TechCrunch vs. Fusion Garage

For many tech enthusiasts, the name “CrunchPad” isn’t an unknown. It’s the name of a product that was set to be launched by Michael Arrington, owner of TechCrunch and related network sites. The CrunchPad could be summed up as being a much larger version of the iPhone, but with a single purpose: Web browsing. Though it looks like an e-Book reader, at least to me, it’s not. The goal of the product was to deliver ultra-fast access to the thing many people care about most.

The CrunchPad was set to launch for $500 from the get go, and for most, that’s a bit steep to stomach for such a one-sided device. But, like most new products to market, prices tend to go down, and as something like this has real potential in the marketplace, I was looking forwarding to seeing its acceptance. When I’m off the PC, the last thing I want to do is connect while mobile, but I can understand the draw, and as a whole, the product was really coming along nicely.

That was until a few weeks ago, when things began falling apart for Arrington and his crew. At the end of November, Arrington made a news post that was pretty disappointing, titled, “The End of the Crunchpad“. Since skeptics for months have been poking fun at the product’s never-announced release date, it almost seemed like it was just not meant to happen. But the reasons behind “The End” aren’t because the product couldn’t be built, or any other small detail like that, but rather it was shelved due to shoddy business practices on behalf of TechCrunch’s partners.

A company by the name of Fusion Garage was the other half of this puzzle, and were responsible with pushing the product forward, and negotiating with the ODM to produce the product. After a lot of back and forth, at the end of it all, Fusion Garage, supposedly on behalf of its shareholders, decided to push TechCrunch and Arrington out of the picture entirely, despite the fact that it was them who originally came up with the design, prototypes, and marketed it (sometimes not purposefully).

It’s hard to understand all of the details of the business negotiations without being part of them, but from the outsiders look in, it looks as though Fusion Garage is fairly shady, and mere days after it broke off with TechCrunch, it re-announced the product as its own, naming it “JooJoo”. Rightfully so, TechCrunch has filed a lawsuit against Fusion Garage, but where that goes is hard to predict. Again, it’s hard to understand what kind of legal agreements where in place, but for the sake of fairness, it would be great to see TechCrunch win this. Just imagine coming up with an idea, working on it for over a year, and then losing control over it completely. I couldn’t imagine how frustrating that would be!

Fusion Garage deleted their blog shortly after the dispute erupted. A lot of statements on that blog directly contradict statements made by Fusion Garage this week (these are included in the lawsuit). That deletion, combined with the fact that they very clearly misled us over the last month into believing everything was on track, while they simultaneously registered a new domain name and rebuilt the case of the device to include the new brand, shows a pattern of lies.