My former TechCrunch colleague Nik Cubrilovic has been on a roll lately.
He noticed, for example, how Apple is telling users to drive off a bridge.
His most recent tweet –
And sure enough, the project was cancelled due to lack of funding.
Cubrilovic tells me he bookmarked the original post on BoingBoing by author Glenn Fleishman and has checked in on it occasionally.
“I bookmarked it thinking if this fails, it is going to be hilarious,” he says.
And so it is.
Apologies to Fleishman and BoingBoing for pointing out the irony in this (and I remind myself of the Man In The Arena and that hey, at least he tried). But I think I’d even have to make fun of myself if this happened to me.
Uncrunched 
What’s even stupider is he cancelled it EARLY (rather than letting it fail to fund on its own), so obviously he doesn’t know how Kickstarter works. He still had a (very small) chance!
This is hilarious.
I think folks that are neither deeply technical nor artistic (biz folks, marketing folks, etc.) always risk falling into the equivalent of the robotics “uncanny valley” and face a strong rejection from the public whenever the cynicism with which they approach manipulating core beliefs, passions, and desire for knowledge from the “public” becomes too transparent.
As a techie (MSEE, CTO in Silicon Valley) and passionate about the arts (used to do tons of oil and acrylic painting since a very young age), I can’t but secretly enjoy whenever something like this happens… It is a feeling that some level of justice/retribution occurred .. that mercurial interests ran amok but couldn’t overcome the more pure passion for real knowledge of the tech folks and the search for meaning and beauty artistic folks, that doesn’t involve money or fame…
Ok
wut
1/10, made me reply
Well, then on to “The Manual”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manual
Auto-replace “single” with “app”. Auto-replace “musical” with “coding”.
Are you going to keep championing this guy that abandoned all the users of Omnidrive? I get that you have a conflict of interest, but Nik Cubrilovic simply disowned that company and all of its users – they never even left a closing down statement and simply disappeared into thin air. All of the user files they had allegedly being keeping safe just went up in smoke. No export options, nothing.
Sure, you should never trust a new startup with your files, but a lot of users who don’t know any better did. As a company you have a responsibility to your users. You can’t just disappear one day when you are in the business of keeping things steady and secure.
The Arrington that cheers on relentless entrepreneurs and doesn’t stand for any corporate BS wouldn’t stand for this kind of behavior, so why do you keep quiet when it comes to this guy? Will you break your silence?
Omnidrive was an application that kept a local copy of all your files. I know because I used it. When it shut down it simply stopped syncing.
Did you lose any files? I really doubt it.
Omnidrive aren’t the first or last startup to run out of money and shutdown – the failure rate must be around 90%. I don’t know why you would have a particular issue with this case, which happen 5+ years ago, IIRC. Sounds more like a grudge.
Reblogged this on kokeblogs's Blog and commented:
Oh, the irony 🙂
Two concerns – 1) are you losing your audience here uncrunched? Only 3 comments. You actually probably don’t mind that. 2) we should all be able to laugh at ourselves while still taking chances/risks.
ok so now technology is happening so fast that i don’t even know what i missed
with or without Kickstarter, it’s not so easy to succeed in a crowdfunding campaign, without have an HUGE press coverage on IT blogs like TechCrunch… 😦
35K$ for writing a book about things he just might want to share, it’s kinda expensive.
Well, it was $35000 clearly because he needed plenty of time to do the research 🙂