Saturday, July 30, 2011

Tactuslabs, Notion Ink's US service center...still exists?

Tactuslabs is NI's official service center in the US. Just that in the last 4 days or so, www.tactuslabs.com redirects to google. I ignored it the first day I heard wondering if it was some internal DNS/redirect error, as it does happen.

But nope. It's been 4 days (or 3, I don't remember since when this started) but it still redirects to google. Surely a serious business would be very worried, but no...makes you wonder how "serious" this business is. Do they still exist? Is it a viable business that you can send your Adam to?

Their internal pages are still intact - for e.g. go to www.tactuslabs.com/blog and it does show up. Just that the last post was in April, and no "update" on this redirect issue either. If you click on their links to their Amazon products - they are all "unavailable"

They seem to have also tried to make some Adam cases, but with such low volumes it's probably not a sustainable one either. Anyway, if you are buying from NI, and are from US, and know that there's a possibility you will need service, then this is the current situation on tactuslabs which is NI's repair center.

I will update this post if I hear from NI or tactuslabs. I did ask this question in a tweet to NI_Chief on Twitter, but as you can probably guess - no response of any kind. This is their US repair center, surely they should know what is happening?

Edit: Update 1They have a twitter page - no updates. And no, haven't heard anything back from NI or Tactuslabs.

Update 2: No change in their website status. No response from NI to my second tweak. Now I'm getting more suspicious about what's happening here.

Update 3:No one from NI ever came out on this. We're only finding out now that Tactuslabs is perhaps dead, and some other service company in Portland, OR is now handling the service. No one was asking NI to give details of specifics of service centers, only what was happening with Tactuslabs as people were having problems, and these incompetents couldn't even communicate it right.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Why buying an Adam from eBay is better than from NI

There are continuing woes of Adam buyers. Just go to conclave or Tabletroms and you'll see interesting samples. A user suggested that it's better to buy Adam off of eBay than via NI. I completely agree with this - and for several reasons

1. Quality - Notion Ink Adam's reliability once it comes to your hand is extremely spotty. At least with an eBay Adam from someone with a good feedback score, you can be sure that they've spent 'quality' time inspecting, ROMing, cleaning, washing, caching, modding, prodding, flashing and so on to get it to work in a reasonable fashion. I'd bet that the chance it will work better from someone on eBay is much higher than directly from the company itself! (har har...I know!)

2. Shipping - Notion Ink's ordering/shipping is unpredictable, and sometimes downright horrendous. It's been 6 months but it's clearly too hard for them to get it right. You know, shipping etc. is such a mysterious process and few companies in the world ever do it. "Shipping and Ordering" whoever heard of that?! So, with someone from eBay, you can at least be sure your ordering will be simple and it'll get to your hand

3. Price - There's price and then there's TCO - total cost of ownership. On an average, the TCO for an Apple iPad is low, but for Adam - rather high. Keep in mind the hassle of customs duty, potential return fees and so on. Given not many are clamoring for this tablet, you can get it for a several $$$ lower than direct. It makes perfect sense to get it cheaper.

So, dear Adam "wanters", getting Adam on...

eBay is cheaper, faster, and better!


Take advantage of a better ordering platform and buy from people who have had the patience to deal with it before selling. Evil, but totally the best thing to do.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Notion Ink Response to Common Customer needs

Consider this conversation in a restaurant

 

NI Restaurant Customer: "Hi, I'd like some coke, a Crispy chicken burger, and fries on that side"

Waiter: "The GDP of Greece fell by 8% but then nickel cadmium hydride couldn't be worse than treasury bonds by the ocean floor"

NI Restaurant Customer: Huh?

That's how I felt reading today's blog entry - which finally came in today.

Also, They're "doing extensive research on the topics (of Wi-Fi, battery etc.) and publish it." Right. People are interested in technical "research now", guess all the research will magically improve current issues.

I can imagine...well, maybe some Adam fan will even say "I was reading this...research on the blog and guess what! My camera started working!! OMG thank you Rohan!"

Unbelievable. Barely addresses questions being asked. Instead we get to read about Fonts and GPU.

Answer the question people are asking, Rohan. And it sure isn't a lecture about Font rendering.

