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Clinkle is the New Color
Greetings from Palo Alto. Over three years (and thousands of posts......) ago, I wrote Color and the Mania in This Valley. The thrust of my post was:
+ Color.com had received $41 million to develop an app;
+ The app sucked out loud;
+ The company deserved to fail.
Well, fail it did (as I announced in the 4th post I did about the stupid place), and in those three+ years, the bubble has just continued to inflate. 2014 makes 2011 seem downright sensible.
Which brings us to Clinkle, which is a firm founded by a 22 year old with no business successes behind him (which at least Color.com's founder could claim, as he sold his firm to Apple for a fortune). Clinkle initially received $25 million (fun fact: the same amount used to fund Google, which went on to bigger successes than building a single app) and has been ostensibly hard at work on this thing for years. Here is the mature and world-changing lad after he landed the funding:

Well, as Clinkle continued to produce nothing, they continued to garner funding, reported to be upwards of $40 million now (a number strangely coincident with Color's). Recently, at long, long last, they launched their app. Here's how they try to explain it:
So let me get this straight........I download an app........and then I sign up..........and they send me a Prepaid Visa Card (which I don't need), and then I can put money on the card. The wrinkle to this, apparently, is that if my friends also use Clinkle, I can transmit cash to them if I want.
Allow me to express my reaction with three letters: B, F, and D. So this is what $40 million and a crack team of engineers was able to create? (Although the money wasn't entirely wasted - - you can go to this page and check out the team member photos which, as you mouse over them, turn into zany poses - - hilarious! My goodness gracious.)
Perhaps I'm just a cranky blogger who likes to pee on the parade of this youngster who has been endowed with so much start-up cash, and in fact Clinkle is an awesome app. Let's check out the reviews on the App Store, shall we?
So from what I saw, there were 19 reviews posted: 18 of them were 1-star (the lowest possible), and one of them was 5-star (which, I would wager, was posted by the man-child above clutching the dollar bills).
Clinkle has also added an elitist wrinkle to their little product by making it available only at certain colleges (as if the demand for this thing would otherwise overwhelm them). Perhaps they figure since Facebook started that way in 2004 (Harvard, Stanford, etc.) then surely that must be the pathway to billions.
What a bunch of feckless douchenozzles. I can't wait for this damned bubble to finally pop, because I'm not sure how much more we can all endure this without becoming irreversibly nauseous. It's not enough for Color.com............or, soon, Clinkle..............to collapse into a pile of worthless ashes. All this overfunded silliness has really got to end, because it's an unsustainable distortion of reality.
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how to get rich USA 2014 edition.
1.go to stanford, harvard, MIT, etc
2. be jewish or elite WASP
3. make stupid computer program/app/website
4.get funding
5.sell it for billions, even though it isnt a business
lol
~dipshitmiddleclasswhitekid
We directed the best and the brightest into financial services in the 80s and 90s. Then it was politics. war and security. Now, the local Catholic Carmelite High School is focusing on "Modernizing War Weaponry" through the new STEM program.
I'm wondering; who's minding the store of conscience. truth and basic infrastructure?
a new "magnet" high school opened up just down the street...
The magnet? It specializes in the "criminal justice sytem".
It resembles a state of the art prison with some dooshbags name on the front in huge block letters crafted of slab metal..
The sign looks like nothing so much as "Arbeit Macht Frei" from the street...i shit you not.
(how do you post pictures on ZH?)
Great piece on all counts, Tim. Many of us feel your pain.
Misalocation of capital, labor, and all things useful seems to be the new normal.
Meanwhile, outside Silicon Valley, some of the most experienced, creative, talented scientist and engineers work on projects with the most enormous potential for fundamental improvement for mankind... and have to finance their operations with savings from their personal careers. Something strange about this picture? Welcome to the endgame for mankind.
