Drones are on the rise, but there's one Kickstarter-funded drone that ended up crashing and burning, with plenty of blame being placed on plenty of different parties by the angry Kickstarter customers who didn't get their Zano minidrone.
Kickstarter itself, however, commissioned an investigative journalist to find out exactly what went wrong with the campaign, and that journalist has now published his finding.
The journalist, Mark Harris, is a Seattle-based writer who spent a total of six weeks looking into the company and reaching out to related parties to find out why Zano didn't take off.
In the report, Harris describes Torquing Group, a business started by Ivan Reedman, who had the goal of building a successful and marketable drone. He turned the drone into a Kickstarter sensation, with the campaign being funded with a whopping 2,335,119 pounds, or around $3.3 million. Unfortunately, after the campaign, Reedman discovered that he and his team didn't actually posses the knowledge or skills to create the drone that he had marketed.
According to Harris, however, the saga didn't involve foul play — Reedman truly thought he could build and sell the drone. Many customers of the campaign will have been hoping for a smoking gun to prove that they had been scammed into giving away their money.
"Torquing's directors managed their business poorly and spent the Kickstarter money too freely, but I've found no evidence that any of them ended up rich on the backs of the crowd," said Harris in the report.
Of course, that doesn't mean that Reedman is totally innocent. Harris raised questions about the video on the Kickstarter page that was used to market the project and ended up being one of the main reasons the drone generated so much buzz. Reedman says that he didn't use CGI or other drones to market a misleading picture about the drone, but he does admit that the video shows features that weren't operational at the time.
In the end, it looks like Reedman promised a Zano that wasn't possible for him or his team to deliver. Not only that, but Harris also suggests that Kickstarter should be more explicit about the risks that backers are taking when they fund a project and reconsider the way it deals with complex projects that involve large amounts of money.
Via: BBC
