Very impressive design and what looks like top-quality components. [UPDATE: It appears to be a stock Xaircraft frame that costs $160. Thanks to the commenters for catching this]. You can back the project here ($999 for the copter, $1,499 for the full deal with APM 2)
Comments
Jani: Kickstarter has *always* used Amazon Payments. I've bought a few Kickstarter projects like the Capture Clip...
I think Kickstarter accountants did the math, and decided that with 28 days to go, they could not absorb the cost, if the project went south. At the rate it was going, Kickstarter could be in it for well over $100k, by the time the project starts, and if things go wrong. Also realistically, they don't get the money to buy inventory until another 28 days to today, making it the end of February before being able to commit to suppliers. Their estimated delivery date was April. That leaves them 2 months to order the parts, build the drones, and flight test each one and meet the April deadline.
But, this proves that there's definitely demand for a higher end product out there. 3DR should start a division to provide these higher end drones.
well either way. when new starting company starts to get huge amount of money in short time without any trackrecords, alarm bells will go crazy. And if i remember correctly eBay owns PayPal and they have similar rules.
For companies that have long good trackrecords it's not so big deal but still it's good to be careful.
It's all going through amazon. So I don't think paypal is involved directly with each project. If the payment deadline of 21 days is really enforced, then 3DR is in trouble with the APM2 delivery. ;-)
I would say answer is rather simple. They just got too much money on too little time and all fraud/scam alarms went crazy on Kickstarter.
As most of donater are using PayPal etc to give their money Kickstarter has to be careful not to be blocked by PayPal.
According to PayPal it's illegal to sell products that does not exist and from payment you have 21 days time to deliver or PayPal can do great deal of harm to money receiver in form of confiscating money permanently (till you do business) and 10-30% for every sales for next 3 months. It can happen sooner or later depend on how people will start to complain about the issue.
One my friend was hit this rule and ouch that did hurt a lot.
This all is done just to protect buyers.
Folks, it gets even worse!
Look at this photo which they show at the start of their video:
http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Eye3.jpg
and compare it to this photo:
http://www.cnchelicopter.com/01202011/v4v8/12112011_v4H6_600_3.jpg
located on this page: http://www.cnchelicopter.com/servlet/the-2122/Xaircraft-Hexa-Frame-...
If you look carefully you can see that they have photo-shopped out the "www.cnchelicoptor.com" and put in their own logo "eye3". in particular, look at the leg where the "www" was located, you can see some of their photoshop work where parts of the "www" is still visible.
The implication in their video is that this is a photo of their product when clearly it is not even their photo! It's a photo of another company's product!
It's stuff like this which basically says to me they can't be trusted. Not to mention the other stuff I mentioned above.
I suspect it was just too risky for Kickstarter.
The people behind it recently went bankrupt and lost their home. The husband (Grayson) is very sick. They owe a huge amount of money to many people. it is clear the husband was the guy behind this drone project, not the wife (Kellie).
On top of this they made impressive claims for the product. And the video didn't show it flying so you wonder if it really was even tested at all. No video of Kellie flying anything. No video of them running the software. Just lots of hype about drones with lots of video/pictures from elsewhere. Way too many warning flags, I think.
And even after it was canceled they were sending people off to their new web site, pretending they had no clue about what happened.
The Make blog:
http://blog.makezine.com/2012/01/20/hexcopter-drone-platform-kit-on...
started getting many emails from people owed money from Lumenlab. Make has asked the Siglers to respond, but I really doubt they will -- just like they have stopped responding to the many people owed money over the past year.
All in all, it was very risky for Kickstarter to keep it running.
I would be not surprised if the amount of money in face of the lack of real and solid information turned this project to a tremendous high risk to the Kickstarter reputation.
I'm wondering how much tested it was. They claim an awesome, stunning capacity. But the project don't has neither one single video to show the wonderful suuuper machine doing the job. The result is symptomatic.
The project creators did not cancel the project, Kickstarter did -
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/eye3/eye3/posts
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