I’m honestly surprised they made 10,000 sales.
Every web outlet and influencer with more than 1000 followers bought one. But that’s all they’re ever going to sell.
Isn’t it ironic that most likely, all their sales were used to make videos roasting their shitty product?
No one wants badly executed overheating slow Google assistant in a pointless little box. You already have a superior assistant in your pocket, reacting to your voice.
And bluetooth pins that allow you to talk to the AI in your pocket already exist. That’s without that projector screen thing but still.
Sure sure, but this one is very close to your skin and vital organs and could burn you or just plain explode, so how about it?
ask for 1B valuation with only ~7M in sales + ~240k/mo subscription revenue… hmmmm gonna be a no for me Dogg
The entire company was a pump and dump scheme. They’re gonna continue the pump until dump or bankruptcy.
Don’t forget about the dangerous batteries and looming recall (due to court action I’m sure)! They’ll soon have ZERO customers, in a way.
I’m sure there’s some MBA douche stupid enough to buy it.
I could see Apple buying it. The form factor makes sense, it’s the fact that it relies on AI and has its own cell connection are the main issues. If I could tap it and have Siri take dictation or take a picture of something to get more information it would be pretty neat.
I don’t need any hardware that does something my phone already does.
I don’t understand this reverse consolidation these companies think people want.
Does it though? Having it pull down your shirt, having to rely on projecting a GUI on your hand, and being unable to hear it in loud environments all seem like pretty strong limitations of the form factor
I’d drop the projector interface, as cool as it is, since you have a phone for that. Maybe make it a pendant as well as a pin.
Apple’s got a lot of experience with using tiny speakers in loud places, so I bet they could figure out something maybe using directional microphones. Plus, again, you’ve got the phone so you can use the headphones.
“MKBHD takes out another company” /s
I don’t see how the AI assistant won’t eventually just end up on the smartphone. And, given that it’s not always appropriate to talk out loud to your phone, being able to use it with a screen makes it the perfect device for it.
That’s why they made it a pin.
Sure you can sell an app on the App Store, but most people won’t pay more than 5 bucks for an app, and even that’s stretching it. And the subscription market is already over saturated. So how do you make a boatload of cash? Sell overpriced hardware that needs to be “upgraded” every year or 2 to use new features, and include a subscription to use the thing in the first place.
They wanted to pull an Apple and lock people into their hardware ecosystem. I guarantee there was a plan for them to release an AI phone in the next 5 years if this thing did well.
What they missed is Apple products are generally pleasant to use on a daily basis. From what everyone said, this thing was hot garbage and slow to respond to queries.
Yeah, that’s all correct, but sometimes you just have to admit that the idea in that form is not good and don’t make a product out of it…
As someone who doesn’t wear a watch, having a little fob that I could use to activate Siri without digging my phone out of my pocket would be pretty nice. If it were a phone peripheral it probably would have been a lot better.
The ear bud/voice interface we see in the movie Her looks nice too TBH.
If we ever get LLMs or whatever we call AI next that is able to understand us that well and perform complex actions for us, I could see that working great.
How do you actually get the oil from the snake though?
Turn them into bovine fodder, then get the oil from the bullshit.
I’m also be seeking for a 1 billion payout
At least my product is working as intended
Inevitably. That’s the goal of most tech startups; hype themselves up and sell out for as many millions as possible. Meanwhile honest labor, education, and trades workers can’t afford houses.
Huh - so it turns out people liked how smartphones consolidated all their various devices into one?
I guess the era of the hardware app is over…
HP is reportedly one of the companies that Humane was in talks with over a potential sale
They didn’t learn the lesson with webos? They lost billions even if that was a good os with good phones.
Can’t imagine anyone wanting to buy this company for more than 1million and that’s just because of patents and devs (acquihire - where the buyer is only interested in ip and devs and doesn’t care at all about the actual product)
What an insane valuation, lol. I wonder how gullible their seeders/initial investors were when they pitched the company initially. Needing to get that much money to settle bills and debts just blows my mind. Shit like this is why I sold my AMD shares at its peak a few months ago and why it’s probably worth considering selling Nvidia now as it’s peaking. The AI boom may peak a bit higher, but I think the frenzy is going to begin waning within the next ~6 months as more and more investors realize the tech is still very limited outside of backend enterprise use (e.g. using LLMs to ingest all your SOPs, regulations, technical documents, etc. and then make it available for employees to query for random work questions).
But who knows, I’ve been wrong before.
Tell me it’s being bought by a data mining company?
Ed Zitron is going to have a field day with this one.
Humane as a company is worth the cost of exactly 10,000 units.
