that that would come when you subscribed and just squeezed the

packet by hand and squeezed it into a glass. Uh. A venture capitalist named Ben Einstein took a Juicer row and dismantled it and said it was incredibly sophisticated. In fact, it was too sophisticated. He said, there was way too complicated, unnecessarily complicated, and that jacked up the price of the juicer but did not provide additional value. And this was backed up by other reviewers of the same product. So yeah, not not the best showing of a brand new product.

And also one of those where people said, why does this need to be a smart such and such? Right, why does it need to be a smart juicer? And people point at this and say, yeah, this is not a valid argument. I don't know that we need such a thing. The last example I want to give about a company that launched after tech stuff and no longer

exists is Cloud. Now. Cloud was an app, an extension really that was meant to measure a person's social influence or their reach using a cloud score, and a cloud score would link to many different social networks, primarily Twitter, but you could also link into stuff like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, ETCETERA. Cloud launched in two thousand and eight after tech stuff was live, and cloud scores were but mean one and one hundred. The higher your score, the more effect of

your social reach was said to be. I was always in the eighties, by the way, uh the average I think was somewhere in the thirties. But for a while, companies would offer perks to cloud members who had scores above a particular threshold, with the idea that the receiver of the perk would talk up his or her experience using the service. I heard about people who got like

crazy deals on hotel rooms things like that. And the whole expectation there was the provider of the service or the product would get a benefit from the person with a very high cloud score saying, Hey, this company is the bomb dignity. You gotta go and buy their stuff because it's amazing, And it would be like a marketing campaign. And when you think about it, marketing campaigns get very expensive.

But if you can get effective word of mouth from somebody who's very influential, and it just cost you the price of a product that you're already selling. That's a pretty efficient marketing campaign. So that was going on for

a while. Eventually Cloud would get rid of the perks program because it received a lot of criticism and uh, there was questions about how effective the perks were that came from both users of Clout and from the providers themselves, and critics said that Cloud was kind of a social evil, that it was leveraging social status anxiety and it promoted bad online etiquette because people were just trying to find fast ways to jack that Cloud score up higher and higher.

And eventually the service would end officially on May twenty, two thousand and eighteen, so just uh, a short while before this podcast was recorded. So Clout is no more as of like a couple of weeks ago. And like I said, this is just a sample of some of the services and companies that have launched since tech stuff became a thing. It's funny to think that my show is older than a lot of these famous companies and services are and outlasted some of them. That's pretty amazing

to me. And Also, it's amazing to me that you guys have been supporting this show, and I love that. It's I deeply appreciate all you listeners out there, the ones who write to me, the ones who just listened to my show and look forward to the next one. All of you guys have been incredible, and thank you for supporting the show and for letting me do something I love to do, which is I love to learn and then I love to talk about the stuff that I've learned, and you guys have made that possible. So

thank you so much. Thank you for ten years of tech Stuff. I can't wait for the next ten. I'll be talking about robots, possibly two robots. I look forward to my robotic listeners. Anyway, for you humans out there, if you have any suggestions for future episodes of Tech Stuff, why not send me a message. It can be about a technology, a company, a person in tech. It could be a suggestion for someone I should interview or have on as a guest host. I look forward to hearing

from you guys. The email address you can use is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter to handle it. Both of those is tech Stuff hs W. And finally, make sure you follow us on Instagram. It is a great way to get a behind the scenes look at what's going on at tech Stuff. And uh, I really look forward to doing tons more episodes for you guys, and I'll talk to you again really soon

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