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We’ve spoken in the past about Chameleon, an innovative new launcher designed for Android tablets, and it’s Kickstarter campaign. For those who supported the developers by pledging some money, here’s some bad news: a goof-up by the company means that they will now have to restart their entire campaign, right after meeting their $50,000 target.
It just happens that those starting Kickstarter campaigns need an Amazon account for receiving payment. For some strange reason, the developer chose to register the Amazon account of an employee while starting the campaign, and now that employee has left the company. And based on Kickstarter’s terms of service, Teknision can’t simply change the Amazon account a campaign is connected to, meaning they’re going to have to start all over again from $0.
As an apology for their goof-up, Teknision is giving away the wallpaper pack from the $10 pledge to all pledges $5 and up.
Here’s a little note from Teknision on the Kickstarter page:
While this campaign has been very successful due to everyone’s support, due to unforseen problems with our Amazon Payments account we cannot accept any new pledges and all existing pledges will be cancelled.
We have spoken with Kickstarter, who have told us the best way to resolve the situation is to close the current project, and create a new Chameleon backing page, where you can re-pledge to receive your Chameleon App. We are grateful for all your support and have upgraded all rewards $5 and above with 5 Bonus Chameleon backgrounds.
People who have existing credit card authorizations from this project will be cancelled when this project is closed – and thus no charges will be applied to your credit card. We appreciate your patience, we are very excited to deliver world class software to everyone!
We are aiming to have the Kickstarter page live early next week, we will be sure to share it with everyone.
[Kickstarter via Android Police]
pretty sexy
Nice Drama! End of series 1. Series 2 begins with in…. oh $hit, we are screwed no one gonna give us money again.
Perfect example of why you must always require your employees to use company owned accounts for all things related to the company. Kinda sucks that Kickstarter didn’t work with them on this though.
That’s the problem with all these companies started up by children. Eventually all these companies need grownups to tell them these things.
I _think_ the problem there was that the company is Canadian and Kickstarter only works with some Amazon payment account that is only available to American citizens, which again meant that their only possibility to run the Kickstarter campaign at all required them to use a private account set up by their only American employee.
Or register their company in the US, too. They don’t need to be physically located there for it. They just need to visit once to register themselves.
That part is way beyond my knowledge :p
If it’s that simple (without other, significant downsides) it sounds a lot smarter than using the private account of a employee.
http://goo.gl/sjPxp
This shows you the level of professionalism that we’re working with here. This whole thing seemed fishy from the start. There are half a dozen of free open source launchers in the Play Store and they need $50k to make theirs? Then they registered the account to an employee, one that was so low level, that he just upped and left? This is not a slip up, it’s inexperience (to be polite). Imagine Apple registered their patents to Jonas the night janitor.
Absolutely agree. A pretty big error from a company who thinks they are gamechanging enough to have an “app” funded. I betcha a lot of people are not going to pledge who did initially.
Great article and awesome project. Check out this video to understand how crowdfunding works http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI-bTpbkH4Y&feature=youtu.be
Ok way to miss some vital details. Specifically, to run a kickstarter campaign an American must have an Amazon payments account to accept the funds. If you’ll notice most of Teknision’s employees, including the guy in charge, live in Canada. Close but not good enough sadly. So the for some reason is that employee is American and could accept the payments. It’s unfortunate he left before the campaign ended, but that’s clearly out other of Teknision’s control. And they’ve been honest about the whole thing, and to make up for the inconvenience when they restart the campaign each level will come with more than the original campaign. Pretty professional to me. It’s amazing how much vital details change the tone of a story. (and contributes to accuracy.)
True, but if they’re going to be receiving money, they must take it in the account of the company or that of one of the senior founders. Yes they’re in Canada, but they can easily register their company in the US too, despite not being physically located there. This could have easily been avoided.
Im confused as to what happened to the original 50k? Did it never get charged? Or did Jonas the night janitor just buy an Escalade and laugh as he drove off?
I’m pretty sure the original pledges were never charged.
Kickstarter charges absolutely nothing of the campaign is not completed successfully, which means both that if they don’t reach their goal, nobody gets charged for anything and if the campaign is cancelled, nobody gets charged for anything.