Monday, July 25, 2011

epic fails...both the Notion Ink CEO & the company, not an iota of shame

"We will continue to push the updates so you all get the best out of your Adam!" - CEO Rohan Shravan - June 27th.

It is now a month. No updates since the last one.

"Seems we will have to make our week-end blog, bi-weekly. " April 30th

It's now a month since the last post. No updates.

"Chief is now on Twitter! Please do follow him for updates (and possibly some of his random rants)."

That was 6 days ago. No update - you know, this is Twitter, supposed to be a "stream" of communication. And then, 2 updates today - both essentially thanking someone who said something nice to them. That's it. So much for company updates...hmm..maybe I should get on Twitter.

And on the forums, I continue to see struggling users. There's just a handful of posts on Conclave and yet it takes days for someone to even respond. And there's no update or response of any kind to the last post of mine where I posted what Rohan said and what they did (or did not)

Have you no shame or sense of responsibility NI? When is it OK to constantly say something you cannot follow through? If this is how it's at the top, I can only imagine the example being set to the rest of the company.

Saturday, July 23, 2011

some silly math - Adam on eBay vs. iPad

So, right now there are about 13 Notion Ink Adam's out on sale on eBay (there are some that are listed on tabletroms & conclave but I'll assume double-count and not add them)

I was just thinking: If the same % of Apple owners sold their iPads as the NI owners sold their Adams....there would be a bit more than

95,000 iPads on eBay.

There's about 2,800 in reality.

Alternatively, if the % of eBay owners selling their iPads was same as NI owners selling their Adams... there would be have to be 4 times as many Adam owners there are today to see One Adam on eBay.

It tells me just one thing -- there are significantly more Adam owners wanting to sell their devices than there are selling iPads. That's not a nice fan following ;)

Sunday, July 17, 2011

I just say stuff...don't really mean it

so...at one point Rohan, the CEO of NI, said about his blog posting something about 'we will continue this conversation weekly' - weeks came and went, no post, and people started getting upset.

He didn't mean what he said, of course.

And then he came back, and said "Guess we'll have to have posts once in 2 weeks"

But then he didn't mean what he said, once again, of course.

Because it's now close to 3 weeks after the last post - and there's no update.

Which is all OK because with this guy, it's quite normal to say what he doesn't mean. Notion Ink employees must be proud to have such a CEO - you know, the one that says stuff just for the entertainment value and doesn't mean it? I wonder how the work culture inside is -- I really do.

An early swan song for notionaddicts, and more support joy

The big support group at NI apparently has no time even to respond to the literally handful of posts on conclave. Which tells me something is much worse than what it seems - it surely shouldn't be that hard to respond to a post.

And then there's another post today about a user getting a wrong device back from repair. But here's the thing - it isn't the first time it happened. The last time it happened, the user's post was quietly removed from Conclave when he wondered if NI was simply recycling used devices among support. I would have no idea, I'd like to think that this again is just a mistake, but it's not the first time.

In other observations, many days ago I asked on notionaddicts if they were going to expand as their posts were mostly spam and a few others, guess they won't at this point. But I'm going to now add www.notionaddicts.com to the list of 'dead/dying' Adam fansites. In the last few days/weeks, most of the posts are either spam or maybe 2-3 other meaningful posts. That's not sufficient to keep the community alive, unless the same people post again and again.

You might counter that people move on - but that's the point, there are few new customers. The old ones move on, there are no new ones => there isn't much of a community. That leaves the NI people with just 2 outlets - the NI conclave, which requires mandatory user registration, and tabletroms.com in which Adam is a subsection.

Of course, in tabletroms people who are unhappy with Adam or NI aren't really welcome to complain - so you can do that here in my comments! ;)

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

World class support

 

 

just 2 recent examples.

http://www.notionaddicts.com/forums/showthread.php/5125-RMA-sent-no-communication-from-anybody..

http://conclave.notionink.com/showthread.php?530-No-answer-Original-case-14608-WIFI-doesn-t-work-never-worked/page2

of course, keep in mind that the support team possibly larger than developer team. I didn't say that.

What can you even possibly say about a company that, after 3 order rounds and 6 months after the first round, can't deal with basic support issues?

I can only imagine the horror if they actually sold hundreds of thousands of devices. Thankfully there have been only a thousand or less who are that charitable...

