CrunchPad, an exciting Internet tablet being developed by TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington (among others), was supposed to be unveiled before the end of the year. Instead, the project has died due to a curious legal skirmish. According to Arrington, Fusion Garage (TechCrunch’s partner) CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan nuked the project through a strange series of emails. He wrote:
Bizarrely, we were being notified that we were no longer involved with the project. Our project. Chandra said that based on pressure from his shareholders he had decided to move forward and sell the device directly through Fusion Garage, without our involvement.
Err, what? This is the equivalent of Foxconn, who build the iPhone, notifiying Apple a couple of days before launch that they’d be moving ahead and selling the iPhone directly without any involvement from Apple.
That’s pretty nuts. Fairly, Arrington admitted that this is his side of the story and Fusion Garage will surely spin it another way. Arrington wanted the CrunchPad to be, “a tablet computer that I could use to consume the Internet while sitting on a couch.” I’m totally down with that. I use my iPhone to check on my site, post some tweets, and read Facebook during television commercials. I wish I could do all of that stuff on a device with a larger screen. It’s sad that a cool and possibly revolutionary product will miss the market due to shareholder greed.
Looks like Michael Arrington could be the next Nikola Tesla. When are people going to learn not to sign away their inventions and ideas to the company they are working for… or at the very least negotiate a better contract.
-M
@Iceman It's hard to say without knowing the specifics of the deal TechCrunch had with Garage Fusion. It's going to get ugly and expensive in court, which is a shame for tech enthusiasts. CrunchPad was supposed to be a cool and cheap Internet device. I was very interested in it.