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welcome to the 14 most hilariously awkward Tech fails of all time these are honestly so hard to watch that you’re one to bury your head in the ground to save yourself from the cringe so the air umbrella was a pretty exciting prospect when it first surfaced in 2014 it’s less bulky than a normal peasant umbrella it doesn’t use fabric that needs to dry off it doesn’t have a frame that’s going to get caught on things and invert itself anytime there’s anything more than just a little light Breeze and H you’d look like the coolest kid on the blog repelling rain with your wind force field so am I surprised that this ended up raising over $100,000 when it landed on Kickstarter not really but am I actually shocked that this even ended up on Kickstarter yes because well here’s the problem if you actually want to repel rain with air you’ve got to eject that air faster than the rain is falling at you so 25 mph as discovered by the action lab Channel or in other words this would basically need to be as powerful as a professional leaf blower you know those ones that are so loud you can hear them from two streets away yeah that just right next to your head not to even mention the size of the battery and therefore the weight required to keep this thing running for anything more than 10 minutes and then even if you solve those problems if you’re literally blowing the air away from you what happens to the person standing next to you so yeah the product was dead before it was even made and because the trailer was almost definitely faked too by cutting off the image so you couldn’t actually see the industrial size pump that I can only assume was attached to actually allow it to work the creators were forced to cancel the project but since they’d already spent all the backer’s money on it they had nothing left to refund them with two out of 10 two out of 10 just because things do get much much worse somehow like laundroid a robot straight from the future that would be able to wash to dry this thing could use AI powered visual processing to identify clothes iron those clothes sort them and then even fold them to be stored in a dedicated closet and this thing was even demoed live at the CES Tech show where it did manage to fold a t-shirt in front of thousands of attendees leading to this campaign being on a whole other scale to the air umbrella I mean this company raised $89 million in funding and then borrowed 20 more for some reason well this is awkward because it’s only upon receiving all of these funds that laundroid realized a slight flaw in their plan they were trying to create something requiring the technology of 2050 but actually using the technology of 2015 sure they were able to get it working on under their own very specifically controlled demos but as soon as you took it outside of that yeah I mean like one Verge reporter found that laundroid couldn’t even handle folding his T-shirt in 2018 because the black color confused the image processing I mean what would it do if I handed it this but also the vast engineering required to get robotic arms to be able to do what’s actually quite a simple task for humans means that this robot was priced at $16,500 who could afford that well only people who could also just hire a maid who could do the job far better and far faster because yes laundroid took between 5 and 10 minutes to fold the most simple t-shirt Peak example of over engineering to ion out a non-issue by vaguely saying the word AI a few times in the earshot of some investors the company went bankrupt about 4 years after they first debuted presumably because they realized how impossible it was to achieve what they were promising because even despite spending over $100 million they did not manage to ship a single unit before they well folded three out of 10 but I got to say one of the best places to experience that raw unrefined Silicon Valley awkwardness is Live Events Tech demos and presentations where things don’t go to plan and just watching the chaos that ensues like Apple’s iPhone 4 launch event I cannot tell you how much hype there was for this phone it was the first ever major redesign of the iPhone it was the introduction of the retina display but um in the process of showing the audience how much faster and better the iPhone 4 was compared to the previous iPhone 3GS Steve Jobs stumbled into some connectivity issues okay let’s just watch the clip it’s insanely uncomfortable you want to watch as well so now let me go ahead I’m going to go to some websites I’m going to go to the New York Times today and uh let’s just compare these websites so the iPhone 3GS is on the left and it’s loading it faster oh no our networks in here are always unpredictable so they’re a little have no idea what we’re going to find they are slow today you has to keep filling the S you know you could help me out if you’re on Wi-Fi if you could just get off I appreciate it uh we’re having a little problem here I don’t know what’s wrong with our networks I can show you some pictures in the camera roll let’s just go take a look at some photos here I mean he definitely handled it well considering what was at stake but it’s just the whole well a blaming the audience for the iPhone going wrong and then B the well I can show you some pictures and the Ripple effects of a mess up like this they are enormous because all of a sudden there is a caveat to every single piece of coverage that people will make on the iPhone 4 Apple also had an equally big blunder recently with their tra for the 2024 iPad Pro they’ basically gone and hired a huge industrial press to slowly crush a myriad of artists tools and I was actually in the crowd watching people live cringing as this press slowly eat the life out of every single object on this platform until finally revealing that all of those things were now compressed into the new iPad Pro and you can see the metaphor that they were trying