 

 

 

Saturday, July 9, 2011

The difference between saying & seeing it through... here's a list!



This post is long, but I think you will find it quite interesting. So bear with me.

When people like me criticize Notion Ink and its CEO Rohan Shravan, some of the responses from the fans is that we're making statements without substantiation. One of the issues is that the CEO does not keep his promises, and some contend that he hasn't really made any.

You will agree with me that that ONLY marketing channel for NI is it's blog. That means you either believe what's said in it, or not. When the leader of a company makes a statement that something is actually being done, I, for one, tend to generally believe it. At least with the respectable CEOs - and I hope Rohan is trying to be one.  There is a difference between vision statements - where you say 'you'd like to be X or get to X', which is an aspiration, versus factual statements where you say 'we're doing X and you will see the result'.

I can understand not meeting vision statements - they change when companies realize that certain things cannot be done for various reasons or the vision needs a tweak to respond to dynamic market situations. What I cannot dismiss easily is when someone says that certain things are already being done and then not follow-up on it. That makes the statement a misdirection or worse, a lie. That reduces trust. A lot about building trust is about keeping true to your word, or when that's not possible, letting people know quickly that something changed and you will therefore do something else. Or in the worst case scenario - apologize and move on.

In NI's situation, a lot of us have always had the feeling that we were led along. All I did was take 30 minutes or so to scan through NI posts and simply picked sample statements that clearly indicated that something was being done and we would see the result 'soon'. See for yourself how vague some of these are, and where they are in terms of reality. I will let you be the judge.

For fans reading this - please spare me the 'they're a start-up' nonsense. It's now 2 years and they have stated that they have over 90 employees now. They've talked about doing Adam, Adam 2, Adam 3, Eve, Eden 2, Genesis, game development,  BLISS, DIY home automation systems. That's not a start-up's cup.

So, here you go. Statements picked right from http://notionink.wordpress.com - which is the official blog of the company. The bold emphasis is mine, and the italics under the paragraph is my commentary.

UPDATES: GO TO END OF POST TO SEE NEW GEMS. CONTRIBUTE.

03 April 2010
Lot’s of ‘extremely exhaustive’ content coming your way! We want to make Adam a universal device which can give you access to a lot of different kind of content, and that is exactly where we are working right now

No evidence of 'extremely exhaustive' content. Not sure what this even meant. Can someone point to me what this "extremely exhaustive" content is, please? It has been over a year since. 

03 April 2010
Being a student myself, I am personally working to make the lives of all students pretty easy when it comes to getting educational content on the device and that too, at a competitive price

Anyone have specific examples of what this educational content is? Links? I have so far seen nothing that specifically was an outcome of this statement

03 April 2010

We are doing some innovation on email front as well. Business people will love it. It will give you an amazing freedom which we never had.

No evidence of such amazing innovation that would be loved by 'Business people', can someone please point out to me specifically what it is? And how does it give 'amazing freedom' we 'never had'

09 June 2010
The UI team has dome some extremely beautiful job and we were waiting for them to finish up so SDK can be released. So, developers gear up!

Anyone got this SDK? Can some developer please share your experience with us?

09 June 2010
We have also done wonderful innovations on e-mail front. Something which might become the biggest differentiation for Adam

That was over a year ago. Can someone point out what the differentiation is...?I haven't seen anyone talk about Mail as the differentiator for Adam recently, so it would be nice to know what "exactly" it is.

09 June 2010
Think about it, if we are doing well, we are talking about at least a business of 100k devices a month. That will amount to at least $350 million dollar of revenues in the first year itself

That means he was thinking about mass market back in June 2010. Wonder which one is the first year... 2011? Why are all marketing techniques targeted towards hackers? Or does he think that hackers and people who have time to deal with OS issues are so numerous in number that he can sell 100K devices a month to them? 

12 August 2010
Application designers can get hold of devices and SDK much early and if you are one of them, join us at relations@notionink.com

Have any app developers got the devices? Any good examples? Share with me!

12 August 2010
But then, neither can I hold on to you forever, neither can I give you a buggy device!

"neither can I give you a buggy device!" Can we say with certainty that he delivered on this promise when the device came out?

