Zano

~ the last words ~

i build computer vision for drones now, which means i read the zano pitch differently than its backers did in 2014. a nano-drone that could see the world well enough to follow a person and dodge obstacles, on that little compute and that little battery, was a very hard problem then. the video made it look solved. it was not.

torquing group, a small firm in wales, put zano on kickstarter in late 2014. it raised over 2.3 million pounds against a goal of 125 thousand, the largest european kickstarter to that point and a staff pick. the promises were the reason: autonomous flight and hd video from a device that fit in your hand.

the physics did not cooperate. keeping a drone that small stable and aware of its surroundings was beyond what the team could deliver, and the battery could not keep it airborne long enough to matter. the ceo resigned in november 2015, and days later the company collapsed. around 600 backers got a drone that barely flew. everyone else got nothing. kickstarter was rattled enough to hire a reporter to investigate what had gone wrong.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

zano arrived at the moment crowdfunding still felt like magic. the campaign video showed a tiny drone doing what a much larger and much more expensive machine struggled with, and thousands of people paid up front on the strength of it. nobody backing it could test whether the hardware existed. that gap between a good video and a shipped product was the whole story, and zano became one of the first giant kickstarter failures to make it plain.

~ what got buried with it ~

the money mostly vanished into a hardware problem the team could not solve. backers had little recourse, because a pledge is not a purchase and there was no working product to return. the investigation kickstarter commissioned laid out a familiar pattern: a small team making an over-ambitious promise, with costs nobody had mapped. i see the same optimism in drone demos now, except the compute finally caught up. in 2014 it had not.

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