Marketing fail
Massive geek and tech-head marketing fail.
I failed to see the unique features demonstrated, either the graphical camera + patterns feature, or the "its open source" angle. No snazzy video content of the cobination of live vid and patterns, no access to anyting like the source.
MilkyMist seems to be nothing more than the usual Windows/whatever music to pattern algoritm, in a box. The alternative would seem to be a laptop with a VGA output, which will allow you to play videos. have a GUI, store stuff etc as well. The only vaguely unique thing about it seems to be that it can (apparrently) mix up incoming video into the display ... if it can, they failed to demo it in there videos. I watched each one hoping to catch a glimpse of
The one unique selling point, and they fail to even show it in action ... lame.
You are trying to persuade people to not use what they would probably use (a laptop) and take a bit of a leap of faith ... which they may do IF the piece of cheese was tasty enough ... and you don't even show the unique thing it can do??? FAIL.
A classic example of why engineers shoudl be kept well away from marketing anything!
In desperation, and following up the nerdy "han I hack on it" angle, I followed the "developer" link on their page ... its supposed to be "open source" so one of the kewl things would be getting into the code and building other projects on top of the hardware platform ... its got some useful IO and with open source of the hardware design, you could have some fun ... and even just the board layouts woudl be fun to look at in KiCAD ... I wanted to see easy access to tools I could use, and documentation, to modify the unit, that would make it an interesting tech toy.
There are secions in the Wiki for Milky mist, almost all seem to be blank, no pages, no downloads, no source code, so nerdy FAIL
I did vaguely look at the NanoNote, being such as low-volume unit, my primary concern was "will it be compatible with anything" ... you really need to feel comfortable thats its going to be something other than an interesting curiosity, and that the designers really understand how compatibility is key. The web page for the "B*n" NanoNote, and indeed even the name itself contains some UTF8 character not rendered on any of my various Linux boxes or my XP boxes, clearly compatibilty didn't even cross their minds when deiciding on the name, so it leaves me little confidence the device itself will be compatible with anything.
Again a marketing fail. Do these guys even have a marketing guy on the team? If so he needs quietly taking out the back and shooting!
Nice try, and technically, an interestign challenge exectuted very nicely ... amazing what a team of just a few people can achieve. But, sorry, you really need to work on the marketing BIG TIME.