to go for they really want to portray the wide array of tools that they have for artists like procreate and garage band and how crazy it is that all of them fit into this new ridiculously thin device but the interpretation that a large part of the internet actually took instead was that this is just yet another big tech company very literally crushing the humanity of the individual artist it’s them looking at a bunch of sophisticated artist tools the kinds of finely crafted implements and instruments that take a lifetime to master and saying oh yeah that’s easy that’s simple our shiny new tablet can do all of that I think Hugh Grant puts this really succinctly in a tweet I’m just surprised that not one person with decision-making power Apple saw this ad and thought hey guys aren’t people going to take this the wrong way considering the world that we’re living in right now anyway they know now cuz the internet’s response was vocal enough that Apple actually had to come out and apologize which is a rare occurrence and then almost like clockwork Samsung came out the woodwork to tell everyone how they would never Microsoft’s tablet fumble though was even worse they were demoing the brand new Surface RT tablet back in 2012 and you could tell they really really wanted this to be the iPad competitor but then it has access to all of the Windows apps for music for video for Xbox and gaming we can see here I’m running Internet Explorer I can browse smoothly you see great Pages using using clear type and have a great experience just with all the with with browsing it’s 10.6 in optically bonded widescreen display custom designed and of course people play games I go play any of the interesting games that are on in the Windows store and I can use surface for using all the sensors that are within Windows as well movies and entertainment look great as well oops hang on what there excuse me just a second surface works great for entertainment as well that is awful it’s just the timing the like the little word fumbles when you can tell he’s trying to stick to the script but also has no idea what’s going on cuz he’s looking at the tablet knowing that it doesn’t work but not showing the audience poor guy it’s a very bad look and in the case of the Surface RT it’s unfortunately quite representative of the product itself Windows was first designed for home PCS and this was the very early days of them trying to chop and fit that user interface into running off a touchscreen and a mobile chip the problem was that because this was such a mammoth task early iterations like the Surface RT was so laggy and most apps didn’t work the product was bad enough for Microsoft to lose $900 million so I guess you could at least give the guy credit for an accurate demo thank you thank you very much easy 4 out of 10 but if we’re going for Pure uncaged secondhand embarrassment you can’t beat Volvo in their demo for their new XC60 car in 2010 and its new automatic braking features well feel like a know what’s about to [Music] happen oh no I mean technically it ladies and gent we’ve had some kind of mishap in the testing here we’ve had some kind of mishap in the testing air you don’t say that was the worst one yet the irony that the car’s even got a badge saying Volvo Safety Center I mean what better demo could you have had to not buy anything that company makes this must be one of the most catastrophically awkward moments ever at a product launch event but while launch events gone wrong can clearly be pretty amusing the real backfiring only really occurs once the company has officially said it’s ready and the product gets out there in the wild like the Apple fine woven cases which were created to replace their old leather option Since cattle farming does create a massive amount of greenhouse gas emissions every year but fine woven which uses a new durable microwill fabric designed to feel sued like while also being largely made from recycled material was supposed to be Apple’s way of having their environmentally friendly cake and eating it too moving on from leather without leaving that level of quality behind but my goodness I mean first problem you know this fine woven fabric it might feel pretty thick giving the illusion of the kind of all One Piece cases that we used to from Apple but it’s actually just a really thin layer of this material on top of just memory foam okay but then you use this thing a little more and you realize hey it also collects like every single pocket particle that comes near it catur lint dust it’s impossible to keep it clean and then the real nail in the coffin is that you then realize it’s extremely prone to scratching and also the sides they can just tear and peel if you so much as rub it too hard up against any commonly used case material even really cheap case materials fine woven fair is by far the worst and you could say well it’s helping the environment so what if it has to be a bit worse well they’re still charging you the full $60 that you would have paid for leather you just are now quite likely to have to replace it for a new one after a year and therefore increase your wastage leakers are now claiming that fine woven was such a poor product that Apple has actually seized production of it going forward now whether or not that’s actually true it seems like a pretty smart move to me but you know what wouldn’t be a fail is helping us to beat Apple in our year-long subscriber Race So a sub to the channel would be triumphant now if you ever looked for jobs in the professional space there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve heard of a company called glass door glass door is a really Val valuable idea it allows the workers at any company to anonymously share their experience working for their employer which both incentivizes companies to act ethically while also arming future potential employees with information to make better decisions for themselves the key key word in all of this