Two Changes To Quirky Could Change The World 103
You've probably read about Quirky in one of many articles that read like valentines to the company and the concept. I do think the vision is brilliant — regular people who have smart ideas, but no experience with patents or marketing, partner with an invention company that manufacturers the product and splits the profits with them. But the hype seems oddly out of proportion to what Quirky actually makes — if you received a catalog in the mail with pictures of these products, would you remember the catalog a week later?
OK, I know, the hype is based not on the products, but on the process — regular people getting a shot at inventor stardom. Certainly the fairy tale has come true for some of the community inventors (who, not surprisingly, are spotlighted by Quirky quite a bit). But if you look at the overall numbers, the "About Quirky" page claims a community of "399,000 inventors" and "325 products developed," a pair of statistics that may reveal more than they intended — and indeed the odds are even worse than that, since only 74 of those products are being sold in their store and making the inventors any money, and only about half of those have made the inventor $10,000 or more. (For reasons explained here, some products selected by Quirky never actually get manufactured.) If you're tempted to think that it's a meritocracy and those 74 products really are the best ones anyone has ever submitted -- do you really think the Glide knife cleaner (12 units sold so far) is more useful than the nearly 400,000 other ideas people have sent in?
So if the products themselves are not changing the world, and from the "community inventor's" point of view it's a lottery that most of them have no chance of winning, then what is the big deal about Quirky?
Not surprisingly, there is an undercurrent of frustration that keeps bubbling to the surface on the Quirky message boards — frustration with the high odds against winning, and the lack of transparency about what products do make it. But I think the frustration can be traced back to two key problems with Quirky's process — both of which could be fixed (one of them quite easily), and which could take the arbitrariness and lack of transparency out of the selection process, and result in more inventions getting selected, all while making Quirky more money.
First, in the existing system, a user submitting a new idea probably doesn't realize that less than 1 in 1000 submissions goes on to be selected by Quirky as one of that week's "winners," and only about 1 in 10,000 ideas has ever gone on to make the inventor more than $10,000. On this page you can see a scrolling list of the most recent submissions; I wrote a script to poll that feed and count up the new submissions as they appeared, and the total averages about 1,500 per week. Of these, only two get selected by Quirky at their weekly staff meeting, and, as noted above, most of the selected winners do not end up in their store anyway.
Quirky also charges $10 for each idea submission, which comes to $15,000 per week, or about $150 per employee — hardly enough for each of them to live on, but not trivial. According to the text I copied from an old version of Quirky's FAQ: "We ask for $10 when submitting an idea for three simple reasons: to make sure you are serious about your submission, to be sure that you're an actual human, and most importantly: to assure that the quality of submissions remains high." Notably missing from that list was "To make Quirky some extra money." But from my experience when running a paid service that offered the first month at a reduced rate, asking for $1 and asking for $10 achieved about the same goal of filtering out the people who weren't serious.
Now, however, Quirky's FAQ answers that question by saying:
Well, you've got to ante up to give your idea the fair shot it deserves. Best case scenario? Your $10 investment takes your idea from a tiny sketch to a professionally manufactured product found on shelves worldwide, earning you a heckuva lot more. Worst case? That 10 bucks gets you extensive community feedback on who liked and didn't like your idea, which serves as focused consumer market research. You then have the option to resubmit your idea, or you can use the feedback you received to make it on your own.
That's not a trivial change, because that statement is actually wrong — the $10 doesn't "get you" any "community feedback". Which brings me to the next problem with Quirky's current system.
When I gave Quirky a test drive by submitting an idea for a standalone smartphone-battery recharger (something I wished for in my article about the usefulness of spare batteries), after I submitted the idea and my payment, I was left on a page without any information about what to do next. How, I wondered, was I supposed to get "votes" for my idea without spamming the message boards or other users? The FAQ didn't — and still doesn't — answer this question, odd for something that would be one of the first things on every submitter's mind. But it referred me to the forums, where I found a post by quirky user Matthew Fleming, whose invention was actually picked up by Quirky, summarizing advice from himself and other Quirky experts on how to get votes (and, presumably, how he himself did it):
"(1) Posting your idea is the designated Pimping Zone. [dead link]
(2) Getting your Facebook friends or Twitter followers to check out your idea.
