JooJoo

» see thejoojoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

the crunchpad story i remember. the tablet that came out of it i barely do. michael arrington wrote a long post on techcrunch in july 2008 saying somebody should build a $200 web tablet that opened straight into a browser, and that he was going to try. for the next eighteen months techcrunch ran updates on a sequence of prototypes (the a, b, c lineage that anyone reading the blog at the time will remember) built in partnership with a singapore hardware company called fusion garage. it was one of those parallel-track engineer stories the blog was good at: an editor speedrunning a hardware product in public.

then in november 2009 the partnership collapsed in a way that became its own minor drama. fusion garage's ceo emailed arrington saying they were going to ship the device alone, without techcrunch and without the crunchpad name, at $499 rather than $200. arrington posted "the end of the crunchpad" on november 30 and filed a federal lawsuit on december 10. the device, rebranded as the joojoo, went up for pre-order a week after that.

i was watching this whole thing from ankara in late 2009. i had a techcrunch tab open most days that year and the crunchpad collapse was the kind of post you forwarded over msn to anyone who would care. nobody i knew was going to buy a $499 web tablet, but the lawsuit was the kind of business story that made tech news entertaining in the months before the ipad reveal made every other tablet irrelevant.

~ the record ~

~ the rename ~

fusion garage's pitch for the joojoo was that it would be a pure-web device. a 12.1 inch touchscreen with an intel atom inside, running custom linux underneath the browser. no app store, no operating system metaphor for end users. you turned it on, you got the web. that was actually a decent product premise for late 2009 if you had no idea what apple was about to announce.

apple announced the ipad on january 27, 2010. the joojoo shipped two months later on march 25 at $499. it had received 90 pre-orders. about 15 of those were cancelled after the ipad announcement made the comparison obvious. the early reviews were not kind. tech blogs that had followed the crunchpad arc covered the joojoo with the visible discomfort of writing about a project they had cheered on through its first life.

~ the lawsuit ~

the techcrunch case against fusion garage moved through us federal court in 2010-2011 alleging fraud and breach of fiduciary duty among other claims. arrington's complaint was the standard collaborator-cut-out claim: that fusion garage had used techcrunch's reach and brand to develop the device, then renamed it and shipped it solo. the case dragged. fusion garage's defense was that they had built the actual hardware and were therefore entitled to ship it on their own. by the time the case stopped being newsworthy, the product had stopped being newsworthy as well.

november 2011 fusion garage announced it would not be making any more joojoos. on january 9, 2012, the company entered liquidation in singapore owing creditors around $40 million.

~ what got buried with it ~

the joojoo is now a footnote in two larger histories: the ipad story, where every 2010 tablet looks doomed in hindsight, and the techcrunch story, where it is one of the early signs that running a hardware project from a media company involves a different set of risks than running a media product. but it is also a small reminder that 2008-2009 internet culture took the idea of a $200 cheap web tablet seriously enough to follow it for eighteen months across blog comments. the device they actually got was twice the price and three months too late, built by a partner who had walked.

both fusion garage and the crunchpad ended within roughly the same window. arrington stayed at techcrunch through its aol acquisition and beyond. the lawsuit was eventually settled out of court.

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