When you embark on educating yourself with the knowledge required to turn your youthful dreams into reality, you learn the difference between those dreams and hard reality of building real solutions. Funding people who lack this experiance is outright imbecilic. Inside Silicon Valley, the real tallent will erode. Inexperianced management in charge of experianced professionals results in people being asked to implement solutions in ways that repeat mistakes; to literally live Einstein's definition of insanity. Nevertheless, internal rhetoric at these companies is aimed at communicating just how inovative and beneficent their projects are. Something that, in reality, they are terrified of. Anything inovative gets outsourced leaving the core services of the company without any real value.
Getting front men for the satanist mafia are a dime a dozen. And get rich quick schemes come in all shapes and sizes
If these guys cash out before the next crash they'll be the business genius leaders offered up as roll models for tomorrows gullible graduates of the Good Slaveship Lollipop U. Whose motto is: There's a suckerberg born every minute
There were quite a few useless piece of shit companies with seemingly endless funding popping up daily before the last dot bomb explosion. However, this one has indications it is more than meets the all seeing eye
The go green logo of saturn means peace in our time and wealth beyond your most avaricious dreams. If you believe me I have a company to sell you
I... gotcher money, dude.
Not the most flattering picture. That selfie makes him look mentally challenged.
I wonder if any of these angel venture capitalists would care to send $250K my way so I can quit my day job and make cedar furniture instead. I certainly don't need $25 million to get my company on a firm financial footing.
Patience peoples, the end is near...it will be awful but refreshing too....
I worked for Sun micro back in the late 90's and the gulch was a cross between circus, insane asylum and daycare center. i left in 98 because I just couldn't stand it anymore but the only thing that's changed since then is hs become even more insane, with a large side of stupid thrown in for good measure.
You too? I actually liked working for Sun Micro (product/test/verification engineer), that is until they put in Schwartz as the CEO. The company went completely downhill after that. Stock options were worth about $2 million before the bubble burst. I don't see anything that's changed. Always good to see "vaporware" still suckers in the VC's...
Silicon Valley - hamsters on meth. Haven't seen anything truly original come out of there in years. Quickest example I can think of... SPARC architecture was 64bit from the start. Intel/AMD took how many years to get to 64 bit? Qualcomm and ARM are trying to do 64 bit now... 24 years later...
I was a network engineer and I loved Sun. I just couldn't stand the 20-something idiots who thought they knew more than somebody with 25+ years experience.
20-somethings don't impart realities that interfere with management's fantasies.
The problem was that most of the time they WE'RE management...
Would you expect anything less from this new generation of snot-nosed, entitled little punks...??
Colonel Clinkle. :-)
"CEO Schultz! Dummkopf!! How did you embezzle forty billion marks from the Reich Pension Fund?!"
"I know nnnno-thing! Nnnno-thing!"
Nice. Real nice.
Upvote on the article just for the grades of B,F & D.
"fees on homeowners, drivers, insurance customers - the working people"
One man's fee is another man's job.
The magic of banking. Working people break their backs to get a paycheck, and then pay all their bills, and then hope there's something left, which can become "capital" to invest in tools which might lower their bills or which they might use to slowly build a business which hopefully will slowly become profitable. Bankers create "capital" out of thin air, and loan it to themselves and their sons, nephews, and buddies to buy up whatever businesses are already profitable. Bankers call what they do "capitalism".
At the same time, all the money the bankers created out of thin air competes with the savings of the working people who have not been able to build businesses, so that those savings buy less and less as the value of the currency buys less and less because the bankers created more and more of it. Eventually, the savers get so broke that they have to go to work for the businesses the bankers bought up with the money they created out of thin air.
Then the bankers create more money out of thin air and "contribute" it to the "campaign funds" of legislators, who create bills that let the bankers' businesses avoid taxes, and other bills which replace the government revenues of those taxes with a multitude of fees on homeowners, drivers, insurance customers - the working people.
Addition: And, as the currency buys less and less, every cost the working people have to pay to live gets larger and larger, so that their ability to have something left which can become capital becomes less and less. Similarly, as the fees they have to pay to live multiply, their ability to have something left which can become capital becomes less and less. So the ability of the people who are actually working, and therefore have actual solutions to problems, to bring those solutions to their communities by starting their own businesses, becomes less and less.
