#funded!

[wildroses-peonies]

Sax Rohmer's DOPE adapted and illustrated by Trina Robbins - A talented young actress becomes fatally ensnared in London's mysterious and glittery drug culture of the early 20th century. - http://kck.st/29Uq5vo

[caramelmokaccino]

We’re funded!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/applecider/caramel-mokaccino-otome-visual-novel

We crossed the 100% goal a bit ago, thank you so much for your support!

We’re onto the stretch goals now, we’re really excited about them and we hope you are too! :D

Sprites Level UP! (2nd pose for sprites and sprites for all minor characters!)

Waitress minigame (for when Penny has a shift at the Caramel - skippable :P)

CGs Level UP! (More CGs!)

Partial Voice Acting (Everybody gets a voice, even the cameo characters!)

Poly/3p endings! (Ian x Barbara x Penny and Nico x Penny x Annie!)

Free GxG game after CM!

Thanks again for your support, you are all awesome <3 Let’s make a lovely game! :D

[ramminanimation]

*Ponders what gesture of gratitude I should put at the end of my next cartoon...*

[dumbfundedit]

Yo

Yo (VC: $1.5mm). Communication. Tersified. Purple. $750k / letter.

Will investors make their money back? Nuh...

Should you enjoy the free ride? ...uh

Who is this disrupting??? Snapchat?

Investor Dumbness Quotient (IDQ) A

Obligatory Puff Piece (OPP) Someone on Twitter still drops yo's.

[dumbfundedit]

Luxe and the more buxe

Fact: it sucks to drive in The Big City. There are as many reasons for this suckage as there are drivers in this garbage can we call San Francisco (or wherever you live, it's probably the same), and each of them has at least two or three startups trying to burn VC money and be the first to go out of business.

Reason #78: groceries and other junk shifting around in the trunk. You just know that was the bag with the eggs in it that fell over, damn it. Associated startups: Instacart, Safeway.

Reason #32: motorcyclists popping wheelies while weaving between stopped cars. Associated startups: none out of stealth mode, opportunity is knocking.

Reason #4: Parking!! I hate you so much!

Any number of startups have tried to crack city parking, going all the way back to the heady days of 2001 and the big boom of making cars go boom upon request. There were companies that would put a brick on your accelerator pedal and gun it right into the bay (no parking meters there). People stood around outside of fancy restaurants with rags soaked in Dom Pérignon and Zippo lighters (only the finest for your Maserati's final fireball). One of the most innovative companies of that time operated a chain of roaming chop shops that could part out a car in 5 minutes or less or it's free (take that Domino's). But repeat customers proved elusive, and simple mistakes like torching the right white Honda Civic on the wrong block could prove devasting. By 2002 it was all over.

Now it's over a decade later, and Luxe (neé Luxe Valet) (VC $75.5mm) has a new take on this old chestnut. They aren't going to blow-, chop-, or in general fuck-up your ride -- they just want their loosely allied gang of skater punks to take your car to an undisclosed location where people definitely will not have sex in it. Most crucially as compared to their predecessors-in-venture, Luxe will even bring your car back provided that your Luxe Punk isn't currently trying to pull off a wicked 540 kickflip, man.

Will investors make their money back? Besides the inherent risks of doing business in the volatile skater gang economy, Luxe also has a slight problem when it comes to trying to undercut businesses whose costs consist solely of repainting the lines once every ten years whether they needs it or not. You simply can't park a car for what Luxe is charging in San Francisco, so unless they're putting their VC money towards building a secret tunnel under the bay to Treasure Island, they may have a problem.

The clearest path to profitability is for Luxe to secretly drive these "parked" cars for Uber and then pull a Ferris Bueller maneuver on that odometer before returning them.

Should you enjoy the free ride? Uh, yeah. It's VC-subsidized parking in cities where a dimly lit, predator-filled garage starts at $30 a day. Your car re-appears when and where you want it, using the power of skater magic. Until you can buy a car that comes with a remote drone operator and Predator Parking mode (enabling your car to hunt for parking spaces and evade meter maids with military precision), this is the best thing going.

