1. WeWork
WeWork was a digital startup firm that helps offer shared office space for new enterprises and startups. So essentially simply real estate for companies, however they also experimented with virtual spaces alongside actual ones and tried very hard to fool people into believing they did stuff when they really did very little. The firm would rent huge office buildings long term, and then split up smaller areas inside that property for additional short-term tenants to utilise it as their day-to-day office space. Somehow, this notion achieved an initial value of $47 billion.
The corporation secured a $8 billion investment from SoftBank and they began about purchasing office buildings in key cities around the nation. They expected the market for their firm to reach north of $3 trillion and no one thought it sounded absurd. They achieved this figure by concluding that absolutely everyone who worked at a desk in a city where they had an office qualified as a prospective member.
The CEO and his wife were famously awful at business and almost cartoonishly incompetent. He worked barefoot and downed tequila shots in the workplace while she once dismissed someone because their “energy” was wrong.
The company’s sole true strength appeared to be mismanaging money. In 2018, they lost $1.9 billion off of $1.8 billion in sales and continued to plummet. The CEO had to quit only to establish some trust in the firm, not that it succeeded at all. In 2019, their IPO flopped and had to be withdrawn. In 2021 they reported almost $2 billion in losses in the first quarter alone.
2. Hacked Sex Toys
By now, everyone understands that they need to safeguard anything that links to the internet from hackers since they’re hovering around every corner. We all have thousands of passwords to secure everything we possess and for good reasons — hackers truly will break into everything. That includes sex gadgets.
There’s a big and increasing market for adult toys that are linked to the internet to enable remote control by other users for reasons you may invent entirely on your own. But the difficulty is that few of these gadgets have any security built into them.
The most apparent security danger is any personal data that might be stolen by hackers from a linked device. This may be merely be humiliating facts relating to your usage of sex toys. But that’s not all.
One person on Twitter recently pointed out how their computer had been hijacked and someone acquired access to their Metamask, a browser plugin that enables you access Ethereum and other crypto services. The user lost some NFTs and dollars and the only unique item they could think of on their network was a sex toy they’d put in to charge.
3. Galaxy Fold
Science fiction has captivated us for a few years with the prospect of folding gadgets. Things like phones or tablets that you can roll up and bend appear useful because enough of us have dropped or crushed phones and cracked the displays to make it a desired feature. So, based on that, Samsung went ahead and built a screen that you couldn’t roll but you could at least fold. Or that was the intention.
The Galaxy Fold was unveiled in 2019 and it looked sort of like a wallet. You could fold it clean in half and then unfold it and your screen was right there, possibly giving you double the screen capacity of the size of it in your pocket. The price tag for this incredible gadget was approximately $2,000. Things didn’t go well.
Once Samsung finally let reviewers check out the phones, they failed instantly. It took just a day or two for most reviewers to point out that their folding displays simply didn’t function. Some created bulges, some only worked on one side of the fold. Other reviewers removed a protective film since they didn’t know not to remove it and practically wrecked the phone.
After the phone’s release, Samsung claimed to have sold one million handsets in just 4 months, but swiftly took that back claiming the 1 million was what they wanted to sell. Samsung’s CEO eventually said they rushed the Fold out too quickly and it was humiliating.
4. Coolest Cooler
Making a cooler into a tech flop is no small effort. A cooler may just be a styrofoam box, so a corporation has to go above and beyond to make it a failure, let alone one that takes technology down with it. But that’s precisely what the Coolest Cooler did when it stumbled its way into existence a few years ago.
In 2014, the Coolest Cooler was one of the largest projects ever on Kickstarter, which garnered an astounding $13 million, a fact no one could have seen coming. Who knew coolers were so popular?
The Coolest Cooler was planned to be able to charge gadgets like your phone and have its own blender and Bluetooth speaker, as well as some other knickknacks. Fast forward to 2019 and the firm filed for bankruptcy when the chiller ultimately went down in flames.
The CEO cited Chinese tariffs for terminating the product line, although product evaluations from 2016 had previously pointed out that the cooler was mainly junk. With a $399 price tag, you’d expect a high tech cooler to at least operate well, yet this one didn’t. The blender was average at best and the battery life lasted approximately four entire minutes of mixing.
The cooler never got issued during its Kickstarter since the firm ran out of money, so backs had to shell out an extra $96 to obtain one if they still wanted it. Plus, folks who didn’t fund the Kickstarter and simply purchased one on Amazon received theirs quicker.
0 Comments