A languishing startup with a great product - thoughts?
jerf: I see two basic possibilities: One, it ran out of money before it could launch, or two, it doesn't actually work.I would put relative probabilities of those two as somewhere around 1:9.I look at this thing as an engineer and I see a signal processing problem that means it's probably pretty easy to build something that's right about 70% of the time, and with great effort you could get to 85%... but that's terrible for an input device. Maybe I'm wrong. But I also know for a fact I've encountered tons of people who have faced other problems like this, and in their boundless optimism are sure that the last few percent are just a matter of trying harder, and some of them go on to blow millions on "trying harder" on what is fundamentally impossible. The truth is, electronics really don't care how optimistic you are.Most of the 'first class' ideas you think are being overlooked are actually the second case. 3D interfaces, a whole whackload of input devices (including the fun case of exotic video game console interfaces), energy sources, new circuit types that are going to blow silicon out of the water, and the list just goes on and on. Most of them just plain don't work like the advocates said they would.Some of the advocates are honestly wrong. Some... are not.Just about the only thing that factors in this thing's favor is that exotic input interfaces have historically faced a very steep uphill battle. Dvorak and other alternate keyboard layouts have gotten very little traction, and that involves no extra hardware at all. I've used a couple of exotic input devices or methods that work perfectly fine but stand no chance of general acceptance because people have no interest in learning how to use them.(I would point out that I've left open the possibility that it does work. But I'd want to see a lot of evidence not coming directly from the company. Everybody always claims awesomeness.)