Who is this disrupting??? Those parking lot attendants who finagle your car into a space visibly smaller than it faster than you can manage a high pitched "oh god wait"! They don't even adjust the mirrors, it's absurd. I couldn't pull these moves off with a team of five people in an hour going an inch at a time.

Also, are you supposed to tip? Coming and going, or just when you pick your car up?

Investor Dumbness Quotient (IDQ) Certified IDQ rating F. Pretty smart really, as long as they're investing other people's money. These investors get free valet parking everywhere they go for a few years, so why not?

Obligatory puff piece (OPP) Business Insider is very excited to regurgitate exactly what Luxe told them about being pretty much almost profitable if you just look at their Excel sheet from this one particular spot in only this room.

[dumbfundedit]

Kuveé

Did you ever wish that drinking adult grape juice could involve more pretentiousness and gadgetry? Kuveé (VC: $6mm) sure as shit did. Their smart wine bottle brings the exciting technological world of vendor lock-in, cloud services that will soon be shut down and miniscule battery life to the staid world of smushed grapes in bottles. You can tell that they mean business, because they figured out how to put an accent mark on one of their e's.

One suspects that the wine bottle connects to The Cloud simply because someone had a bunch of leftover AWS credits and this was the best idea anyone could come up with to burn them off.

Will investors make their money back? Seems real unlikely, but people do seem to drink a lot of this stuff already. They need to sell like 2 million bottles of wine to recoup the investment to date, and it's not like anything could possibly go wrong before that happens.

Should you enjoy the free ride? The wine isn't particularly any cheaper than down the street, but it does come in fancy bottles with screw tops and you can buy it in the middle of the night (not unlike Mad Dog 20/20). No word yet on whether Kuveé's Smart Bottle works with third-party paper bag accessories.

Instead of investing in a Wine Consumption System, you could just drink your wine faster. Or buy smaller bottles. If you are really determined to be a nerd about it, just inject some argon in there.

Who is this disrupting??? Kuveé is working with partner vineyards, so it isn't the entire wine industry. Not really the wine bottle industry either. Hmm. Is it the fat cats in the wine cork industry?

Investor Dumbness Quotient (IDQ) Certified IDQ rating B. A robo wine bottle is dumb. Kuveé's Smart Bottle design doesn't even do much for freshness beyond hopeful optimism. Kuveé is also adding another layer of middlemanery to an industry literally bursting at the seams with mid-men. Who knows though, maybe they'll only lose half of their money.

Obligatory puff piece (OPP) Wired seems real excited about getting some fancy screw-top wine for the office.

[dumbfundedit]

Juicero: You Juice Bro?

This thing slices, quite possibly dices. It also squeezes a pre-filled packet so hard that goop you drink falls out. Prototypes exploded. In this economy that equals big VC money for Juicero (VC: $120mm).

Will investors make their money back? Not a chance, these guys blended and drank it all already.

Should you enjoy the free ride? At $700 plus juice rental fees, the Juicebro is not exactly a VC-funded steal. Maybe you should stick to the tried and true method of obtaining cheap juice? For the record, that’s: 

Get Instacart to bring a bag of fruit or whatever to your place, leave it in the street.

Have a Lyft driver back over the bag a few times.

Finally a Handy-person comes by to “clean up” the mess and leaves it for you in a jug in the fridge.

Who is this disrupting??? That guy at the farmer's market clinging to a subsistence level income, who already has Odwalla nipping at his heels. Big Bottled Juice of course is feeling the burn from some random juice bar down the street (only available in cities with considerable hipster or hippie enclaves).

Investor Dumbness Quotient (IDQ) Certified IDQ rating B. Pretty dumb, but someone might actually buy a few of them at least.

Obligatory Puff Piece (OPP) Vogue is ready for some juice now please! Includes bonus photo of random juice-holding model from the year 6 BJ (Before Juicebro).