Fusion Garage Strikes Back: From CrunchPad to JooJoo

The very public fallout between US-based TechCrunch and Singapore-based Fusion Garage was publicised, analysed and critiqued to no end, but was just based solely on the TechCrunch side of things. Last Monday, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch made the declaration of the end of CrunchPad and claimed that they will file a litigation against Fusion Garage. Within the tech community across the world, we were left wondering what had happened and have been waiting to hear Fusion Garage’s side of the story. The long awaited media event from Fusion Garage finally happened about an hour ago as the CEO Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan, took the stage through a live streaming video conference and conveyed three main points: (1) the fallout with TechCrunch and reply to Mike Arrington’s claims, (2) a demo of JooJoo (it’s no longer called CrunchPad) and (3) the product specs and pricing of JooJoo. We offer a narrative account on what transpired during the live-tweeting that went along with the video conference from Chandra.

Update: This story is still ongoing. For what happened before this – read this. To view updates, read here, here, here and here.

Here are the points summarized from Chandra’s video conference, followed by a planned Q&A session with someone asking him questions in the background. First of all, an overall comment on Chandra’s performance: he did stick to the talking points given to him and probably did not reveal a lot of information as to who has invested in Fusion Garage. Kudos to San Jose-based McGrath/Power Public Relations who have done a good job to prepare him for this video conference.

The Start Of The Affair

Back in early 2008, Fusion Garage had already started working on some bits of the software development for a browser-based operating system (OS) and on reading one of Michael’s blog posts, Chandra came to realise of the shared vision between Michael and himself.

At TechCrunch50 in September 2008, Chandra introduced himself to Michael and that was when the mutual courting started and the affair developed.

Refuting Mike Arrington’s Claims And Debate Over IP Rights

According to Chandra, there are no contracts signed between both parties and there have been only verbal discussions on the product. The IP is owned by Fusion Garage alone, both the OS that powers the device and the hardware and Chandra claimed that neither Mike Arrington nor TechCrunch has contributed anything to the device. So far, we know that TechCrunch only owns the trademark “CrunchPad” and that it was only filed recently.

“TechCrunch did not contribute a single line of code.” – Chandra, CEO of Fusion Garage

Chandra claims that Michael offered to bring in investors but with a much bigger goal in mind, to structure a path towards acquiring Fusion Garage one day, with Michael himself having a controlling interest. But that Michael had failed to follow through on his promise and did not get any investments by the prototype B stage. So, Fusion Garage had to go on its own and complete the product.

Perhaps the quote of the day from Chandra:

“Unfortunately, Michael was unable to deliver at the project’s date end, in February 2009… pictures of a birthday cake do not mean a contract is in place. If the project was to go forward, it was up to Fusion Garage.”