I bet the IP TechCrunch owns is simply the brand "CrunchPad." Good luck with that suit.

Fusion Garage's story is infinitely more believable than Arrington's. After both sides have spoken, I imagine it went down like this:

They show him their OS in hopes of getting press and subsequent funding. Arrington loves the idea and wants in on the concept. Fusion Garage goes and actually builds the thing. Meetings take place with Fusion Garage probably passively hoping for funding through Arrington's connections and Arrington monopolizing the conversation with "product ideas" that are more pie-in-the-sky thinking than actual engineering.

In the meantime, tablet fever grips the nation and a Fusion Garage with a working prototype has no trouble scoring VC meetings. They probably had to fight off the cash being thrown at them. Suddenly they don't need Arrington and those that actually came through with funding demand they end the charade of him being a participant. All they have to do is come up with a new name (Joojoo? Come on...)

What remains to be seen is how TC's audience will react. The idea that Arrington apparently tried to glom onto the project with no engineering contributions perfectly fits the tropes discussed on HN: MBA-types make a buck off the back of those who actually built the thing. I wonder if this tale will actually hurt his rep?

Who here will approach TC and Arrington differently after today?

So, here it is: Fusion Garage's side of the story. And what do you know, it doesn't exactly match up with Arrington's version. Best bit: "There are no contracts between Fusion Garage and TechCrunch."

Holy crap. I knew there was going to be more to this.

Ultimately, I think $499 is too much for a device that essentially browses the web, and that's it.

My netbook will do the web and lots of other things. Like let me play Civ II.

I get a feeling this is going to become a case study in how not to develop a product.

It's looking more and more like Arrington has totally screwed up contracts, agreements etc. And then it looks like this Fusion Garage CEO has a complete lack of understanding why the CrunchPad was a great name (etc)....

Im willing to bet we never actually see a product - either that or it will bomb.

You typically want to buy hardware from a trustworthy company. Whatever the truth is, I'd have trouble trusting Fusion Garage after this mess.

I am most intrigued at how Michael Arrington, a former attorney, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Arrington] would have failed so miserably at doing anything to protect his interests. No contract? No formal IP? Nothing?

That's quite an indicator that he likely had little to do with this device as Fusion Garage claims. If he'd actually done more to bring it to fruition, he would probably have taken the appropriate steps to safeguard his investment. For anyone else I may attribute a lapse like this as simply a mistake, but for an attorney to drop the ball this badly sounds quite suspicious...

Why does it only browse the web? How hard can it be to throw a desktop on there?

You make all that hardware and then cripple it with limited software? Whateva. I would pay $499 if it had bluetooth and could run a normal OS.

Also, these Fusion Garage guys need to hire a marketing/PR firm STAT. Fingerprint-marred green screen and scary looking nerd glowering at the camera is bad for business.

I find it interesting that this all apparently happened so quickly, but the timing still seems off.

The domain "thejoojoo.com" was registered on Nov 10th.

They told TechCrunch about the split on the 17th, and that day TechCrunch applied for the trademark.

I mean, who was running this show? Domain names and trademarks are supposed to be lined up and checked much further in advance. (Not to mention contracts...)

On a side note: this is the tech equivalent of celebrity gossip... I'm sure that much worse has happened in the past, but never this publicly.

It's hard to tell exactly what's going on here, but clearly Arrington was an idiot if he didn't have any contracts in place.

That said, I find fusion garage's side of the story pretty suspect, and even if it's true, I highly doubt they'll succeed. They seem way too focused on the product and the technology and seem to think it will market and sell itself.

I hope TechCrunch sues. Even without a written contract, there must be heaps of verbal and written evidence as to exactly what the relationship here was. Letting the courts sort it out might be the only way to get close to the truth.

The only thing I liked about the whole webcast/interview is that fact that he said it the way it is, "Techcrunch is just a blog". Not only that, its a tech blog with authors that has little to no tech knowledge about the underlying technologies they write about.

A tech news blog is itself a subject of news because of its hunger for drama.

So, why did they name it "penis" in chinese again?

I'm surprised at the vitriol here. This was clearly a joint project that got hijacked out of greed.

I was looking forward to buying several Crunchpads, but it will be a cold day in hell before I ever buy a JooJoo, just from principle.

My theory, which is pure speculation, is that Fusion Garage misinterpreted Arrington's support. He promotes many companies on his blog, TC50 and elsewhere. It seems entirely plausible that FG thought Arrington was simply an enthusiastic supporter trying to help a small company bring a product to market. Maybe they figured he would buy a bunch of units OEM and rebrand them as CrunchPads while they were free to sell the design to other companies or market a device at retail themselves. The fact that Mr. Arrington, who is a tech savy lawyer, apparently did not enter into any formal contracts supports this theory. He should know better. It's very suspicious that he would not clearly define the terms very early in the process. This suggests to me he wanted to swoop in and take control of the product only when it was nearing its completion. FG takes most of the risk -- he jumps in at the last second if they pull off the engineering side of things. The big question is who was paying the bills?

