Apple Bandai Pippin (PiP P!N)

Between 1995 and 1997 apple released a gaming console with internet capability called Bandai Pippin. The machine was a derivative of the Apple Macintosh platform that was equipped with a CD-ROM driver to enable multimedia software and applications, especially games. The operating system was a stripped version of  Mac OS 7.5.2, and was based on a 66 MHz PowerPC 603 processor. It had 6 MB combined system and video memory, and 128kb NVRAM. It was commonly equipped with a 14.4 kbit/s modem, although there were some versions with 28.8, 33.6 kbit/s modems. There was also the possibility of using a docking station and connect more devices.

Apple Pippin.

The Apple Pippin was an open multimedia technology platform, allowing Apple to sell licenses to third manufactures. Unfortunately, Apple made no effort to market the Pippin platform. Moreover, other big players, such as Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation, with more processing power were dominating the market. In combination with the high price and the luck of games, made this platform to be one big product failure.

Eyetop Wearable DVD Player

The Eyetio Wearable DVD player was a set of glasses that had attached small screens connected to a dvd player released in 2004. This system consisted of a portable DVD player attached to a pair of heavy-duty sunglasses that had a tiny 320-by-240-pixel LCD embedded in the right eyepiece. You were supposed to carry the DVD player and battery pack. The LCD was supposed to simulate a 14-inch screen.


Unfortunately, the Eyetop player stimulated the motion sickness because the left eye was free. There are still sold in amazon if your are interested. You can watch a video of the product (in German) here:

3Com Audrey

The 3Com Ergo Audrey was an internet appliance from 3Com released on October 2000 in the price
of USD499. Once connected to an appropriate provider, users could access the internet, send and receive e-mail, play audio and video, and synchronize with up to two Palm OS-based devices. 3Com discontinued the product on June 1, 2001, in the wake of the dot-com crash, after only seven and a half months on the market, making one of the most noteble failed technological products. Only 3Com direct customers received full refunds for the product and accessories.

Two Com Ergo Audrey devices with their infrared keyboard.

The 3Com Audrey is powered by a 200 MHz Geode GX 1 CPU, with 16 MB of flash ROM and 32 MB of RAM. It weighs 4.1 pounds (1.86 kg) and It is powered by the QNX operating system. It is equipped with a stylus and all applications were touch-enabled. The Audrey is equipped with a modem, two USB ports, and a CompactFlash socket. It is still available from some sellers. It included 56 Kbps modem and an optional USB Ethernet adapter.

Iridium satellite constellation

Iridium Satellite

The Iridium satellite constellation is a large group of satellites providing voice and data coverage to satellite phones, pagers and integrated transceivers over Earth's entire surface. Iridium Communications Inc. owns and operates the constellation and sells equipment and access to its services. The founding company went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy nine months later, on August 13, 1999.[1]

The constellation operates 66 active satellites in orbit to complete its constellation and additional spare satellites are kept in-orbit to serve in case of failure [2]. Satellites are in low Earth orbit at a height of approximately 485 mi (781 km) and the orbital velocity of the satellites is approximately 17,000 mph (27,000 km/h). Satellites communicate with neighboring satellites via Ka band [3] inter-satellite links. The satellites orbit from pole to pole with an orbit of roughly 100 minutes. This design means that there is excellent satellite visibility and service coverage at the North and South poles, where there are few customers. The cellular look down antenna has 48 spot beams arranged as 16 beams in three sectors. The four inter-satellite cross links on each satellite operate at 10 Mbit/s. Each satellite can support up to 1100 concurrent phone calls and weighs about 1,500 lb (680 kg).

Mistakes

Reasons for Iridium’s Collapse Cellular build-out dramatically reduced the target market’s need for Iridium’s service.  Iridium knew its phones would be too large and too expensive to compete with cellular service, forcing the company to play in areas where cellular was unavailable.

With this constraint in mind, Iridium sought a target market by focusing on international business executives who frequently traveled to remote areas where cellular phone service was not available. However, a number of mistakes leaded to the bankruptcy.


Use of stand-alone network in space: A call from an originating handset accesses the network at the nearest satellite, travels through space from satellite to satellite before beaming down to its destination on Earth. Unsurprisingly, all that technology came at a stiff price. Moreover, the lack of broadband data capabilities was another negative aspect of this decissio


Heavy handsets: The second issue was that the Iridium handsets were clunky, weighed about 1lb, and harkened back to Motorola's infamous brick phones, common a decade ago.

Small market: Despite spending more than 60M international marketing campaign, Iridium had managed to attract less than 20,000 customers.