being anonymously because if anyone is leaving bad feedback for a company that they’re still currently working at it could be a career ruining move if that feedback isn’t Anonymous right well turns out the glassor has decided to change change their policy now any user who signs up needs to give their full name their job title and their employer upon sign up for the purposes of verification which okay kind of defeats the purpose of the whole site since even though your details aren’t being attached to your public reviews you can’t ever be truly Anonymous if the site actually does hold identifying information about you so weird move but fine until you realize that the website has also been secretly grabbing a lot of older users data too in really creepy ways when one user earlier in 2024 again anonymously going by the Sudan in Monica emailed glassor support team to ask them to remove some stuff that she’d written before what they did instead was to actually take the real name that was in her email and attach it to her public account oh not to mention her City too just in case you know anyone had any doubts about who she was which they must have gotten from her job search locations I guess and the only way to get that data scrubbed delete your account and every single review you’ve ever left so Monica ended up writing an angry blog post about this it blew up it became a massive Fiasco and we then realized that this had actually been happening to many other people too it all kept snowballing into headlines like if you’ve left a bad review on glass store you may want to delete your account obviously dealing a pretty shattering blow to both the company’s user base and their security reputation they probably should have double glazed it okay the nothing company you know the ones who make these funky transparent looking phones well as a way to try and stand out in 2023 they decided to try and once and for all fix the iPhone Android messaging divide created by iMessage or to put it another way to allow you to get blue bubbles on Android they employed the help of another company called Sunbird who created a system through which users could log into to their Apple ID on their nothing Android phone and from then on their messages could be rooted through an Apple Mac server Farm to come across as official Apple iMessages nothing advertised the feature to include single messaging group chats live typing indic Full Resolution Media sharing voice notes almost the full iMessage shebang at launch and importantly that the messages would be endtoend encrypted so they wouldn’t be stored on any servers however literally the day before the November 17th beta launch for this feature Apple announced that they’d finally allow iPhones to support the RCs messaging standard you know the one that Google had been proding them to do for a very long time because it creates parity Androids have RCS so as soon as iPhones have C S2 then it means that Android users while still of course having green bubbles will be able to freely text iPhone users and also have all the perks of modern messaging apps which means that overnight nothing’s sole unique offering was now just beautiful new blue bubbles but that’s not even why nothing made it on this list because when their app launched on the Play Store people quickly found out that it wasn’t end to end encrypted like they promised the app was actually sending all data unencrypted and it could easily be accessed in plain teex the reasons are fairly complicated but one easily relatable and frankly cartoonish example that shows the scale of the problem is that the app was using the HTTP protocol not https any guesses what the S stands for secure nothing weren’t actually the developers of the app that would have been way worse they’re just the ones who published it but that’s still a massive problem for a phone company who needs users to place their trust in them especially a new company with a lot to prove like nothing right it’s top five time this is where you just kind of need to grit your teeth and bear the pain now pretty much every Tech fail I’ve ever covered has some sort of twist like good idea but poor management or greedy CEOs or Shady business practices however in the case of the Humane AI pin yeah it was just a bad idea it was all going really well for the first 8 months or so with the company slowly teasing out details of this device that was the future of Computing Advanced AI capabilities all controlled by touch and voice they got a lot more coverage than you’d expect and a lot more Intrigue than most companies in their position skyrocketing their value to almost a billion dollars it of course helps that both co-founders are ex Apple Executives everyone loves the story of an ex-apple employee doing what Apple wouldn’t but let me tell you whilst the resulting AI pin did have the Polish and that unmistakably Apple minimalist design unlike Apple products it feels like in all the hype and the push to devel Vel something different the company forgot to ask the question why the AI pin did absolutely nothing that your smartphone couldn’t already do while still costing as much as a high-end smartphone would with an additional subscription cost that would likely make it even more expensive than your phone which can already do way more I mean technically you can wear it so it’s always around but I mean the thing takes so long to respond to your requests it’s probably still quicker to actually go to your pocket take out your phone and ask that instead essentially isolated it lots of media slated it and then Marquez MKBHD stepped in to reaffirm that it is in fact the worst tech product he has ever reviewed feels like a 6 out of 10 I think the company will continue to exist but once you’ve had a hype cycle and this much media attention and then blown it as badly as Humane has it’s really hard to get that chance again I think the company will now either be relegated to the specific