Tuesday, May 22nd 2018
3D Headphone Startup Shut Its Doors After Raising $3.2 Million in Crowdfunding
In the business world, companies fail all the time, and startups are no exception either. Ossic is the latest startup to make the headlines after announcing over the weekend that the company is shutting its door. The audio startup had successfully raised $3.2 million through Indiegogo and Kickstarter campaigns to produce their high-end "3D sound" Ossic X headphones. The headphones, which costed between $199 to $299, incorporated special head-tracking technology to deliver surround sound in VR environments. Apparently, they were also capable of determining the shape of the user's ears and customize the sound profile to match the user.
Ossic had received over 22,000 pre-orders over the company's life. Unfortunately, the company only managed to produce 250 pairs of their Ossic X headphones and delivered around a dozen of them to Kickstarters. As the well has run dry, Ossic has no other alternative but to cease operations. Kickstarter backers are extremely angry - and with right as they will not receive their headphones or refunds. A Facebook group with over 2,500 members threaten to pursue a class action lawsuit against the company.
Source:
TechCrunch
Ossic had received over 22,000 pre-orders over the company's life. Unfortunately, the company only managed to produce 250 pairs of their Ossic X headphones and delivered around a dozen of them to Kickstarters. As the well has run dry, Ossic has no other alternative but to cease operations. Kickstarter backers are extremely angry - and with right as they will not receive their headphones or refunds. A Facebook group with over 2,500 members threaten to pursue a class action lawsuit against the company.
58 Comments on 3D Headphone Startup Shut Its Doors After Raising $3.2 Million in Crowdfunding
Maybe they should have ditched the incredibly powerful option , might have been more affordable then.
The company that owned the school dissolved and the bank took ownership of any accounts/financial stuff. The bank froze the accounts and held on to whatever money was in there.
With the company dissolved, there was no one to sue to get our money back. Teachers were SOL for a month of work and got no pay and students were SOL that they were out thousands for tuition with no way of getting any of it back to repay the loans that just sent payments out on for the tuition (literally two days prior to the school closing). The bank wouldn't renege on the payments received and return them to the loan companies to offset a large chunk of tuition fees that students now owed. There is a class action lawsuit out against the whole thing, but it's just in limbo since the company is dissolved.
If the company here dissolves, there will be nothing for the angry people to do but keep bitching. They won't have anyone or any company to sue. The people have every right to be pissed about the direction and actions taken, but they should just chalk it up to a lesson learned and go about their lives. Even if they can get a class action lawsuit to stick, they'll see very little in return and it may take years to resolve.
Crowdfunding is simply a horrible idea , you give people who potentially have no idea as to what they are doing the chance to start projects way out of their reach and potentially rise insane amounts of cash in the process because what the hell do the backers know about any of this anyway ?
I wonder how many of these "entrepreneurs" took business loans or tried their chance with venture capitalists? Probably a small percentage because by then most of the dumb shit they are trying to make would get filtered out. That's the thing , crowdfunding has no filter and it's too exposed to scammers , beggars and most importantly , people how haven't got a clue as to what it takes to manage a project like this. In my opinion they don't really have a right to be pissed at all , they literally threw their money at some unknown entity bound by little obligation to even do anything at all. What kind of right to be pissed does that give you ?
However, I think their idea here was pretty solid, if too expensive to be feasible.
By providing head tracking, you could control the spacial sound direction with your head, as opposed to with the mouse in a first person shooter, for example. The application would be severely limited, mostly to people with multiple monitor setups, or ultawide displays... Currently, if you have an ultrawide display, and you turn your head to look at something in your peripheral without turning your character ingame, you're still going to hear spatial audio from the point of view of your character, even though your character isn't "looking" in the same direction you are. Head tracking would allow that extremely small detail to allow for turning of your head, and track sound accordingly. And without some pretty powerful onboard processing, it would require each game to explicitly support it. Adding onboard processing would allow it to be game/system agnostic, while also allowing spatial sound on systems/games that didn't support it to begin with, like mobile.
All that being said... The application is SUPER niche, as I said above... It's no wonder it failed, as business-wise, it's a terrible work/reward ratio. But that doesn't change the fact that the applicable scenario isn't a real one. So for those who understood the real implications, and the real application scenarios, I wouldn't deem those people as idiots.
If one just looked at the market speak and said "OMG 3D audio, I need that" .... Yea, idiots.
2: Why aren't the like of kickstarter and indiegogo taking a more active role in overseeing these start ups they originally wanted 100K they got that which means they should have been able to deliver 333 pairs of headphones they didn't even do that many this is where KickStarter or Indiegogo should have stepped in and said whats going on fella's
3: People tend to over donate and then get all pissy when it turns tho shit point being don't donate more than you're willing to loose
www.businessinsider.com/new-sennheiser-orpheus-headphones-cost-about-55000-2015-11
and yet nowhere near the most expensive