Hasta La Gadget!

Trying to raise $32 million via crowdfunding always looked overly ambitious. And indeed it has proved to be so. Canonical’s Ubuntu Edge Indiegogo campaign to build a smartphone designed for converged computing has fallen considerably short of its target, ending with the fixed funding project receiving nothing at all — which, when you’ve got pledges worth around $12 million, has got to hurt. The campaign ran from July 22 to August 21.

The Edge, which promised to be both a high end Android and/or Ubuntu-powered smartphone and also an Ubuntu-powered desktop replacement, never looked like it would climb its own crowdfunding Everest, as Canonical was forced to keep coming up with new tricks to try to eke out more backers. The price of the device was lowered, dropping from $830 to $695, plus additional price tiers were added. It even offered backers the ability to vote on the next model’s specs if the project hit its target. Which sounds like a nice carrot — but not a $32 million carrot.

The largest sum raised via crowdfunding to date remains the $10.2 million garned by the Pebble smartwatch (via Kickstarter) — a project which had a far more modest $100,000 goal. If Canonical had plumped for a more modest funding target it too could be taking home multiple millions of dollars right now. Albeit, the cost of building a high end smartphone is of course hugely higher than building a smartphone accessory like Pebble — as Canonical noted:

We’ve set such a high crowdfunding target for a good reason. Between design, certification and manufacture, the costs of building a new phone are huge — but the more we produce, the lower the final cost of each handset. Setting such an ambitious target means a more competitive price per device.

It’s all about scale. To offer the final product at a competitive price we need to produce enough volume to bring the unit costs down. At the same time, we want to be selecting parts that are not yet proven for multi-million-unit production. This is the balance we found. A lower funding target might seem more likely to succeed, but the individual perk amounts would have to be significantly higher. We believe this funding target and these perk levels give us the best chance of success.

In the event Canonical raised just over a third of their overly ambitious funding target, and generated plenty of publicity trying. Which may ultimately have been mostly what the campaign was about. We’ve reached out to the company to ask what their plans are post-Indiegogo unfunding and will update this story with any response. Their project page also notes: “If we don’t reach our target then we will focus only on commercially available handsets and there will not be an Ubuntu Edge. All contributions will be fully refunded.”

Update: In an interview with The Guardian, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth appears to confirm this is the end of the road for the top-end Edge ‘superphone’ concept but he told the newspaper that carriers and handset makers are interesting in building lower end handsets running Ubuntu Mobile.

The Edge received around 27,500 publicly listed backers, including Bloomberg which pledged $80,000 for 100 Edge devices — the sole backer at the top tier enterprise pledge level.

The project raises some interesting questions about the limits of crowdfunding for funding complex hardware projects. Many more modest hardware projects do very well on crowdfunding platforms but there is clearly a funding sweet spot considerably far south of the multi-millions Canonical was hoping to raise (suggesting Elon Musk probably shouldn’t bother trying to crowdfund a $6 billion Hyperloop). At the Edge funding level, investor/VC backing appears to be the only game in town.

The Ubuntu Edge may be the future of the smartphone, but does it have a future? Nexus rumors abound for the next generation of Google’s vanilla tablets and smartphones. Meanwhile, startups are hitting up Indiegogo with new quantified self devices, including sleep-tracking sheet Beddit and extreme sports tracker Trace.

We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast, featuring John Biggs, Jordan Crook, Darrell Etherington and Romain Dillet.

We also invite you to check out our new DroidCast which airs every Wednesday.

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Intro Music by Rick Barr.

Smartphone companies have it pretty rough — they’ve got to sink millions into research and development every year, all in the hope of making their next shiny touchscreen gewgaw the fastest, slimmest, smartest, prettiest one ever. And every year we eat it all up, and take what we’re given.

But Canonical, the folks behind the incredibly popular Ubuntu Linux distro, isn’t your average phone smartphone company. It doesn’t have a huge production budget like Samsung or Apple, so it decided to crowdfund the creation of its first phone. Turns out that’s not the only thing they’re doing differently — Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth is currently fielding questions on Reddit, and he’s expressed interest in having backers of this current project getting some sort of say over what goes in future models.

