Hi Everybody,
For those just tuning in, we’ve shipped backer rewards up to backer number 275, with some fulfillment hiccups (see below). But we’ve run out of enclosures, so we’re waiting for the 2nd shipment of enclosures, which requires a boat, and boats are hard to come by these days.
So… do we have a boat? Short answer: yes, and the shipment is booked on a boat with an October 18 departure and a November 20(ish) arrival. (Yay? Not exactly great news…)
Longer answer: do you ever call the help line of a large company, and the person on the other end says they can’t answer your question or solve your problem, so they transfer you to another department? And that new department can’t answer your question either, so they transfer you to yet another department? This can go on and on… Sometimes you wind up being batted back and forth between two departments, each of which assures you that the other department has the information you so desperately need or can solve the problem you so desperately need to solve. Is there a word for this? I call it frustrating as heck. It’s what we’ve been facing — the enclosure vendor says that they can’t pay freight until they get a booking on a ship. And the freight forwarder says they can’t get a booking until freight is paid. Freight costs have increased substantially since we paid freight back in November 2020 (about 200%), which might be part of the rub. At any rate, we’ve been able to straighten out the freight charges and we’ve been told that the enclosures are booked on an October 18 shipment. October 18 is not quite good news, but maybe it’s the best possible news under the circumstances. So with the Thanksgiving season, pumpkin spice, and hope in the air, we may finally get our enclosures — a full year after we ordered them. Maddening… and this assumes there won’t be additional delays. It’s frustrating for you, the backer/customer, and it’s expensive for us. Here’s really hoping we get past these supply chain issues soon.
Software and scheduling
In the meantime, we’ll be pushing software and documentation. We’ve revised the live schedule to reflect both fulfillment and software efforts. Much of the application development will entail bringing over older code, cleaning it up, and getting it to run with the latest code and libraries. Since much of the code is already written, it will help speed things along, but software schedules can be tricky. Any changes in the estimates will be reflected in the schedule and future updates.
The application poll is still gathering votes — please weigh in if you haven’t already. The initial results aren’t too surprising — Birdfeeder, Motionscope, Astronomy, and Pet Companion (in that order). And feel free to suggest other applications either by replying to the thread or creating your own topic. This will inform our efforts after we develop these initial applications. Here at Charmed Labs, one of our favorite ideas is an application that estimates where your golf ball will go based on its trajectory immediately after being hit — you know, for a Vizy-based golf simulator. Another favorite is an application that will estimate the speed of passing cars and take a picture of any speeding car’s license plates and upload the pictures to the cloud for others in the neighborhood to see (and possibly shame) — an automated neighborhood speeding vigilante if you will. Let’s meet over at the forum and discuss more.
Fulfillment hiccups
After much back and forth with Amazon, we got almost all of the fulfillment orders unstuck, except for a few, which we resubmitted. This gave us the confidence to upload the rest of the batch. So if you’re a US-based backer with backer number 136 through 275, you should be receiving an email soon from Amazon. Thanks for your patience.
That’s all for now… see y’all next week!
The Vizy Team