niche of people who want phones but don’t like screens or it’s going to have to be bought out by a bigger tech company who can turn the salvageable bits into a better product okay so you remember that glass door section that was all about very poorly handled consumer data well at least that is still currently a what if situation Ashley Madison experienced the worst possible case scenario and by the way I still to this day cannot believe this is a thing but Ashley Madison is the first ever married dating site so you basically only sign up if you’re in a committed relationship and looking for some Secret side action boy the tagline is literally life is short have an affair so anyway obviously due to the very sensitive nature of the site it claimed to have excellent security until 2015 when hackers calling themselves the impact team announced that they had acquired every last bit of Ashley Madison’s user and employee data and demanded that Avid life media the Canadian company behind the site permanently take down both Ashley Madison and its related site establish men or else they would publicly dump all of this data I mean it’s it’s hard to have too much sympathy but imagine being one of the 37 million users of this site knowing that at any second your biggest secret could be blown in your life well even more messed up than it already is impact team held a grudge on the site because of how it both trivializes and enables adultery but the other reason they decided to attack the company was one particular feature that Ashley Madison offered you could delete your account but only if you paid them a $20 fee which is slimy enough already but then impact also found out that the company was only deleting that data from the public side of the site they were actually still keeping it internally even while extorting their users to remove it so what happened well Avid life media refused to take the sites down and impact team they were not bluffing they proceeded to flood the internet with post after post 32.8 GB of customer information salary data spreadsheets containing email and password combinations revenue reports source code customer chat logs all topped off with a new revelation keep in mind that the site is a scam with thousands of fake female profiles 90 to 95% of actual users are male chances are your man signed up on the world’s biggest Affair site but never actually had one he just tried to if that distinction matters oh goodness well I’m sure that 2015 was an amazing year for divorce lawyers but I me another group who massively benefited from this Scandal is other hackers because people whose data was leaked in this breach have been receiving personalized blackmail emails ever since and even though you’re probably not visiting Ashley Madison I’m going to show you a new WhatsApp contact that you can add right now who can just generally stop you falling into traps on the internet and no it’s not my mom it’s actually bit defender’s new AI powered assistant sco this vid’s sponsor the concept is this there’s like a million cyber criminals out there right but now they’re all using AI to mask their scams to the point where Common Sense alone sometimes isn’t enough so this is like a completely free companion you add it as a contact or just to your web browser and anytime that you’re not sure about something that you see on the internet anytime you’re not sure about a link or you know there’s emails that could either be something that you need to very urgently action or a way for someone to steal your details all of that stuff you literally just ping it over to sco the same way that you would text your mom except this unlike your mom uses very Advanced AI to tell you what to do and I’ve actually tried to trick it quite a lot at this point and I have not been successful I’ve actually been wanting to work with Bit Defender for a while now because they’re they’re quite good like this is the brand that’s trusted by law enforcement globally and they’re very highly ranked by independent Labs so scam is a good one for you who’s already quite techy but I would say also particularly people you know who are more likely to fall for scams so Link in the description it is completely free now if you thought the crowdfunding air umbrella and the LA Droid were bad then xano drones was an absolute shambles this company were promising something pretty incredible a palm-sized drone that did away with fiddly onscreen controls and instead owed you to control it using really intuitive gestures so moving your phone around to move the Drone around and it was apparently so stuffed with highgrade sensors that it could do it all it could follow you it could avoid obstacles it could even lock onto your face to shoot selfie video for up to 15 minutes per charge you want to know how much funding this project got £ 2.3 million it was the most funded Kickstarter project in the history of Europe and unlike the air umbrella which was a bunch of very carefully curated faceless demos the Zano drone campaign seemed to come with loads of real evidence that it was being worked on and real people staking their reputation on it we’ll get back to that last bit well the first bit of worrying news was that talking the Welsh company behind the xano drones were actually uncovered to have previously been contracted to develop a military surveillance quadcopter which they failed to deliver on after 3 years of funding because they couldn’t figure out the infrared obstacle avoidance Tech which is the same Tech they promised to deliver to the Zano so it still didn’t work when people received their xanos they found out that while the obstacle detection function was on all it would do is just fly up in the air a few feet and then land again over and over yeah you know the sky was not the obstacle we were trying to avoid and in the odd times where it didn’t just flop around pathetically it would suddenly go out of control flying off in random directions