EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Products => Crowd Funded Projects => Topic started by: EEVblog on January 12, 2017, 05:07:35 am
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Even with $34M (MILLION!) in pre-orders from 60,000 people, they have now folded without delivering anything.
Refunds are being offered though.
As early as December 20th they Tweeted that they were delivering.
Turns out they were relying upon new funding in order to do that. That funding didn't come through.
Backer email:
The Adventure Comes to an End
Dear Lily community,
Antoine and Henry here from the Lily team. When Lily set out on the journey to create a flying camera over 3 years ago, we were determined to develop and deliver a product that would exceed your expectations.
In the past year, the Lily family has had many ups and downs. We have been delighted by the steady advancements in the quality of our product and have received great feedback from our Beta program. At the same time, we have been racing against a clock of ever-diminishing funds. Over the past few months, we have tried to secure financing in order to unlock our manufacturing line and ship our first units - but have been unable to do this. As a result, we are deeply saddened to say that we are planning to wind down the company and offer refunds to customers (details below).
We want to thank you for sticking with us and believing in us during this time. Our community was the drive that kept us going even as circumstances became more and more difficult. Your encouraging words through our forums and in your emails gave us hope and the energy we needed to keep fighting.
Before we sign off, we want to thank all the people who have worked at Lily, who have partnered with us, and who have invested in us. Thank you for giving your all, nights, weekends and holidays, in the effort to deliver a great product.
After so much hard work, we are sad to see this adventure come to an end. We are very sorry and disappointed that we will not be able to deliver your flying camera, and are incredibly grateful for your support as a pre-order customer. Thank you for believing in our vision and giving us the opportunity to get this far. We hope our contribution will help pave the way for the exciting future of our industry.
Sincerely,
Antoine and Henry
Lily Founders
Refund Details:
Lily will be offering a refund to customers over the next 60 days. We will be initiating refunds to the payment card used for the original transaction (no action is required on your part; please allow 14 days for the refund to appear on your statement).
If the card you used is expired, please fill out this form so we can work with you on providing a refund by other means (e.g., PayPal or check).
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Wow! I wonder what they're not saying...
Presumably their build cost was going to be way higher than they anticipated, and thus there wasn't going to be the ROI expected by VC/financers.
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Were they spamming forums with some new FAA rules copy-paste?
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They will refund the money :-DD :-DD that is i think.
By experience with other bankrupts, when a person needs 60 days for refund the money , he hasn't the money and he has to ask to loan somebody.
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Interesting, 3D Robotics folded burning investors similar amount of money - http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2016/10/05/3d-robotics-solo-crash-chris-anderson/#4fc7954d4840 (http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2016/10/05/3d-robotics-solo-crash-chris-anderson/#4fc7954d4840)
They did produce a drone which hit the stores, but apparently couldn't save them...
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Will be interesting to see how refunds work out.
They could very well still be sitting on a considerable amount of cash, but having so grossly underestimated the production costs that if they started manufacturing they'd make a significant loss on each unit.
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Will be interesting to see how refunds work out.
They could very well still be sitting on a considerable amount of cash, but having so grossly underestimated the production costs that if they started manufacturing they'd make a significant loss on each unit.
I can't imagine they'd be sitting on anything close to $30M in cash.
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Dear Dave, please come home. :)
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Would have been interesting to see the final product....
https://youtu.be/lWAhoAIcELM
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The UK's El Reg has something on this: apparently the DA is having a go at them for unlawful practices:
http://m.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/13/lily_robotics_faces_lawsuit_for_false_advertising/ (http://m.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/13/lily_robotics_faces_lawsuit_for_false_advertising/)
One bit of note is:
The complaint against Lily, obtained by The Register, alleges that the company knowingly misled customers by creating a promotional video that purported to show video footage captured with a Lily drone prototype.
"In fact, none of the video in the Promotional Video was shot by a Lily Camera," the complaint says. "Most notably, the POV footage used in the promotional video was filmed using a professional camera drone called the DJI Inspire."
