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The Robin hit its Kickstarter goal within the first day.
Nextbit
Nextbit sounded a call to see who would be interested in its cloud-based smartphone, and the people have responded.
The startup, run by former executives from Google and HTC, hit its Kickstarter goal of selling $500,000 worth of products in a single day. The company said that it would provide free quick chargers with every phone if it hits $1 million.
“We poured our hearts and souls into this project, but because we kept everything under wraps, we really had no idea what the public reaction would be like,” co-founder and CEO Tom Moss said in an e-mail.
The rapid response shows there is a market for niche attempts to enter the smartphone market — even if it is at a small scale. Unlike the traditional means of selling a product through a large carrier, Nextbit opted to use Kickstarter to drum up awareness and early orders for its smartphone, dubbed the “Robin.” It’s the latest company to directly go after consumers — albeit in an extreme way through the Kickstarter crowd-sourcing method.
The Robin is the first smartphone utilizing cloud storage as its key feature. While the phone has 32 gigabytes of internal storage, it will have a total of 100 GB of storage in the cloud. The phone is supposed to intelligently move off little used apps, photos, videos and other files to the cloud to ensure you always have room with your built-in storage.
“This shows that customers really believe that more is possible with the cloud, and they’re ready for a change,” Moss said. “And they’re ready to buy phones in a new way.”
While Nextbit is holding its 30-day long campaign now, the Robin won’t actually ship until early next year.