(3) Promoting to all other people off site (including Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, Reddit, emailing, texting & calling your friends, finding relevant forums elsewhere online).
(4) Putting links to your idea in your profile, then being active in other areas of the site, such as helping other people's. People may check out your profile and look at your ideas.
(5) When adding a link to your submission in # 1 or 4, make sure your link is clickable typing in the html code (OR you can use this handy link generator to generate the HTML code to then paste directly into your post).
(6) Promote in other Quirky hangouts, like:
Quirky Inventors on Facebook
As Seen On Facebook [dead link]
Quirky Products on Facebook"
My heart sank like a rock when I read those words. Here I had really believed that — despite the considerable odds against any given submission making it into the production stage — Quirky at least had a system in place for identifying the best ones. But it turned out that those who had played the game successfully were basically admitting that the only way to win was to act as an unpaid Quirky promoter to your friends. And more to the point, it meant that the winners would not be the best inventions, but rather just the inventions that met the minimum requirement of not being embarrasingly stupid, whose inventors were the best at playing the promotion game.
So it is in fact misleading to say that the $10 entry fee "gets you" any community feedback. The only way to get community feedback is to try bringing up your idea in forum threads (which risks pissing people off if you violate some rules that are never clearly explained), to post it in designated areas where idea flooding is encouraged (which are clogged to the point of uselessness from everybody else doing the same thing), or to recruit new people under you in the Quirky pyramid.
I didn't do any of those things, so my idea got a grand total of 8 views and 3 votes, before expiring at the end of the 30-day vote-gathering window. Far from being surprised that I got so few views, on the contrary I don't even have any idea where those 8 views came from, since I didn't rope in any of my friends to sign up and vote for me.
If Quirky wants to essentially limit the winners to people who agree to promote Quirky to their friends, that's their right, but then they shouldn't claim that their system actually identifies the best new ideas, or even what "the community" thinks are the best new ideas.
Meanwhile, the products that do make it into production, seem to bear out the prediction above — they're good, but not great, and many of them look like they made it as a result of a combination of luck and playing the promotion game. The $13 "Pluck" egg yolk separator looks cool, but do you really need it when the grocery store sells an egg separator for $1.59? Well, I don't cook much, so maybe I'm more qualified to evaluate electronics accessories. I actually did just order one of Quirky's "Cordies" for holding cord extensions on your desktop (if it works out, I can let you know in a follow-up to my much-beloved article about low-tech hacks!), but there are gizmos on Amazon that do the same thing. The Pivot Power Strip also looks cool, but it seems simpler to me just to use power strip liberators, which are cheaper per-plug, can be divided across multiple rooms, and light up to show when the power is running.
And the truth is that of all the gadgets I saw in the Quirky store, there's nothing I would choose over having a portable charger for spare cell phone batteries. I may be biased, but what would you rather have — effectively unlimited phone battery life, or an egg yolk separator that happens to look like an egg?
What's frustrating about all of this is that there are two simple changes that Quirky could make to their selection system, which would immediately make the "promotion game" obsolete, and almost by definition would select the inventions that the greatest number of people would actually buy. The first change is the same basic system that I've advocated for reforming the White House "We The People" website, for halting cheating on news aggregator sites, for detecting abusive content on Facebook, and multiple other problems: random-sample voting. In other words, when you submit a new idea to Quirky, the idea would also be presented to, say, 20 other users selected at random. Each user votes on whether they would buy the product if it went into production. (Quirky could simply require that, as a condition of keeping your account active, you have to vote when they ask you to.) The ideas that get the most "yes" votes out of those 20 randomly selected users, are judged to be the most marketable. (Well, 20 is a small enough sample that some would get high ratings just as a statistical fluke, but an invention that cleared the first hurdle could then be sent to a voting panel of 100 users.)