Apparently they (allegedly) fibbed about the footage from a prototype, making out it was from the Lily camera when it was from a GoPro. OK, fair enough that fibbing is a naughtly thing to do, but was the prototype supposed to be the final thing? I mean, if it's a technology demo, isn't it OK to say "this is what it will look like" (noting that they didn't have small print saying it wasn't the real thing as you'd buy it).
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I mean, if it's a technology demo, isn't it OK to say "this is what it will look like"
Probably fine IF you say so, which they apparently didn't.
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which they apparently didn't.
Indeed, although a closer reading doesn't say they did fib, only that the boss didn't want the footage to be traced to a GoPro. Kind of like Microsoft not wanting their servers to be known to run Linux (and saying so in internal email), which is fine so long as they don't sell the asp.net services as IIS hosted.
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Apparently they (allegedly) fibbed about the footage from a prototype, making out it was from the Lily camera when it was from a GoPro. OK, fair enough that fibbing is a naughtly thing to do, but was the prototype supposed to be the final thing? I mean, if it's a technology demo, isn't it OK to say "this is what it will look like" (noting that they didn't have small print saying it wasn't the real thing as you'd buy it).
The problem is they didn't say it was from a mockup, hence the lawsuit.
Also, it wasn't a prototype, it was shot from a competitors commercial drone.
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Also, it wasn't a prototype
The advert, yes, but the dodgy emails refer to a prototype which had a GoPro mounted on it. I think the desire to explicitly not have it traced to a GoPro may have been because that was a direct competitor rather than to hide that it wasn't the final hardware.
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I wonder if they are telling the truth. They told that they will shut down and refund at the same day the DA informed them about filing a lawsuit. They were "racing against a clock of ever-diminishing funds", but still have enough money left for refunding?
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"racing against a clock of ever-diminishing funds", but still have enough money left for refunding
I am not defending them (honest!) but that could mean that they were burning through other investment funds and the point at which that runs out and they would have to start on the returns money is where the clock runs out.
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The DJI Mavic has just been released as well. It looks pretty amazing and though more expensive it would be strong competition to the Lily. I certainly want a Mavic as it looks well designed and has DJI knowledge and support.
https://www.dji.com/mavic (https://www.dji.com/mavic)
Fraser
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I've had a Mavic for 2 months now, it's a real technology marvel and extremely well crafted fine piece of gear.
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The Hover camera also looks impressive, though not quite on the same level as the Mavic - amazing nobody thought to put a carbon-fibre shell round a quad before.
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If you read the actual complaint : https://regmedia.co.uk/2017/01/13/lily_complaint.pdf
It appears that they made deliberate attempts to disguise the fact that the demo footage was shot from a GoPro, and there are emails to prove it. Seems like a pretty good case for false advertising.
My guess is it will boil down to whether the crowdfund campaign is subject to the same rules as conventional sales and advertising.
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"racing against a clock of ever-diminishing funds", but still have enough money left for refunding
I am not defending them (honest!) but that could mean that they were burning through other investment funds and the point at which that runs out and they would have to start on the returns money is where the clock runs out.
I've just read that they have burned $15 million from some sponsors and didn't touch the money from the preorders. Kudos for that.
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I don't believe I've seen it stated anywhere how much the refund would be, i.e., nowhere have I seen it state "full refund".
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I would think most anyone on here could design an RC coptor with a camera for 34 million.
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The Hover camera also looks impressive, though not quite on the same level as the Mavic - amazing nobody thought to put a carbon-fibre shell round a quad before.
Patents? There have been a few protected rotor quads before.
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My guess is it will boil down to whether the crowdfund campaign is subject to the same rules as conventional sales and advertising.
Their problem there is they didn't use any of the usual crowdfunding platforms, they did their own thing where they really took "pre-orders", not "investments" - so it will likely be considered as "pre-order sales" and not "crowdfunding"...
I would think most anyone on here could design an RC coptor with a camera for 34 million.
The whole point for this one was not to be "RC" but fully autonomous with barely any user interaction required, or even possible. Even the biggest players aren't quite to that level yet.
My guess is that they folded simply because they were way too optimistic at the start. If they delivered something now, already more than a year late it would be nothing like what they advertised either in design or capabilities, everybody would go batshit crazy about them, so they really had no choice.