Addition: Lastly, the legislators, at every level of government, also create regulations which either outright prohibit small businesses or make their costs higher than the bankers' larger competing businesses. So even if the working people have been able to create capital, and have experience-based solutions they want to bring to their communities by starting their own businesses, they might find that those businesses are outright prohibited due to lack of size or have to play on an uphill playing field. Furthermore, as a result, the real economy becomes less and less diverse, and resultingly weaker and weaker. Since a weak economy threatens "consumption" and thus the bankers, and the bankers bag of tricks includes only "more of the same", they increase money-creation, taxes, fees, and regulations, and the shrivelling continues, until, eventually, only totalitarianism, either fascist or communist, can survive. Complete lack of diversity. Ugh.
Bankism destroys capitalism, the way a strangler fig destroys the tree it grows up around and then strangles.
sir, thank you. great simplicity. copied, attributed, and shared to a large audience!
ditto...to a smaller audience
Yes, yes, yes. Very well said TGR!
The new app I am developing is called Tinkle. Upload a selfie and $10 and we send you a GIF of you getting a golden shower.
Good article in last Sunday's Telegraph (colour supp.) about start-ups in the UK. The basic premise was they wanted to all 'change the world' (and not make money, ha!) with some crappy app they've all developed.
The author's summary - God help us all.
This guy wanted to change the world too till he got busted for wasting the tax payers money on hot spring trips.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c_A0GigrQl0
Party like it's 1999:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
I'm starting a new app called Klinkle, where everyone just sends me money and the app will return a thank you reply. Who's in???
I like the Klinkle idea, but just sending money for an e-thank you is a little sad (then again GoFundMe has campaigns that sound like that anymore). A thank you with an encrypted selfie of me in a bra and panties might get some hits though.
My money is that Zerohedge readers could come up with an app in a day, costing no money at all, that is much much better. This is the height of Keneysian failure...open source lowering costs while central planners say costs must go up up up. I'm sure this kid was well connected...
NAH, No one's satisfied with 'e-thank yous'. The trend is toward tangibles. Let's partner on my KRAKKLE app, where everyone sends me money and a KRAKKLE rep spider-webs the user's windshield.
Your reps should just take a dump on those windshields.
Truth in advertising laws, and all that. The gifts on the cars can be construed as marketing.
Just a friendly FYI, and hope that something wakes the sheeple up. Crapping on windshields seems as good an idea as any.
General Berkhalter: Klink, is the seret weapon ready yet?
Colonel Klink: Ja, Herr General! I have personally designed it myself! I call it... the Clinkle!
General Berkhalter: is there even a slim chance at all this thing will work?
Colonel Klink: Why would you ask such a thing?
General Berkhalter: Because you designed it.
I'm all for it, provided you'll allow me to become your business partner. Not sure about the name though. How about Klunkle? Or Kloinkle?
Klondyke. Current and PC. The girlies will love it.
Not sure I want you as my business partner with a name like highly debtful. ;)
Klinkle, kinda has a ring to it.
I’m neutral.
For ‘feckless douchenozzles’ the guy did get $40,00,000 to blow.
go fuck yourself! fuck you, fuck you
http://southpark.cc.com/clips/yvpwup/new-and-improved-logo#source=ff4daa...
eh fucking ads everywhere. sorry.
They really nailed it with this episode. Looking forward to this week's new SP.
LOL awesome
It's hard to argue with indisputable facts and iron-clad logic like that.
In a universe far, far away.....actually the early days of ZH, there was a blog about how google had paid squillions for an address shortening site. One of our most esteemed posters then guffawed at the price and told us to "wait right there".
An hour later he came back with this: http://tcbp.net/ which is still in use today......for free!!
These corporate cunts have money to burn. Your money.
Yes, since the SOURCE of the public "money" supply is made out of nothing as debts, those people who have that privilege, (as an egregious fraud which is enforced by the government, as the legal counterfeiting of "money" by those privileged few, which also proportionately benefits those towards the front of the queue to get that new "money" made out of nothing), are looking for every possible excuse to allow them to make more, AND SO, OF COURSE, there are insane bubbles being blown everywhere!