And thus, Mark may have just come up with the coolest backer perk ever. Quoth Shuttleworth:

“This first version of the Edge is to prove the concept of crowdsourcing ideas for innovation, backed by crowdfunding. If it gets greenlighted, then I think we’ll have an annual process by which the previous generation backers get to vote on the spec for the next generation of Edge.”

In case you haven’t been following the story, the Edge is an awfully handsome concept for a phone that will run Ubuntu and Android and sport a sapphire glass-covered 4.5-inch 1280×720 display, along with the “fastest available” multi-core mobile processor, 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. The internet being what it is, Redditors couldn’t help but throw out bits of hardware for Shuttleworth and the Edge team to consider for the current model anyway. IR blaster? A “cool idea,” he says. Wireless charging? Probably not going to happen.

Shuttleworth was pretty forthcoming when it came to lingering questions about the Edge’s design and proposed rollout. As it happens, the team is still having trouble figuring out what sort of speaker system to throw into the thing (my two cents: the closer to HTC’s Boomsound setup the better), but it Canonical has asked potential carrier partners to agree to take note of a set of conditions that should minimize bloatware if the Edge is ever picked up and sold with long-term contracts.

Now this all hinges on the notion that Canonical was right in thinking that enough people would believe in a company that has never made a smartphone before to basically pre-order one for (at least) $675. In a way, this is a perfect move — if the project hits critical mass, everyone gets a phone. If it doesn’t, well, no harm no foul. The crowdfunding movement has given a software company a shot at really making a mark in an industry dominated by giants, some of which are already feeling the pinch because their pricey flagship devices perhaps aren’t selling in the astronomical numbers they were hoping for.

And so far, things appear to be going rather well. Canonical’s Indiegogo campaign only went live three days ago and Ubuntu fans have already chipped in just a hair under $6 million. Of course, there’s no guarantee that sort of traction will continue for any serious length of time — the company has already had to add some less expensive device pricing tiers to keep the campaign from flaming out too soon, and it’s still got a ways to go before it hits the $32 million goal.

(Oh, and in case you were wondering, Shuttleworth seems to be tackling nearly every question being thrown at him — no Rampart shenanigans here.)

The Ubuntu Edge is the amazing future space phone of your dreams, which is why UK-based Canonical feels it needs $32 million to make the thing. The Ubuntu creator made some good progress in the initial hours of its crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, and is now sitting at just over $4 million pledged, but to stoke the fire it took back its initial promise to up the entry-level pre-order price of the Edge from $600 to $830.

The plan at first was to up the price of the Ubuntu-powered superphone, which is somewhere between a grand tech experiment and a reference device, and it aims to be powerful enough to achieve true computing convergence and replace both smartphone and desktop. But the speed of pledges dipping seems to have encouraged Canonical to change its strategy, so it opened up a number of devices at the $625 dollar level, and also added $675 and $725 tiers. Each has 1250 devices total, with the $625 units selling out at a pretty fast rate already.

Once those are all gone, of course, it reverts back to the $830 level (unless Canonical once again decides to open up more less expensive options). The worry here is that after the initial bump, the Edge will hit a wall and won’t manage the rate of pledges it needs to reach its incredibly ambitious goal in the 29 days remaining in its funding campaign.

Canonical’s goal isn’t completely beyond reach – campaigns on crowdfunding sites including Kickstarter have raised ludicrous amounts of money in less time, like the Pebble, but that only raised $10 million in just over a month, and it was actually seeking about a tenth of that. The Edge sounds like it’ll be the best thing you can get in a mobile device when it finally does become a real, actual thing, but that’s not slated to happen until at least May 2014 per Canonical’s shipping schedule.

Crazy high concept device with huge price tag and relatively unknown mobile OS isn’t exactly a recipe for pre-order success, but the Edge is a mobile geek’s dream. The question is, will enough of those dreamers believe hard enough to raise $32 million in just under a month? Canonical’s clearly willing to give some ground to make that happen, but just how much it will take isn’t quite clear yet.