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The whole point for this one was not to be "RC" but fully autonomous with barely any user interaction required. Even the biggest players aren't quite to that level yet.
Maybe a ToF based direction finder for a 433 MHz beacon would help, forget about image processing on the drone.
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It takes some innovative technology to do what the Lily set out to do, not something particularly cheap to manufacture. Even so, drones or multi-rotor RC aircraft with cameras are a dime a dozen anymore. The difference is their flight paths have to be pre-programmed or manually controlled. Even if the Lily had accomplished what it set out to do (follow the user autonomously taking video), these things are typically made cheaply as possible and tend to have reliability issues. They could run into lawsuits where people are getting hit by drones following them around or other damage to life and property when a drone flies off out of control. It happens all the time with drones sold currently and was the imputes for the FAA to impose regulations on them. The whole idea was wrought with pitfalls so it's no surprise to me it didn't make it.
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Seems to be another case of "AI is easy" handwaving. (In 1966, Marvin Minsky assigned "vision" to an undergrad as a summer project.)
The Lily was to be an autonomous UAV with no operator backup. Just the legal liability issues involved are crippling.
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Maybe a ToF based direction finder for a 433 MHz beacon would help, forget about image processing on the drone.
GPS is enough for locating, vision recognition is just there for additional precision and image smoothness. The big issues for something you "launch and forget" are obstacle detection and positioning reliability.
Technologically the first is becoming possible, the 2nd is getting better but still a bit of "spray and pray"... but the state of the art in both fields combined costs >3x what Lily was hoping to sell for, anyone with a foot in the industry would call BS, completely unrealistic.
My stance is that anything that needs breakthrough technology should never be crowdfunded or even announced before being ready. All they achieved is reveal the interest in this so that the big players could invest all their know-how and WAY bigger resources into competing with them.
It's not a bad thing per se, but anyone going this way should be aware of it. Maybe they were. Make a big buzz so that someone else does the complex job that's outside of your capabilities and creates what you want... IF they actually do refund all preorders I would consider them geniuses.
The lawsuit developments will also be very interesting for anyone considering a tech project. Nowadays if you don't do what they did you have 0 chance of getting attention. If that gets punished... it would be a giant blow to innovation and small-medium scale developments. If when you try to do something good all you gain is being sued for doing what everybody does, why bother. I'd rather sit on my chair and watch the others in their mess than try to do something, even if I've got great ideas.
I'm NOT condoning the stupid "not actual footage" or whatever warnings that would make it legal. The only solution is for everybody to be prohibited from including any footage that would warrant such a warning... but it would force a "downgrade" on so many big players there's no chance it would happen. Actually, maybe with Trump's councelor pushing down on them that could be a thing...
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GPS is enough for locating
Yeah I guess you're right, at least as long as you calculate position from the same subset of satellites.
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Just the legal liability issues involved are crippling.
I wonder if that might be the real reason. I've been involved with a novel (at the time) invention which worked well and got to the point of selling hand-built pre-production units, and then got dropped because of the legal and insurance potential. The current crop of rules regarding drones didn't exist when they started, I think.
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If you read the actual complaint : https://regmedia.co.uk/2017/01/13/lily_complaint.pdf
It appears that they made deliberate attempts to disguise the fact that the demo footage was shot from a GoPro, and there are emails to prove it. Seems like a pretty good case for false advertising.
I read the complaint and am not that sure it was false advertising (bearing in mind this complaint isn't going to offer up any evidence for the defence). Yes, that video is kind of incriminating, but only out of context. The on-screen text ("Lily shot | Follow", for example) I would normally think to myself as having the subtext "this is what it would look like". Typically, this type of advertising would say "Actual footage" or similar, so I don't think it's that clear cut.
Possibly the decider would be the Kickstarter blurb - in that, did they say they need the dosh only to get manufacturing started or to finish development? If the latter, the punter should suspect it can't be real footage.
I imagine the same applies to the pre-sales. That is, whether it was sold as basically in production but not shipped yet, or 'soon to be ready' kind of thing.