Of course, users who have expertise in particular fields, could weigh in at any time to point out that an invention would be impractical, illegal, in violation of someone else's patent, or redundant given another product already on the market. But to answer the basic question of how many people would buy a product if it cleared all those other hurdles, asking a random sample of users is a rather more valid research method than "texting & calling your friends".
Unusually for one of my "random-sample-voting" lobbying efforts, someone has already made essentially the same point on the Quirky message boards — community inventor Clinton Fleenor wrote a post making essentially the same argument. I would quibble with him in a couple of points (there's no reason to bring in "a million+ impartial, non-submitting voters" per day, since a smaller sample size is good enough), but he got the key point exactly right:
"What happens if the system is distributing the submissions to voters one at a time instead of allowing voters to self-select?
Answer: No submissions are buried."
(Clinton's posts since that date have expressed an increasing disgust with the process, most recently calling Quirky "glaze-eyed lazy asses" — and this was from someone who actually won at their game. You can imagine how the people feel who don't win.)
In fact, you could even use the random sampling method to ask people not just whether they would buy a product, but to give them the option to pre-order it, Kickstarter-style, with the money to be returned if the product doesn't get enough pre-orders to justify production. Which leads to the second change that could revolutionize how Quirky works: Rather than picking two "winning" products every week, put every product into production that receives enough votes and/or pre-orders to indicate that it would be profitable.
For example, suppose you have an idea that can be made and sold for $10 per unit, but only if the product sells 10,000 units or more. Assume there are 100,000 Quirky users who can be polled to ask if they are potential buyers. Quirky takes your idea and presents it to 100 randomly selected users, and asks them to pre-order it for $10 if they're interested. If 20 of those 100 users do in fact pre-order, then Quirky presents the idea to all of their 100,000 product-buying user base. Assuming that the original sample of 100 was representative of the population of 100,000, then they would expect that 20,000 users would also pre-order. Now you've exceeded the minimum required order of 10,000 and the product can go into production. On the other hand, suppose only 5 people pre-order out of that sample of 100. Then Quirky could expect that out of their total population of 100,000, only about 5,000 would pre-order the product — not enough to justify production, so they never push the pre-order to the rest of their customers, and the original 5 who placed their pre-order would get their money back.
More realistically, suppose Quirky makes most of their sales through retail and not to their own users, but they also know that sales to their own users are a good predictor of retail sales — for example, that they sell 3 times as many of a product through retailers as they do to their own built-in user base. Then if a product has to sell 10,000 units to be profitable, they put it into production if they determine, via random sampling, that they would sell at least 2,500 units to their own users, and count on roughly 7,500 more orders from retail shoppers.
This system has several desirable features:
- If an idea doesn't appeal to a high enough percentage of the user base (as determined by asking the random sample that are asked to pre-order), then the vast majority of users never get bothered with the pre-order request, since it dies after not making it past the hurdle of the initial 100.
- On the other hand, if there are enough potential buyers among the user population, then barring any statistical flukes, the initial sample of 100 randomly selected users will reveal that. Thus almost all of the time, any idea that does get pushed to the entire user population, will get enough pre-orders at that point to go into production.
- The system can't be "gamed" by promotional shenanigans like "texting & calling your friends".
- It's scalable — any product that receives enough pre-orders to guarantee the desired profit, can go into production, no matter how many such products clear that threshold in any given week.
(If Quirky's patent lawyers are in danger of getting overwhelmed from all the ideas that clear the pre-order hurdle every week, the idea is still scalable for any invention where there's enough profit to pay for the lawyers. Suppose it takes $2,000 worth of lawyer-time to clear all the patents and other paperwork to market an invention. Then any invention that gets enough pre-orders to pay for the production cost, plus $2,000 for the lawyer, can still go to manufacturing. That process can be repeated as many times per week if you want, as long as there are lawyers who want the work.)
