Thursday, August 22, 2013

Ubuntu Edge campaign fails to reach target by $19 million


Ubuntu Edge has been running a crow funding campaign that ended August 21. The end result was $12.8 million whereas the goal was $19 million, meaning that the project will automatically be cancelled.

Ubuntu Edge is a smartphone concept designed by Canonical and development of the phone itself was supposed to be started through a crowd sourcing campaign.

The campaign has been running since July 22, 2013, and ended at midnight of August 21, 2013. While the initial flow of donations was overwhelming, things unfortunately stagnated towards the end. When the campaign hit its end, the total amount collected was $12,809,906. While this sum was an admirable amount and broke previous crow-funding records by a large margin, it is still very far from the goal set by Canonical which was $32,000,000.

With the failure to reach the target goal, the project will automatically be cancelled and everyone who has put money into the crowd funding campaign will soon be refunded. 

Of course it is sad to see that the development of Ubuntu Edge will not be initiated at this time, however, this does not mean that Canonical will cease developing mobile versions of Ubuntu. Rumors claim that by the time of the release of Ubuntu 13.10 in October, mobile Ubuntu versions for ARM and Android platforms will also be available.

In retrospective, the goals set by Canonical were way too ambitious, but with development ongoing for the mobile version of Ubuntu, and the massive amount of promotion created by the crowd sourcing project, it is very likely that Canonical will make a second attempt to get the Ubuntu Edge started.


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