30 August 2010
Only 200 people will get selected in the Early Access Program (EAP) and there is a lot which they will get in return like:
- Adam itself! I believe these will be the only people other than our labs who will get access to Adam.

- More on what all will be there when you register for the upcoming EAP web portal.
to get to play a pivotal role in validating the pre-production software full access to the OS and UI which we have developed

-24×7 engineering support from Notion Ink (email as well as on phone)
other things like: marketing opportunities, etc. will be explained in the program itself

Now almost a year later, surely we can get details on how many got into the program, how many got the Adams,  the 24x7 support, and metrics on how successful the EAP was? Can anyone who was part of this program please share your experiences - there must be many of you?

14 September 2010
Coming up on Adam along with other stores is a brilliant Comic Store! We will again go public on this in October

Can anyone point me to this brilliant comic store... been over 9 months now, and 8 months after the 'October'. Surely it must be there?

24 October 2010

The EAP. Probably we will have to do the closure earlier than on 3rd November because of the sheer entries and participation. ... What we are doing here is to talk to all of them personally and check what is the end use case, how can we work together and improve the current eco-system and Adam itself.

How many did they talk to? How many got the Adams? How did they contribute to the overall great quality of Adam and Eden? Do we think this program actually existed considering the issues post release?

13 November 2010
In the EAP 2 we have around 46 countries! EAP was multi pronged test for us. Production Validation, Logistics (handling shipments, etc. for so many countries), test of the support system, work on the feedback before it reaches masses (ones which we can quickly fix) ...

So is he suggesting EAP actually worked with all those stages? Why is it that the post release was plagued by horrible support, delivery, buggy software? Can any developer share with me what exactly happened in EAP that the result was so poor? He talks about 'test of the support system' - where is this support system? It is now 8 months!

27 November 2010
Notion Ink is about bringing that ‘future’ faster towards us (but not rushing by releasing sub-standard products, we are here to stay for centuries)

 "not rushing by releasing sub-standard products." That's the second time he's said something like that. Can we say, again, with certainty that this is what happened post release?

27 November 2010
I apologize for being little mystic in this post, but I want to point in the future, back to this post and tell you that I shared a secret and hint with all of you, and it all happened in front of your eyes!

It's been 7 months already, can you please tell us what. I'm dying from suspense.

Dec 11 2010

"My next goal is to make Notion Ink best in its customer relations and whole of my energy will go into making this happen"

It is no news that NI customer service has been horrendous. The CEO said, 6 months ago, that all his energy will go towards best customer relations. This is a startup, as the fans keep pointing it out to me, then why is it, after 6 months, that support is still horrible? There is practically no support system except an anemic facebook-members only support forum. Did he mean what he said?

28 January 2011
We have started working on the Honeycomb and looking into how soon can we offer the update to you all!

They started working on HC in January and must  have done a lot of work on it in the 6 months. But they released TR's version? Can someone from TR let us know if you were working with HC since January? If not, what was NI doing in the last 5 months?

28 January 2011
All the softwares developed by Notion Ink are open source and will be shared with the community soon.

Where can we get 'all the software' developed by NI? It said 'soon', it's been 5 months now.

08 February 2011
I will introduce him soon! (New UI designer since August 2010)

Nice to meet him. Who is it? Shouldn't take you 5 months to introduce him...really

08 February 2011
As I told you earlier as well, Honeycomb on Adam is a work in progress now. All application are also on time for their port on Honeycomb.

Brilliant. But....NI released TR's version? What was done by NI in the last 5 months?

08 February 2011
The EAP2 Program and SDK. Now that still hasn’t kicked off because whole Notion Ink is in the mode of switching from Froyo-Gingerbread to Honeycomb. It makes more sense to share on a platform where developers can ensure their art work on more devices and which is a standard. RenderScript is also one part we are waiting for

What happened then, eventually?

13 February 2011
Our developers are loving Honeycomb while porting their apps on it

But...you released TR's version?

15 February 2011
Sales this time has been extremely good and now you will find more Adamites there!

He did mention that 'if things went well' they would be looking at 100K devices a month. So if sales have been 'extremely good', what is it?  1 million? 100,000? I think it was less than 1500.

