Mike left a comment when someone asked that same question in the post: "of course there is more to the story. but the point is we’d gotten past all the ugly sausage making that goes into any startup and had moved to within days of launching it. An email to us saying “the economics don’t work, we have to talk” would have been a reasonable request. But telling us that we aren’t important to the project, and stating that we don’t own the intellectual property, is just bizarre."

To me that says acres more than the entire original post...

Still. I find the most upsetting part of the article "And then the entire project self destructed over nothing more than greed, jealousy and miscommunication." <- that quote. That quote shows his personal feelings about what happened and it's very sad that such an amazing project could be destroyed so easily.

I don't share any of the hate the author probably does; however, I do feel extremely sad about the entire ordeal.

(ps: I, with a friend of mine, had already started programming to make some applications we thought would be perfect for it.)

I think there's always more to such stories but rarely do the other parties know it. In my experience the biggest contributor to products dying is passive aggressiveness. If you're in a partnership where you don't feel you can air your grievances they'll just build up inside until you hit the last straw and everything explodes. I suspect that's what happened here.

On the upside, thanks to my Boss foolishly putting enough faith in this project to bet on it's eventual existence (and write several blog posts he's probably embarrassed by now) I'm now $100 bucks richer.

Yeah, that post has the subtle stench of BS. I haven't followed the Crunchpad ordeal all that closely, but they've never been all that forthcoming about problems and this announcement smacks of manufactured drama.

Honestly, everything I've ever seen with regard to Arrington or TC has been surrounded in "drama" and hype, both things I'd rather simply avoid.

I truly don't understand the appeal, but I'm curious... Are there any hackers out there who think that TC provides any form of intriguing technical commentary? Or that he's a legitimate "visionary/evangelist" in things dot-com?

If the answer to both is "no", what's left? Why do we have so many TC stories?

  Are there any hackers out there who think that 
  TC provides any form of intriguing technical commentary?

You are making two assumptions here: 1. Hackers are only into technical commentary 2. TC promises technical commentary and under delivers

I don't think either of them are true. For a lot of us, particularly those doing startups, an article on TC about our company can be worth many times more than frontpage NYT story. I say that from experience.

Even if you dislike TC's content, dismissing its potential value to your business would be stupid.

What has been the value of being on TC for you?

I've had a number of startups get their post on TC, which resulted in tons of clicks on our homepage, and basically nothing beyond that. These startups ranged from VC funded to boot strap, and I can't really say the "publicity" we received was useful in any way.

FWIW, we got funded because of our TC coverage. Our investor (a Silicon Valley VC) called us the day of the post. 2 months later, the money was in our accounts.

Top two things:

1. We got incredible SEO out of it. As a result of TC, we got on top of digg/reddit. Each of those gave us dozens of more linkbacks. This significantly helped us with our seo strategy that got us sustained 80-90,000/uniques a day within 3 months.

2. We got into ycombinator. I believe without getting onto TC, it would be very hard to get traction. And without traction, a site like ours would be a very tough sell(as much to ourselves as to investors)

Before we launched, our 3 month plan was to get on TC. That we got on it a few days after launch put us way ahead.

The appeal of TC (for me atleast) is that they produce a lot of content. The subjective nature of the content is one aspect I won't address, but the simple fact is that they are very active reporters. Like it or not, it is often the first place I hear about up and coming startups.

I like the subjective nature - you don't have to beat around the bush to find what the editorial staff's (!) position is it's plain as your nose right there.

Yes, TechCrunch is great and has a substantial position in our vague industry. Arrington has almost single handedly resulted in a spotlight being cast onto us that simply didn't exist before. I'm not saying someone else couldn't have done it, and maybe perhaps better, but Arrington was the one to step forward to the plate and TC has done a lot more good for our industry than bad.

From the start the promise of building a large touchscreen tablet for $300 was simply impossible. Either they were naive or dishonest. The 12" LCD touch panel alone is likely $200-$300 in bulk or even more. How can you price a product at retail below the cost of an individual component? As the price crept up to $400, then $500 and probably more realistically $800-$1k I think Mr. Arrington needed an end game that didn't make him look dishonest or naive. An IP dispute solves that problem nicely. Of course he could be telling the truth but based on the pricing fib/naivety I'm skeptical.

I've seen large "touch panel" layer parts for various devices for well under $100 and 1080p 22" TN LCD screens with built in speakers for $100-$150, so a 12" touchscreen panel would likely be nowhere near $200.

In what type of volume?

Here's a 15" panel at $97 for a single order: http://wholesale.alibaba.com/product-gs/261192316-15inch-SAW...

Note that this a touch panel not the LCD, but they do work perfectly well

You're comparing apples to oranges.

