What does $20 million burning smell like? Just ask DigiScents!

By Andrea Dusi in Unknown Startups 4 Comments
ISmell Digiscents

A particular idea, which raised $20 million in funding to create a product that was never released on the market: today i want to tell you about DigiScents and its iSmell.

The concept behind the project by Joel Lloyd Bellenson and Dexster Smith was, no doubt about it, fun: to recreate smells and perfumes through a device connected to the PC. Let’s go back to 1999 when, during a holiday in Miami, the two partners, amazed at the variety of perfumes, scents and essences that could be perceived on the beaches, began thinking of a way to store and reproduce these olfactory experiences in different contexts.

Continue reading

Keychains and condoms, what about market research?

By Andrea Dusi in Unknown Startups 0 Comment
Condom and keyrings

While surfing the web I stumbled upon a very curious story that, despite its peculiarities, or perhaps because of them, has a lot to teach us about startuppers.

We must go back to the late 90s, when Stanford Magazine published an article by one of its former students, Robert L. Strauss, who in the eighties, in defiance of his MBA in General Management and MA in International Economics, saw the birth, and shortly after the death, of what he considered to be the idea of the century.

Continue reading

Burning $5.5 million: Wantful, the startup for personalized gifts

By Andrea Dusi in Unknown Startups 0 Comment
Wantful shutted down the business

It wasn’t long ago that we heard the news about the closure of Wantful: the American startup created in 2011 by designer and entrepreneur John Poisson, which proposed the ambitious goal of revolutionizing the world of e -commerce and gifting.

But what exactly ended his run is still unknown to most people.

Thanks to an innovative navigation system, the company based in San Francisco and New York could advise their web surfers about what would be the most appropriate gift, analyzing information, the gender, tastes and preferences, of those who would receive them.

Continue reading

Pleo: too much, expensive, unuseful, innovation

By Andrea Dusi in Unknown Startups 0 Comment
Pleo

Looking at it, it seems like a simple toy, a toy dinosaur.

Well, it definitely is a toy. But why are we talking about it in this blog?

In reality Pleo is a robot designed and engineered to mimic the movements and appearance of a baby Camarasaurus of a week old (bear in mind, of just a week!). It was created by Caled Chung, the co-founder of Furby, cute little soft toys that move and do a thousand things (the modern version can also be managed through smartphones).

Camarasaurus baby

Continue reading

So many mistakes behind Everpix failure

By Andrea Dusi in Unknown Startups 0 Comment
Everpix Failure

If, in a previous article, we talked about the end of a brilliant startup due to a lack of passion, this time we shift the focus to a case that is diametrically opposed. The example of Everpix, in fact, is full of passion.

This startup, founded in San Francisco in 2011, will definitively disappear from the web on December 15th, 2013. And this is all despite the enormous efforts made ​​by Pierre -Oliver Latour, its creator, to keep it alive. Yes, because once the abundant initial sum of nearly $2 million paid by the investors (including Index Ventures and 500 Startups) was gone, to avoid collapse Latour tried the only two solutions that were possible: find other financing or sell. And he tried. And tried again. And tried again and again. But his efforts, unfortunately, did not bear fruit, so… bye-bye Everpix!

Continue reading