Although this is a shame it is yet another sign (for me) that the 'Internet of Things' is going to be DoA if we have to also rely on them for a backend cloud service. Most of these devices could be run in a completely decentralised way, such that if the company goes under, your device is hardly affected. e.g. I don't expect my light switches to stop working if the parent company gets acquired or shuts down.

There are real challenges to making distributed systems easier to build but I'm working with others on that c.f http://nymote.org and http://openmirage.org.

Ninja Blocks just became the poster child for cloud based hardware failures.

The product never "needed" to be cloud-based. The dashboard could have lived on the Beaglebone Black inside the main unit and from there it could have allowed us to hook it into IFTTT, Pushbullet, etc. without the need for Ninja Blocks to still be a part of it.

These sort of failures make the larger corporate offerings look even more sweet, and that is a terrifyingly dangerous prospect. The company might not go away, but the data they will collect on you will probably blow your hair back.

IoT needs an open source solution, and fast.

One thing I feel the NB never quite achieved was "state". It sort of worked, but sometimes not the way expected. It turns out that "state" - like a door open or closed, is not easy to keep track of reliably. Caution is needed for anything else in the chain eg "if door open for longer than 30 sec, sound alarm".

In the end, nothing beats a physical switch on the door (wireless battery operated), with hardware on/off states. Then the door can't be mistaken ever as open or closed due to mis-matches in sending the state, or whatever other interference cause the "door open" state to get out of sync. If Ninja Blocks had made their own special little purpose-built wireless sensors and switches rather than use aftermarket, then things like state could have been sorted out early on IMHO.

The supplied door switch for example that came with the NB, triggered the same thing whenever the pin was moved in or out. The switch had no concept of open or closed or on/off, it just blurted the same signal each time it was triggered. Attempting to build "state" from such trigger data is never going to be reliable.

Knowing without doubt that your garage door is open or closed when looking at the app on your phone, is not something you want your security device to be wishy-washy about. You want the truth. Ninja Blocks (in combo with the basic remote sensors) simply couldn't give you the truth, it could only give you a "pretty sure, quite likely, almost certainly the door is closed". This isn't good enough for security.

This sucks. I wanted to buy one because it seemed to do what I want, but I guess they have decided that its better to go under than sell me one.

All I was waiting for was better support for existing services and devices.

Anyone behind YC want to go buy them to keep them alive? Its a massive waste to let the company go under when they have customers wanting to buy their product.

If the Ninja Blocks guys are reading this, you should remove the "Buy" buttons from your site.

They are a great source of inspiration to me. This comes as a shock.

The bubble is coming.

This reads like an onion article. This material is ripe for an episode of Silicon Valley.

so, snappy core didn't see the day?