I was involved in a similar project ten years ago. At the time we had no problems getting to ca. $500 with a 10.9" LCD/touch combo, obviously otherwise with very modest specs (a NS x86 clone, 32MB RAM, 16MB flash) but enough to get Opera running on a stripped down Linux with a number of other apps. Sourcing a reasonably priced touch screen was definitively not what killed that project.

I'd be very surprised if $300 would've been impossible today, even with a larger screen, though of course that depends on the rest of the specs. Especially given the specs of my new $500 laptop. Sure, it lacks a touch layer, but its also spec'ed far higher than you'd need for a pad like this.

Here's a 7" tablet for under $274 at retail: http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.31523

A 12" device for $300 might be hard, but under $500 is doable for sure (even with a capacitive touchscreen).

(Edit: another version, without Android support for $211: http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.27441)

That's not a capacitive screen. Apple has effectively banished all other (mobile) touch technologies - capacitive is the only one that doesn't royally suck as far as user experience goes.

A 12" capacitive touch layer... think at least $250 at volume.

I'm not sure resistive screens "royally" suck. They aren't as good as capacitive, but Nokia still uses them. Maybe only "suck"?

The pricing isn't clear. http://utouch.en.alibaba.com/productgrouplist-209605425/capa... has a range - I'd guess $250 might be about right.

Resistive is what was common before capacitive came along - I'm sure we've all played with them extensively at some point. Take my Garmin GPS for example, it's got a resistive screen that, coming from a daily iPhone user, just doesn't work. I have to practically stab it with a fingertip to get it to register, and even then it's pretty consistently wrong, and will often think I'm tapping the button next to it.

Argh.

The iPhone set the bar - and manufacturers have responded. I doubt you will find a single manufacturer now who is trying to peddle resistive touchscreen phones in their new products. Nokia, Moto, HTC, etc, appear to only have capacitive touchscreens on the roadmap - for good reason.

Most tablet PCs are feeling incredibly dated for the same reason - IMHO the next product to enter this field will need capacitive sensing, or die.

12" touchscreen monitor for $249 for a single piece: http://wholesale.alibaba.com/product-gs/263506741-12-Inch-To...

That'll be under $200 in bulk, and as a screen (not a complete monitor).

Based on those prices, $400 for the complete device might be possible.

Its called pre-installed software, search engines and default services. Its worth alot- Both in "revenue now" and recurring revenue.

TC has a large readership that Arrington might be using to his advantage in this situation as well.

Agreed. Count this post as Arrington's own heavy-handed negotiations.

obviously that is his purpose in posting it

he's demonstrating his value as "visionary/evangelist/whatever"

Maybe not much more, though. As I've warned even my own partners, it's sad, but people often change over money. The near readiness and impending launch probably got some people excited. Let this be a lesson, especially on an entrepreneurial board like this: agree on partnership terms and expectations up front, and also get it in writing.

Yup. I learnt all these things the hard way :(.

Yep. I too think TC isn't the most truthful media outlet. TC has a lot of power as a media outlet, and there have been a couple of incidents where I think they are abusing that power. This is just another case of that happening. Justified or not you have separate your personal feelings from your coverage, and I don't think Mike can do that.

Shareholders can sometimes do crazy things.

Arrington mentioned that the deal being contemplated involved a new entity buying Fusion Garage. I'm sure that would have required the approval of FG's shareholders, who don't currently seem to be strongly behind Chandra.

If that's all actually the case, then perhaps the mistake was failing to recognize early enough that Chandra wasn't the final decision maker.

That's a good point. But what gets me is that Arrington is a former lawyer. I would have thought he'd have proper papers written up from the start.

Well he says in the article "We jointly own the CrunchPad product intellectual property, and we solely own the CrunchPad trademark." So I'm thinking he probably has this covered, though it may be the other company sees a way around this or does not care about legal implications. It may be the product gets knocked-off by some overseas company before ever being produced itself (look out for the the iCrunchpod).

Maybe Chandra (the other CEO) has been told that he must go ahead and dump TechCrunch, despite the fact that Chandra knows it's impossible.

He can a) tell his shareholders to shove it, or b) get Arrington to tell the shareholders for him.

That's my guess.

No, intellectual property and trademark legal protection happen automatically, without needing to do anything formal. It looks like he did little more than say "help build it, and we'll be partners".

I believe you are thinking of copyright. Patents and trademarks need to be registered in the US.

From wikipedia: Proprietary rights in relation to a trademark may be established through actual use in the marketplace, or through registration of the mark with the trademarks office.

Apparently there is - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/30/crunchpad-end/#comment-.... It would be interesting to know what "the other side" of the story is.

Maybe there is more to the story, but for the first time, I feel bad for Arrington.

Absolutely , there has to be more to the story. Where is the other side of the story ?