Kickstarter doesn't use random-sample-voting to identify the best ideas on their site, but they do use pre-orders to solve the scalability problem -- if enough people make a pre-order pledge on Kickstarter to meet the project's minimum funding requirements, the project goes ahead (and if the fundraising goal is not met, everyone who pledged gets their money back). Kickstarter doesn't pick "winners"; if you meet your funding requirement, you "win," and there's no limit on how many projects can be successfully funded in a given week. So I wasn't surprised to see that Kickstarter has funded over 39,000 projects successfully compared to Quirky's 326. (Yes, that's apples and oranges, since many Kickstarter projects are easier to complete than putting a Quirky invention into production — but still, given the buzz that both companies are receiving these days, would you have guessed that one of them has funded over 100 times more projects successfully than the other one?)
So those are my suggestions to Quirky: Use random-sample voting to get an initial reading for the merits of an idea (very easy), and then use Kickstarter-style pre-orders to secure funding for any marketable invention, not just a limited number of weekly "winners" (a much bigger overhaul, but a good long-term goal). If they appropriate my suggestions, I promise not to organize any protest demonstrations outside their headquarters demanding credit. In fact, given how unfair their current system is to the inventors ponying up $10 each to play their lottery, we should probably stage a protest outside their office if they don't take these ideas.
Re:Spam (Score:5, Insightful)
Dice employees too scared to post their own shill stories now?
If I wanted a shill story I sure as hell wouldn't get Bennett Haselton to write it. Half of Slashdot hates him, and most of the rest refuse to read his walls of text. And here, his main point in a nutshell (once you get through the rambling, which he does at great length) seems to be that Quirky is a Ponzi scheme that sells useless products. His proposed solution to them is "stop being a Ponzi scheme and start selling not-useless products."
Personally, and apparently like most of the other commenters here, I had never heard of Quirky before this. I'm certainly not going to go there now. Thanks, I guess, Mr. Haselton?
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If I wanted a shill story I sure as hell wouldn't get Bennett Haselton to write it. Half of Slashdot hates him, and most of the rest refuse to read his walls of text.
I read the first sentence and then stripped straight to the comments, mostly looking for the hate and the synopsis of what he was blathering on about.
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But it starts out like another advertisement.
Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
You've probably read about Quirky in one of many articles that read like valentines to the company and the concept.
Nope, never heard of it before today I read plenty of news.
Re:Nope (Score:4, Informative)
*and* I read plenty of news. D'oh!
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Ok, really. How is this perceptibly different than pump-and-dump spam?
Sigh. I wonder what reddit's doing right now. Even if they're railroading some innocent kid for the atrocity-of-the-day, it's gotta be better than this.
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ya, good call. meet ya there.
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Ok, really. How is this perceptibly different than pump-and-dump spam?
Sigh. I wonder what reddit's doing right now. Even if they're railroading some innocent kid for the atrocity-of-the-day, it's gotta be better than this.
Don't you mean especially if?
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I've heard of quirky, I follow it quite closely as part of following all sorts of CrowdFunding platforms. Quirky is similar enough to one to merit that. At the same time, it's different enough that there's just really not all that much interest in it. The idea behind the site is cool, but you can probably imagine how many completely dumb, previously patented, etc. ideas are thrown out there, get voted up because it seems cool, and then shot down for reasons people just do not understand.
I'm finding the s
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I dunno, I've been a member there for a while. I'm not making like huge amounts of money on it, but I've gotten some free stuff and I get a small amount of money from it.
Conceptually it's interesting, but I doubt there's much room for growth.Certainly not enough for it to support many competitors.
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I was amazed I had not heard of it - simply because it sounds so silly people would pay ten dollars to submit an idea to some guys that receive 1000+ ideas weekly and who would choose the things to sell you already developed to the extent that you could put on a kickstarter. and I guess the real problem is that anyone could come up with the idea for a baby translator but wouldn't be able to make it into reality. and flying cars with hookers&blackjack.
they're not stupid to ask the money, but the people s
WTF (Score:3)
Guess you don't need to read the article for this one, it's in the summary.
not bothering reading any of it. thanks though!