03 March 2011
Support team strength = developer team strength. As discussed earlier we have expanded our support team and now in fact it is bigger than the developer team

This was in March. 3 months ago. There is a post from Michelle in Conclave, on May 14th, saying they have further expanded the support team. That tells me that NI had a support team larger than dev team in March, and then further grew that in May. That's a really big support team. I'll leave it to the readers judgment on whether this rings true.

03 March 2011
Dev team is maintaining a TRAC (moved out from wikidot now) for the current development process which will be opened for all to see, especially the wiki part

This was in March... it's been 4 months now, can you share a link to this TRAC?

UPDATE: OCT 1 2011 - THERE IS A BASIC SUPPORT SYSTEM IN PLACE FROM TODAY

29 March 2011
In a couple of days, Notion Ink will go live with its forum and next, live chats with the moderators and support staff will start

This was 3 months ago. None of this is here except a basic forum that requires a facebook account to login.

UPDATE: OCT 1 2011 - THERE IS A BASIC SUPPORT SYSTEM IN PLACE FROM TODAY. NOTE  - THERE IS NO CHAT WITH MODERATORS ETC. BUT THERE'S A TICKETING SYSTEM

29 March 2011
There is one special assurance for Adam owners. their devices will never get obsolete

How so? Will they get their hardware components replaced for free as hardware evolves? Can NI please confirm this and tell us that when Adam 2 comes out with new PQi, then Adam 1 owners will get their screens replaced for free? Same for CPU, Hard Disk etc? 

30 April 2011
Starting 2nd May, posters will run across Bangalore on the plan we discussed in the last blog. It’s a one of its kind and bound to change a lot of things.

Can someone from Bangalore please confirm this to me? Any pictures on what this is? It should have started 2 months ago already...Why is there no update to this?

30 April 2011
the expectations are enormous, you need to get the things right the first time and as I love to say

In a press interview recently, Rohan said that the reason there is criticism of Adam is "because there were too many expectations" - but here he says that 'expectations are enormous and you need to get things right the first time'. 

06 May 2011
This blog will again take the technical route starting from June, when we will enter into the world of NEON, PVRTC, Parallel Processing, 3D gesture detection and much more.

No such posts in June.

28 May 2011
Last 6 weeks we were integrating all support pieces to an advanced online system, which you will soon see go live on support.notionink.com.

On 29th March, he said NI would go live with several support improvements. It never happened. Now on 28th May, he said we would 'soon' go live. It's been over a month now, and no news. We're talking about a basic support system that is not in place over 6 months after release, and with a support team that is supposedly larger than the dev. team, and with more than 95 employees that would mean at least 35-40 support people. What are they doing?

UPDATE: OCT 1 2011 - THERE IS A BASIC SUPPORT SYSTEM IN PLACE FROM TODAY

28 May 2011
We have a team here working on automation systems, and after their study we will release few DIY system using which you can do interesting things!

Month over, surely we've gone past 'study', and why is NI working on DIY home automation systems? They also have a game division...and then they also have Adam 2 and Adam 3, and also Eve  (or whatever), and Eden 2, and preparation for Ice Cream Sandwich. And this is what fans still call 'a start-up'. I call this a company that has no clue or focus on what it wants to be.

UPDATED

June 27th 2011

"We will continue to push the updates so you all get the best out of your Adam!"  Nope. None that I know. It's been...July, August, now Mid September.

July 26th 2011

"The content project which we brushed earlier is also going in full pace. I will cover it soon." It is now 1 and 1/2 months since he said. No update on what this content project is. 

"I have been collecting comments and thoughts from Conclave and majority of them want us to focus on the screen quality, camera, battery life and wi-fi strength. We have done extensive research on these fields and will share it with you in coming weeks.

Bye for know, will keep you posted!."

So, he's been collecting "thoughts", and this was 6 weeks ago. No update on the research. A new blog update came out today (16th September) and it has no reference to any of these and instead promises new research!

He has made new promises in today's (16th Sep) post, so let's wait to see how long it takes before it amounts to nothing.

-------

So, I will leave it at this and let you judge this behavior by its merits. You can ignore it all, and it's your choice. Building trust requires that a leader stands behind his words when he says 'something is being done', and the sad thing is - I haven't even picked all the statements he made. None about build quality, software quality, Wi-fi, battery, screen quality and so on.