Mr. Arrington originally said the CrunchPad was not about profit. So what's the problem with Fusion Garage selling their own device? Or even selling the design to other companies? Again this strikes me as being very suspicious. Wouldn't more manufactures competing against each other be true to his original vision? Was FG unwilling to sell him this hardware to be re-branded as CrunchPads or were they unwilling to give him exclusive access to it?

It looks like FusionGarage was looking at initial funding (or acquisition) from techcrunch early in product development cycle. And techcrunch (i believe intentionally) avoided commiting anything earlier itself since they thought it as too risky. Techcrunch thought that they would bring in world class investors and team later around the product development ( few months before launch) and get a good stake in the product for that. And FusionGarage investors were frustrated that TC can come around later (when the risk is too low) and take a major bite of it.

In between, TC claims that they did initial marketing for the product. Technically it may be correct. But From risk factor, what was at stake here for TC ? Actually TC biz model works on buzz factor. More Buzz equals more readers and Revenue. So at worst (if product fails), they made some money out of the whole buzz. But for FusionGarage (and their investors), everything was at stake.

Arrington might be correct, they could have negotiated on the product stake. ( How about : 2% for initial idea discussion, 2% for initial marketing, and 2% bring in new investors and team .) I guess such a 5-6% offer would have still led to such a breakup. (But can u give a 30% stake just for blogging about a product ?)

To me, Arrington is a Bad (Scary) Startup-Investor here (keeping the startup in guessing game till end ..), and FusionGarage has a bad CEO who could not anticipate what was to come. And those investors are smart to bring the whole stuff out before the product is actually launched.

Looking at what he's holding versus what I saw in the hype pictures is a starkly different product in terms of size. I don't care if the green is a trick of the camera light or not Arrington was right if he wanted it priced topping in at 300-400. Netbooks are a much better deal.

Smartphones/netbooks have pretty much filled the niche for this device. You could add a radio to the cruchpad and it would be a bad cellphone. Even if there was any kind of success here, Quanta would zip in and build a netbook with a touchscreen and put them out of business fast.

The flap over who owns it doesn't matter, it's already dead. The whole advantage of a "small team" development is to avoid issues like these all together. If Fusion and Arrington had both put everything into this project, it might have gone somewhere. But mediocre product + fractured team = failure.

Best bet now would be to open the platform and hope someone with an open OS looking for hardware saves you.

It says the weird green screen effect in those photos is a trick of the camera, but it's remarkably consistent given the different camera angles. What would cause that?

Zoozoo is also the name of Vodaphone's India mascot, and has proved very popular. Not sure how that affects this, buts its not a terrible name, IMO. http://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&ei=NrMdS6-xGo3u7AP3...

So it was a fairly recent decision.

thejoojoo.com

Created: 2009-11-10

Expires: 2011-11-10

Updated: 2009-11-10

To ditch crunchpad or to go with joojoo

Well, they've certainly received a lot of publicity out of this. I read Tech Crunch an average amount and I actually wasn't aware at all of this device until recently. The device looks fairly average to me, and I can't image spending that much on a limited tablet style computer.

The racism in the comments over at engadget sure is unpleasant. Also, the green screened pictures is certainly doing them a disservice!

Someone posted a comment that says:

Hasn't the Archos9 existed already at that price point?

http://www.archos.com/products/nb/archos_9/

Possibly with more features? Or is it vaporware?

But it seems to have been killed. I think he is right, though; the Archos is a much nicer device that's already shipping and that's cheaper.

I'm betting this is a publicity stunt. This has all been too public for a real lawsuit. They have gotten much more mindshare from all the blogs due to their "fight" then if they had just announced the product in a normal way.

Pricepoint sounds more realistic yet still reasonable, glad to see it's still moving forward. Sad to see all the ugly behind the scenes business stuff (which is usually hidden from view, but all too common) airing in public.

No contracts? That seems like a newbie mistake I wouldn't expect from Arrington...

I wonder how all this story will affect the sales of the "joojoo" and of Apples coming Tablet. I was actually planning to get me a crunchpad but now I'll wait until all this settles down...

Wow, all I can say is if they had nothing signed, Arrington committed a pretty amateur mistake. As a lawyer, he should have known better. That's assuming we know everything.

the only way i can see this thing succeeding, is if its extremely hackable. Allowing users to run any os.. would be the first start. Otherwise as web client - could be ok , but again, netbooks are much cheaper, and does possibly the same. I would like it mainly as an e-book reader as the 10" from amazon is around the same price point, but with no pdf reader, no sd slot, or any idea of internal memory its a fail as a reader.

Even touchpad, webpad or cloud-D sounds way cool then joojoo and I just thought of those while in bed and typing this on my iPhone.

Might someone explain to me why this device was ever considered interesting? In just what way is it unique?

It's an interesting story but at $499 I don't see it selling all that well.

I'll continue to wait for the Apple Tablet.

joojoo: "karma. bad luck." http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=joojoo

Is it just me or that guy looks a lot like a Klingon?

What a clusterfuck.

Comments at engadget are really funny

Hasn't the Archos9 existed already at that price point?

http://www.archos.com/products/nb/archos_9/

Possibly with more features? Or is it vaporware?

Did they still want their custom OS instead of port of the Chrome OS? It seems that they should think again.

$499!? -- I'll wait for Apple.