I might of checked out the site, but the super long summary made me think someone (looking at you timothy) is getting paid if I click on the link.
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That's more or less it. I have an account and I've bought a few things and they're reasonably nice. But a lot of it is junk, that would previously have been in The Sharper image at 10x the cost. I do love the cutting board and the laptop light I got from them, but most of the items appear to be crap.
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Dear mr. Haselton,
Posting as AC and talking about yourself in third person isn't fooling anybody.
Slashdot is not your personal blog, nor are it's readers your personal beta-testers.
Why should we put effort into reading your post if you put no effort into publishing it?
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The "summary" isn't a summary. It's a blog article written by Bennett Haselton who posts blog articles directly to Slashdot every once in a while because he likes Slashdot as a discussion forum and wants to hear what Slashdot's userbase has to say about his ideas.
And yet, I still don't care.
Nope Nope Nope (Score:1)
Nope. Never heard of them before. This is the first.
You failed to describe them in the first paragraph. You failed to describe them clearly in the second paragraph. Then you posted a massive wall of text that I will never read, as I am sure it is just as poorly written as the first two paragraphs.
So, I still have no idea what Quirky is. Nor do I have any interest in finding out what Quirky is. But, most of all, I have zero interest in reading this or any other article you should care to post.
kthnxby
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I've also never heard of it before. And I won't be hearing about it after it disappears like most of its dot.com brethen.
When I saw the headline, I thought for sure it was some kind of a hack or exploit that allowed a spammer to inject spam. Quirky Change the World? What the fuck lol
An egg separator? (Score:2)
If you cannot separate eggs using the shells, stop cooking at just go to McDonalds.
Re: (Score:2)
No, he's right. 8 year old me managed separating eggs first try. An adult who understands the process should have zero issue.
Remember, (Score:1)
we live in an age where mother fed her child pureed hamburgers.
Re: (Score:2)
Separating an egg using the shell is not terribly difficult but for the novice will be a bit of a challenge and using a vessel will make it easier.
A vessel... like, I dunno, an egg shell?
Re: How MacGyver separates the yolk (Score:2)
Separating an egg using the shell is not terribly difficult but for the novice will be a bit of a challenge and using a vessel will make it easier.
A vessel... like, I dunno, an egg shell?
Or, you could use something deceptively simple like a water bottle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AirVOuTN_M [youtube.com]
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If you cannot separate eggs using the shells, stop cooking at just go to McDonalds.
If you cannot separate eggs using the shells please never try to drive a car on a public highway, and most certainly never, ever have any children.
Slashdot is Quirky.com's new forums? (Score:4, Informative)
What the f*ck has happened to the moderators for post submissions? I could understand if there was something cool going on a quirky.com -- maybe a new product, or whatever. The summary has a single link to the front page -- I guess slashdot has become the new way to get free advertising -- and doesn't even mention what the hell "these two changes" are...
Seriously, if you want to send quirky.com your two grand ideas, use your own personal email. Or use their forums.
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Slashdot apparently pays the editors $22k a year and the editors don't actually seem to do any editing. I think that might describe the problem. Incompetence and apathy.
Personally, I come here for the trolling, but even that's going down hill. This current APK BS doesn't hold a candle to Dr. Bob and it's actually even less competent and thoughtful than all that "care and feeding of niggers" bullshit from some years back.
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Less shilling with paid articles plox (Score:1)
these advertising stories need to go away *fast*
Re:Timothy - the slashvertising twit (Score:5, Funny)
The first post from the APK spammer is actually more useful than the story itself.
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I come here for my daily dose of masochism. *shrug* Say what you want, it beats hitting your hand with a hammer a few times.
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The first post from the APK spammer is actually more useful than the story itself.
It's certainly made me reconsider my attitude to my HOSTS file.
Sounds like late night TV commercial w/the caveman (Score:3)
This sounds like the late night commercial that always used to run with the caveman. "Inventors! Call this number NOW..."
e.g., http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifPf1A6pBLE [youtube.com]
Hello inventors! New scam, same as the old scam! (Score:2)
I am nigerian prince with excess money to burn and no nuerons firring in my brainz. Please to give me your ideas and pay the small sum of 10 dollars americain in order to be part of the game. You shall receive feedback. Please to make way through the egress sign after giving me your money.