There's also an amusing observation I made today from posts on the official forum - that's for next time.

Thursday, July 7, 2011

coming soon...about coming soon!

Fans get upset if someone says that Rohan makes unkept promises. I took just 30m to just look through his blog posts to draw up a list of interesting 'coming soons', so I will list them sometime in the next 2 days, and you be the judge.

I can tell you, it is quite a list.

So come back and have a fun time through the 'coming soon' list.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

The World Conspires against Rohan Shravan, it's all someone else's fault...

So, Rohan Shravan, CEO of Notion Ink, gave an interview to Tabletroms - here is the source. He makes a rational argument on the status of Honeycomb which I can understand.

But here is where it got really interesting. I quote the interview,

Question: There has been speculation among news sites that the Adam has been struggling and questions the companies determination to succeed and produce quality products. Do you have anything to say to those news sites? Has the last pre-order proven enough to keep those rumors away? How is the development of the next product looking?

Answer: People need something to talk about. :) Our sales has been good, PQ is again out of stock. Eden 2 and Adam 2, in fact 3 as well are already underway and full scale expansion on 5 different countries is in progress. I have much more faith on Adam 2 since it is coming closer to what I envisioned. I have been spending a lot of time in company re-structuring, and teams have got good exposure and combination. A Game Design Team is already doing excellent job!

Pay attention. He still believes that people complaining about the producing quality products is just 'people talking about something'. Nope, not a single sentence about 'we learned from our mistakes', no 'we will do better', it's apparently just something people feel like talking about because they have nothing else to do.  He also said in another interview that the poor reviews are a result of 'expectations were too much and that not sharing devices with the reviewers angered them' which is one of the stupidest reasons I've read in a long time.

This is a CEO who believes that everything that happens is somebody else's fault or problem and therefore I would infer that they think there's nothing for them to learn.  I would be very wary of such an enterprise.

(Did you notice that He says Eden 2 is on the works and Adam 3 too! Wait, what? Adam 3?! Adam 3 is being built with today's technology? There's a game design team?! Notion Ink produces...games?)

Monday, July 4, 2011

Notion Ink and Tabletroms - what is the working relation?

I have mentioned Tabletrom in the past, to the extent that but for the good people at Tabletroms, Adam would be dead by now. I think a lot of people share that sentiment - a look at a few threads there and in notionaddicts will show that.

Having said that, I believe that it is now crucial for Notion Ink to clearly spell out what their relation to Tabletroms is. NI is using a significant body of TR's work and TR, all said and done, is a hobby group. Most Notion Ink users are now reliant on the work done by a set of helpful programmers/hackers who have no legal obligation to do so.

consumer =========> Notion Ink<------------------Tabletroms

(buyers)                            (seller/commercial entity)         (hobby group)

What we have essentially is a commercial organization that takes money from buyers, and in turn depends on its OS release on a hobby organization. And that to me, from a risk analysis, is a red flag. I know from experience that hobby groups come and go, sourceforge has thousands of them. TR has no obligation to render its services but does purely from an altruistic perspective.

A few questions

- What happens if the talented developers at TR one day decide to do something else?

- What if there is an internal dispute on collaboration with NI?

- What happens if there are significant issues with NI release that are traced to TR code?

- What happens if NI users turn to TR for issues on NI release?

Some of these are not monumental issues when the user base is small, is technically-oriented, and will put up with issues, updates, wipe, resets and so on. It is a major issue however if this support link is cut off for whatever reason, or if the user base expands to less savvy users.

It then boils to that fundamental question - who stands behind the NI release and what happens if TR decides to focus elsewhere?

What agreements exist, if any, between the two entities? NI acknowledges TR's work on Rohan's blog post, but their website (NI's) gives no indication of a formal collaboration. If such a thing exists, given the critical role TR now plays (it's essentially their Honeycomb on NI Adam now), NI should mention the details of the relation and answer these questions.

I'd like to invite TR and NI to share their views on this - leave them in the comments or you can just email me on jksaur @ gmail . com. For fans of NI and TR, note that I'm not casting aspersions but asking what I believe to be fair questions to which answers must be clarified.