until it was either out of range lost in a tree or embedded in someone’s face so Zano didn’t even manage to achieve the base function of a drone and then because the kickstarter was so successful that they ended up with 20 times the number of orders they were targeting to fulfill it also means the company smashed all of their stretch goals if you’ve ever used Kickstarter you’ll have seen that sometimes companies will promise extra features if they hit a certain number of orders so yes they had to fulfill all of those too which they were clearly not ready for the company was so strained that they ended up burning through their entire pot of cash to the point where they actually went bankrupt before they could even attempt to integrate many the features shown in the original trailer like gesture control and the Drone being able to land back in your hand wow that actually worked it’s like the least awkward thing all video it’s actually a bit of a shame that they never got to finish it cuz I would have loved to see the end result of someone holding out their hand and a clearly confused drone accidentally landing on their head but this project got just way out of hand because in order to try and save themselves from bankruptcy the company then started selling the Drone to new buyers before it had even shipped it to the existing backers this project was so poorly handled that it even had a profound effect on Kickstarter themselves with people dropping out left right and center and losing faith in the platform themselves it got to the point where Kickstarter had to send a letter to backers announcing that Zano’s creators were banned from creating any further projects and they even went as far as to commission the freelance journalist Mark Harris to do a fullscale investigation basically a postmortem to make it clear to the public that the reason Zano didn’t work was because of them and not Kickstarter although let’s be honest Kickstarter didn’t have nothing to do with it number two then has got to be Fisker an American Automotive Company who released a car called the ocean and this one also involves our buddy Marquez MKBHD so Marquez initially asked Fisker to give him that car so he could review it but the company kept delaying so he just borrowed it from a dealer when fisa found out that Marquez had found a way to get hold of the car they asked him to wait to review it until a software update came out he said no and reviewed it anyway he his words were it’s not really in my policy to wait on promised future software updates I’m going to review the car that’s out now that real buyers are actually living with and I think this is the important point if this was a pre-released product and it was running beta software then maybe what the company was asking was fair but no this car was on sale and in buyer hands so no taky boxies so anyway marquez’s review was pretty resoundingly negative the worst car I’ve ever reviewed is actually the title talking about a lot of weird choices including unlabeled buttons and sunroof solar panels you can’t Monitor and software glitches with the key fob the cameras and more it does not look like a good product I think that’s pretty clear but then fisa who’s already in a bad spot here made it a lot worse with their response they basically called up the dealer who lent the car to Marquez and asked him for marquez’s personal details so they could get in touch directly with him it was a clear sign of a company not confident in their product but in fact scrambling to hide a mess which is not only morally wrong but I mean that would be a crime in some countries Fisco was already on the down before this whole Fiasco but obviously it blowing up across the Internet it’s not going to decelerate the process and it made it very much an external embarrassment as well as an internal one to the point where in this moment fisa said that they may not even have enough money to survive the year and they’ve had to turn to extreme markdowns to Stave off bankruptcy they’ve basically been forced to slash the price of the ocean their only model by nearly 40% oh yeah and they’re also on track for being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange for failure to keep their share price above $18 out of 10 fail but now it’s getting majorly majorly awkward with Yahoo it sounds ridiculous today but before Google became the absolute Behemoth that it is now Yahoo was the biggest search engine in the world but here’s what makes this so cringeworthy Yahoo actually had the chance to buy Google twice the first time was in 1998 where the two Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin they wanted to sell their startup so that they could get back to focusing on College which they priced at $1 million and the tech that made them confident enough to price it that high was something called the page rank system it’s basically the function that shows you the page that most closely matches what you’re looking for essentially what became the core function of Google search yah who decided to not buy the company they said it was overpriced okay but then fast forward to 2002 where Google had already way overtaken Yahoo to be the reigning search engine for a couple of years it was looking so bad for Yahoo that they decided to cut their losses and just go after Google again they swallowed their pride and they offered them $3 billion Google said give us 5 billion and Yahoo thought No 5 billion that’s absolutely crazy and they walked away for the second time but oh my goodness you know what Google is worth today 2.1 ion Yahoo could have made a 400 times profit if they’d sealed the deal in 2002 and if they’ done it in 1998 well 2 million times but as it stands because they didn’t they ended up being crushed by Google with most of their Core Business being acquired by Verizon in 2017 for just a fraction of what it used to be worth 9 out of 10
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