[Android General] e.mote:
I don't want to go too far afield. What you're mentioning is graft, which is apart from what we have here--fraud. Neither do I want to get into the murky area of ethics.

There are different shades of fraud. While Christopher Price's Console OS swindle isn't egregious--i.e. he didn't simply take the money and run--the crux of all fraud is misrepresentation, and Price's claims for Console OS are spun out of whole cloth.

I'm not surprised that the current crowdfund system is rife with abuse. What I was surprised at was how little effort it takes to conduct a successful scam on KS. All you need is a pitch with wide appeal ("run all Android apps on your Windows PC with no effort!"), a basic web site, a couple of videos, and that's it.

Price didn't even need to have a decent backstory. He had one Engadget write-up on his vaporware iConsole project, and some videos of PCs running Android games (probably running Android-IA). He promised a bunch of stuff, and that was good enough for a successful KS run.

I'm still periodically keeping tabs on Console OS out of morbid curiosity. I want to see how long Price can string along his flock of believers before they get wise, and their reaction when they realize that not all that glitters is gold. Most'll probably do nothing. The majority paid the $10/25 amount--small enough to brush off, and being gullible enough to get duped by a kiddie con isn't something to tout in public.

Likewise, I'm curious how long Price will continue to maintain the charade. The "dog ate my server" excuses are already wearing thin, and really, there's no longer a need to keep up the pretenses. The KS money is already four months in the bag. Price already did more than the minimum KS requirement--nothing--and he's not getting any more money, so further effort is basically wasted.

My guesstimation is that Price will soon begin to wean off his flock after this DR1 release--his freq of responses has already tapered off considerably--culminating with a "due to circumstances beyond our control, we can no longer continue as an ongoing concern. We are sorry for any inconvenience." That's the biz lingo for KTHXBYE.

For optismists (and backers) who still hold out hope for a piece of that pie in the sky, here's some sobering fact from Console OS' company profile that it submitted to Vator as part of a contest:

http://vator.tv/company/consoleos

The number of employees (1-5) and funding history ($80K from KS) should tell the whole story. Think about the tasks for Console OS if it were a legit business: to write the many drivers for all the components in all those "supported" systems. That's the hard part where "open" projects fall down (eg Android-IA) as getting the component spec and driver development is a specialized skillset not available to garage dev types. Even commissioning a single driver could well burn up a good chunk of that $80K. Next, are the many software features that Price promised: WindowsFlinger, InstaSwitch, an app store, etc etc. Do you think all of these would happen with 1-5 employees (more like 'one') and an $80K total budget? Do you know how many tens of millions Google and Microsoft spent developing their app stores?

PS: Chrisopher Price is active in his online life, and has an abundant amount of detail for those who bother to use their Google-fu. You can start here:

http://who.is/whois/mmv.mobi

http://411.com/name/Christopher~Price/95973