Post date: Aug 23, 2013 8:58:26 AM
UK-Mobile Phone/Edge -- Crowdfunding project for Canonical's Edge fails in UK
China Central Television (CCTV) - A crowdfunding project for the production of Canonical's Ubuntu-based Edge smartphone has failed, only having raised about 12.8 million US dollars of its targeted 32 million.
The Ubuntu based computer operating system of Canonical Ltd, a UK-based privately held computer software company, has a quite good market share, only after that of the windows and Apple systems.The Canonical Ltd, without strong capital backing, decided to have its hardware open sourced last month and as a result, it introduced a campaign for its Ubuntu-based "Edge" smartphone. According to the campaign, contributors, as long as having invested 690 US dollars, could get an "Edge" smart phone once the campaign achieves success, and if the campaign were to fail, it would refund the money to the contributors.
Open sourcing is to make its software information public for free so that all people, including the designers of the software and its users, could jointly develop the software, and after that the software is provided to its users for free.
"The Edge represents such a leap forward in terms of innovation, and such a larger step from where the market is right now, that it's difficult for industry which wants to innovate, but is conditioned to not take risks to support such a project. So, we thought crowd founding was a perfect way to do that, to demonstrate the demand," said Jane Silber, CEO of Canonical Ltd.
The Edge was designed to have at least 4GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage, and its users would be able to boot to either Ubuntu or Android.
"We will put on both the Ubuntu operating system and Android to do a boot, but importantly with a Ubuntu, it gives you the capability to have both a phone and a desktop all from the same device. So if you were to plug it in to a keyboard and monitor, you would have a full desktop computing experience, and when its unplugged, you have a phone," added Silber.
After the campaign was introduced, it raised two million US dollars in just two hours, which broke the record for the website of Canonical to raise money.
However, it only raised 12 of its targeted 32 million US dollars from July 12 to Aug 21, which means that its crowdfunding campaign did fail in the end.
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