Management issues: Though lots of new products fail to match early expectations, few, it seems, have failed with such an international bang. Insiders say Iridium's internal structure proved too cumbersome.  
Sales management: As the target group is the business people that traveling in remote areas where the don't have phone coverage, it seems that the sales department was non-existent. In 1999, CNN writer David Rohde detailed how he applied for Iridium service and was sent information kits, but was never contacted by a sales representative. He encountered programming problems on Iridium's website, and a "run-around" from the company's representatives [4]. You can't expect this type of support from a company that targets the managers of big companies that travel around the world.

Reborn

Their service was restarted in 2001 by the newly founded Iridium Satellite LLC, which was owned by a group of private investors. Although the satellites and other assets and technology behind Iridium were estimated to have cost on the order of US$6 billion, the investors bought the firm for about US$25 million [5]. The system is being used extensively by the U.S. Department of Defense through the DoD gateway in Hawaii.

Despite the big failures [5,6], the concept of Iridium satellite survived and new companies adapted to the new market requirements. A number of bad technical and management decisions leaded to this failure. 

References[1] http://jitm.ubalt.edu/XVI-2/article5.pdf
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellation
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ka_band
[4] http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9902/24/iridium.idg/
[5] http://www.davidvernon.net/David_Vernon/The_Canberra_Journal/Entries/2007/2/20_A_Heavenly_Sign_-_The_Iridium_satellite_story.html
[5] http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/iridiums-problems.php
[6] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/down-to-earth-reasons-for-iridium-failure-1113638.html

DigitalConvergence CueCat

CueCat scanner.

The CueCat was supposed to make it easier for
magazine and newspaper readers to find advertisers' Web sites. The company behind the device, DigitalConvergence, mailed hundreds of thousands of these cat-shaped bar-code scanners to subscribers of magazines and newspapers. Readers were supposed to connect the device to a computer, install some software, scan the barcodes inside the ads, and be whiskered away to advertisers' websites. Another "benefit": The company used the device to gather personally identifiable information about its users.

The CueCat is widely described as a commercial failure. The CueCat's critics said the device was ultimately of little use. The CueCat device was controversial, initially because of privacy concerns of its collecting of aggregate user data. Each CueCat has a unique serial number, and users suspected that Digital Convergence could compile a database of all barcodes scanned by a given user and connect it to the user's name and address. For this reason, and because the demographic market targeted by Digital Convergence was unusually tech-savvy, numerous web sites arose detailing instructions for "declawing" the CueCat — blocking or encrypting the data it sent to Digital Convergence.

Investors in CueCat lost their $185 million. The service stopped on 2001.

Syncronys SoftRAM

SoftRAM and SoftRAM95 were system software products which claimed to "double" the available memory in Microsoft Windows without the need for a hardware upgrade. The truth is that 700,000 users bought Syncronys's SoftRAM. Unfortunately, that's not what they got.

It turns out that all SoftRAM really did was expand the size of Windows' hard disk cache--something a moderately savvy user could do without any extra software in about a minute. And even then, the performance boost was negligible. The actual drivers were in fact slightly modified versions of code examples taken from Microsoft's "Windows Development Kit". Still, the program would try to pretend that it increased system resources, by silently increasing the size of the swap file on Windows 3.1 and by giving false information on the current state of the system. Even worse, the program was compiled with the debug flag on and so runs slower than the original driver from Microsoft.

The FTC dubbed Syncronys's claims "false and misleading," and the company was eventually forced to pull the product from the market and issue refunds. After releasing a handful of other bad Windows utilities, the company filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 1999. It will not be missed.

You can read here a full description of why this application is not working. No application can really increase your computer's RAM memory.

SoftRAM. Photo taken from http://www.dansdata.com/gz142.htm

Sharp RD3D Notebook

As the first "autostereo" 3D notebook, Sharp's RD3D was supposed to display 3D images without requiring the use of funny glasses. But "auto-headache" was more like it, as the RD3D was painful to look at. When you pressed the button to enable 3D mode, the notebook's performance slowed, and the 3D effect was noticeable only within a very narrow angle--and if you moved your head, it disappeared. Maybe the funny glasses weren't so bad after all.

Common problems with the Sharp Actius RD3D Notebook were:

• The 3D graphics could reportedly not be seen if the user slightly shifted position while looking at the computer.
• The computer's performance reportedly slowed when it was put into 3D mode.
• It was also very big (12 pounds), bulky, and extremely expensive, selling for $2,999.
• The battery life was also inferior, reportedly lasting for a mere 2 hours.