.
{ten-dollars-deposited-tone}
.
{dial-tone}... hello? hello....?? anyone there????
.
What, you fell for that "inventor's help-line" scam again? They used to have it by p.o. box, then by 800-numbers,
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Let me repeat: you can't make money off nothing but an idea. Give up already on this ridiculous "intellectual property" BS.
What about facebook? What about Google's search algorithm? I know they were turned into actual software, but they're still just ideas rather than physical objects.
Who? (Score:3)
Nope, first time in my life I ever heard that name.
Looking at their website, it seems similar to Kickstarter... So why would someone use Quirky instead of Kickstarter or Indiegogo?
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They accept bitcoins and use APK's host file?
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If they sell Arduino-powered 3D printers, I'm in!
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Unlikely. This would make this piece of "news" (I use the term loosely and akin to Fox News) actually /.-worthy. Almost at least.
And we sure as hell can't use that!
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Agreed. Never heard of Quirky and I suspect they are somehow related to or a partner of Dice, by the nature of the article.
Also, they have a steep hill to climb, because any inventor worth their salt is wary of the bullshit "do you or someone you know have an invention? submit your invention to us!" scams over the decades.
If you have an invention worth something and, get a lawyer, contract a marketing/promotions professional, and contract a business manager.
Re:Who? Nobody. (Score:5, Informative)
Nope, first time in my life I ever heard that name.
Me too, and I make significant money as an inventor.
Looking at their website, it seems similar to Kickstarter.
No, it's much, much worse. The terms [quirky.com] are awful. "While one aspect of the Site is to provide Users, including Idea Submitter's with the right to share in Product Sales Revenue, Users should not participate on the Site or in the Services primarily for financial gain, as any actual monetary compensation actually received by a User in connection with the Site, may or may not bear any relation to the actual time invested on the Site, or the quality or quantity of User Content submitted, or Influence allocated." They own your submitted idea even if they don't use it. If they don't use it, you can buy it back from them for a fee, plus a cut of future revenue.
There are resources for inventors. The USPTO has a page. [uspto.gov] There are startup incubators. There's Kickstarter. And then there's a bunch of slimeball "invention brokers", with success rates somewhere below 0.1%. These clowns are in that category.
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There are resources for inventors. The USPTO has a page. [uspto.gov] There are startup incubators. There's Kickstarter. And then there's a bunch of slimeball "invention brokers", with success rates somewhere below 0.1%. These clowns are in that category.
Here's my idea: run two sites, the first one's like this (previously unknown to me) quirky, a good way to get candidate ideas some of which would be profitable (but as noted, a horribly ineffective way of actually doing anything with the contributed ideas), and another much more like Bennett's which can effectively filter and exploit the ideas. Then feed the latter from the former, and (with any luck) get profitable products which can then be sold. Or maybe just sell the ideas/patents (along with the list o
Is there an "ignore user" feature on Slashdot? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is there an "ignore user" feature on Slashdot? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, there is... [slashdot.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, there is... [slashdot.org]
much appreciated; would mod up if i could =)
no, timothy (Score:4, Funny)
Posted by timothy on 04-25-13 03:40 PM
from the StupidDipshitsWhoAreRuiningSlashdot dept.
Had to Dig for the Thesis (Score:5, Insightful)
it turned out that those who had played the game successfully were basically admitting that the only way to win was to act as an unpaid Quirky promoter to your friends. And more to the point, it meant that the winners would not be the best inventions, but rather just the inventions that met the minimum requirement of not being embarrasingly stupid, whose inventors were the best at playing the promotion game.