The American economy has become almost totally based on ENFORCED FRAUDS, and everywhere one looks one will see the consequences of that, where those who are able to personally position themselves inside of the flow of that "MONEY" MADE OUT OF NOTHING do not have to succeed all that much at anything else, other than getting their paddles into that flow ...
Basically, we operate through fundamentally fraudulent financial accounting systems, which were originally the result of the best organized gang of criminals, the biggest gangsters, the banksters, applying the methods of organized crime to dominate the political processes, in order to implement systems of legalized lies, backed by legalized violence. That is the overall context in which "economic" activities take place, namely as little whirlpools of folly spinning off of the enormous flows of ENFORCED FRAUDS.
Those people who have the personal skills to operate inside of those systems, which takes specialized sorts of abilities to be professional liars and immaculate hypocrites, because the SOURCE of their funding always tracks back to the political economy being based on organized crime, through enforced frauds. What has been happening, more and more, faster and faster, is that the relative ratios of reality to fiction have been runaways, for more than a Century, automatically getting worse faster! Basically, each bubble blown by the people looking for excuses to make more "money" out of nothing as debts, gets more bizarre than the previous ones.
The "success" of systems of legalized lies, backed by legalized violence, provides personal "successes" to those who are able and willing to operate inside of those established systems. Paradoxically, recognizing more radical truths about the apparent social "success" of runaway systems of enforced frauds is NOT as apparently rewarding as being deliberately ignorant about that, as least so far ... To be frank, I kind of wish that I did not realize that the monetary system was INSANE, back when I was a teenager. If I stayed deliberately ignorant about that, then I surely could have been able to make a lot more of that "money." At the present time, it tends to be a personal tragedy, rather than a personal success, to comprehend the degree to which the entire political economy is based on enforced frauds, making "money" out of nothing as debts, to "pay" for everything. The more one understands how INSANE that really is, the less one is able to continue to operate inside of that system, promoting its next level of outrageous INSANITY, as each new level of which becomes greater than the previous ones.
Somewhere deeply buried under that political economy's distortions are some actual real progress in science and technology, with real applications. However, all of the social "successes" achieved by those doing that are channeled through the social pyramid systems, whereby those who can work with those who can make more "money" out of nothing are funded, and therefore, can cut slices of that pie off for themselves, as they do whatever they may do.
It is quite an intense paradox that to be a "successful" entrepreneur requires a peculiar kind of deliberately maintained ignorance towards how the basic economic system is based on criminally insane enforced frauds. The less one looks at that, the better off one may be, since the SOURCE of all funding continues to be "money" made out of nothing as debts.
Another clinke is merely another wrinkle in the basic situation of electronically creating "money" out of nothing, to be electronically moved around. Meanwhile, nobody doing that is required to take any personal responsibility, nor is held accountable for any of the legalized violence which is the force that backs up that globalized electronic fraud. Those enjoying "new colors" tend to never have to pay attention to the black background upon which those figure.
So, the real question is "who is Lucas related to?". I equate many of the so called "successes" to inside blow jobs, kind of like the retarded kids of rich and connected people becoming artists and authors and becoming instant successes with their art being purchased to huge sums of money.
... it is the way of the world. Real talent starves ...
wth is a clinkle? Seems like it should be spelled clinckle. So, it is a prepaid debit card? The market has been flooded with those for many years. I am either out of the loop or our future Gates/Jobs innovators are common core educated morons.
"Seems like it should be spelled clinckle"
I read cankle but...
Money has become so cheap to borrow that many people are now arguing that you must take it even if you don't know what to do with it. It is hard to imagine how much this is distorting the economy, markets, and reality in general. A total disconnect between life on main street and the financial world is occurring and it is putting the economy in a very dangerous place.
It is often hard to determine what is true, but a report on Bloomberg that 32 Trillion dollars in funds were held in offshore accounts around the world made me shutter. How safe is this money, and what exactly is it doing? Can you say Cyprus? More on this subject in the article below.
http://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2013/05/cheap-money-more-and-more-and-mor...