 

Update: Here is the most relevant response from a member of TR  (original thread here)

"Tabletroms is no different than any other Android development website and my relationship with NI is based purely that of respect and friendship. There is no formal collaboration or game plan, as you said this is our hobby and we do it for the joy it brings others and the friendships we make along the way. Ask every developer in our core group and they will all say its nice to get a donation but its not about the money and If my website went down the drain and my developers moved on so would life. Great example that you all have lived through already was EdenX. Roebeet stepped down from the development and support of EdenX and shortly after someone else took over and pursued his work and several other Roms popped up. 

From my recent interview (front of site) it sounds like Notion Ink is waiting on the release of Ice Cream Sandwich and their explanation seems very reasonable and makes sense to me. I predict that ICS will come out and NI will provide you a fresh OS thats publicly available. I foresee communities like mine taking the manufactures work and adding great new features like always and life moving on. 

I can't speak for Greg, but I am going to assume he is a human being and he was excited about his toy and after playing with it for awhile he moved on and plays with it on occasion and I see absolutely nothing wrong with that."

NI hasn't said anything.

Sunday, July 3, 2011

What are Notion Ink's 95 employees doing?

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, Rohan stated recently that they have about 110 employees (LinkedIn shows 39). He is known to exaggerate (for e.g. stating that they have operations in 87 countries, which is extremely misleading) but let's take that at face value.

The question is, what are they doing? Here are a few facts

  1. The reference design to the current hardware probably ended in Nov 2010 because the hardware has essentially remained unchanged

  2. Eden turned out to be extremely buggy, which indicates poor development and quality control - nevertheless it was pushed out in Jan - 5 months ago, with an update a month+ ago.

  3. Later, NI mentioned that most of its developers had moved to Honeycomb - except that we learned that most of Honeycomb was actually Tabletrom's version!

  4. Support is still very anemic and slow moving, on May 28th Rohan stated that "Last 6 weeks we were integrating all support pieces to an advanced online system, which you will soon see go live on support.notionink.com" which seems to indicate that they have been working on the support system since mid-Apr. It is now July, and none of those changes are visible. Over 2 1/2 months to get even a basic support system in place, and it's still not. Even now the only way to post on their official forum is to have a facebook account.


I did a very rough back-of-the-envelope, and it seems to indicate that they should have about 80 developers doing development/testing! What the are they doing?! 

Clearly not much of core software as it's now mostly TR inspired (with a bit of NI thrown in), which brings me to wonder, what are they up to?

Here are a few speculations (yes, they are speculations based on observation)

  1. Are they all on that mumb0-jumbo BLISS system that Rohan's talked about?

  2. Are they developing generic Android apps (nothing to do with Adam) to make money from it?

  3. Are they working on perhaps the next version of Eden slated for Adam 2?

  4. Something with HC? Does TR get a feel that a significant portion of NI is engaged in the TR version of Honeycomb?


I have no clue. As the commentor on my previous post mentioned, hyping Adam 2 even before Adam 1 issues are sorted out, is just plain stupid. On the one hand, I can see where he's headed - he stated that Adam 1 is kind of sold out again (maybe 50-100 based on what they produced is my guess), then does that mean they will do nothing until Dec?

Is he going to re-try the string-along and bait a few customers for Adam 2?

Friday, July 1, 2011

Crunchgear, Rohan Shravan...etc.

Max-Power's post lead me to two places

John Biggs @ Crunchgear had this to say:  Notion Ink fans now considerably harder to find

The folks at Technolink had a few comments too, and did refer to a post of mine on PO3 recommendations.

Meanwhile, Rohan Shravan gave an interview and had a few interesting snippets, and I'll let you decide the merits - considering all that you've heard and read so far.

  1. 110 employees including interns + consultants (yeah, they're not small...)

  2. Adam 2 slated for December

  3. "We have operations in 87 countries" ... wait, what?!  It's possible the journalist misquoted Rohan, as I'm aware that happens, but he says it twice. It is my understanding that NI has operations in 1 country, ships to 87, and has support tie-up in maybe 3 countries. Operations in 87 countries?!!

  4. He suggests that poor reviews were a result of 'too much expectation and not enough access to the device' - nope, no hint that they did anything wrong at all.