Shouldn't this be up in the summary? Why did I have to read down so far to get to this information that immediately tips me off that Quirky is like one of those terrible schemes where you start "your own" store selling shitty products to your friends who, if they start their own store, earn money for you further up the chain? I don't want to be that guy that thinks he's a genius for selling his friends vitamins to make them healthy while I get a negligible profit from a company that's making even more profit. And I don't want to be the guy that shows up at your house and asks you how my invention that you bought from Quirky is doing and I expect it to be prominently in use.
... they just ... *shudder* ... are like some sort of vampire that hurts my brain when I contemplate what they do. And that's the feature on Slashdot today? At least let me know what's going on before I invest in reading this stuff. Clearly that should be your thesis.
I'm a smart guy but those companies that prey on people like that
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Smells like a PONZI SCHEME [wikipedia.org] .
Timothy should take a nice, long, relaxing walk off of a short pier.
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Ah, nice. Another take of ye old Ponzi-scheme http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme [wikipedia.org].
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Who? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is today BS day? The second overblown, dishonest PR BS story in close succession? Come on, /., if you have financial troubles, ask for donation. This is just pathetic.
Actually... (Score:1)
You've probably read about Quirky in one of many articles that read like valentines to the company and the concept.
Actually, I've only seen one such article [slashdot.org].
That's it. I quit. (Score:2)
This is no longer news for nerds, or stuff that matters. Now it's an advert for some company, a fluff peice on the failings of a nothing website, and constant hosts file harassment. I can find a better news aggregate, and I will. You have lost your place on my bookmarks bar, Slashdot after 12 years of dedication.
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Same. I'm removing this from my Reader/whatever-is-replacing-reader feeds. I may come back if someone sends me a link, but I'm not reading it for news anymore.
Never heard of it (Score:2)
Saying a product is revolutionary belies the reality nobody knows or cares about it.
Old Ideas - but still good (Score:2)
But you see Quirky has their own reasons to continue their current method.
You see, Quirky needs to advertise itself MORE than it needs better products. They get thousand of ideas, they are OK with having thousands fail and only one or two make money.
What they want and need more than better ideas is more people buying from Quirky.
Hence the current system where the people that
Eight dollars for a little piece of molded plastic (Score:2)
At that price I should be listed as a VC for the product. No thanks... I think I'll buy some wood and run it once through my table saw. :-)
Like those "gone viral" links (Score:2)
...to a video with less than 1000 hits that probably belongs to the author or his friend. Terrible product placement Timothy.
Avoid Quirky (Score:3)
At least make it looks like a regular /. post man! (Score:2)
Nope (Score:2)
This is the kind of article... (Score:4)
... no one wants to read. It's stupid and about a service that no one who had half a brain would use. Dear God, is there no real news? Click-/Ad-bait is one thing, but this takes awful to a new level. I feel stupider for having read through half the summary. I'd say more, but those who read the whole summary are no longer smart enough to read.
"You've probably read about Quirky in... (Score:2)
one of many articles that read like valentines to the company and the concept."
No, no I have not. If you're two paragraphs into your summary, and you've told me several times that a company is amazing, but have not yet told me (other than in link form) anything about what that company frelling *does*, I will assume that you don't care whether I know what it does, and will respond with a big fat screw you to said article.
Screw you.
I got an idea (Score:1)
I'll just post it here, though it's probably too expensive to implement? Those darn CFL lights take too long to light for some reason. Maybe we can run a second incandescent bulb that lights up right away and, over time, gets dim as the CFL bulb (or unit) gets bright. Eventually the incandescent bulb turns off. When the light is turned off and soon back on, the incandescent bulb will still be dim/off while the CFL will still be bright. but if the light is turned off for a long time and turned back on the in
Quirkz (Score:2)
Great, now I'm going to be guilty by association, only one letter away from whatever this place is.
Blah blah blah (Score:2)
Isn't that the point of the summary? Mention the two changes, and if I want more I can go RTFA?
Still don't know
A life preserver! (Score:2)
I'm drowning in banal text, for someone clearly overpaid by the word!!!
Seriously, 3 pages of text to repeat the same points 3 or 4 times, then make two conclusions that are orthogonal to his points? Someone needs to edit this material.