Juicero was a Wi-Fi-connected juice press that cost $699, then $399, and on September 1, 2017 the company that made it shut down for good, roughly sixteen months after the product went on sale. The machine did one thing: it took a single-serving pack of pre-chopped, pre-pressed produce — sold only by Juicero, on a subscription, scanned by a barcode reader, refused if past its expiry or recalled — and squeezed it into a cup of cold-pressed juice. It was a beautifully engineered appliance built to perform a task that, as the world memorably discovered, two human hands could do about as well and a great deal more cheaply.
The pitch was pure mid-2010s Silicon Valley: the “Keurig for juice,” a hardware-plus-recurring-revenue business wrapped in wellness aspiration and aluminum so over-built that a teardown likened its internal frame to something from an aircraft. Investors believed it. Juicero raised roughly $120 million — by some counts $134 million — from a marquee list including Google Ventures (now GV) and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a sum that for a juice startup beggared belief and, in hindsight, narrated the whole tech-bubble mood in one line item. The company launched the press in 2016 at $699, cut it to $399 in early 2017 to chase volume, and was reportedly burning around $4 million a month.
The end arrived not as a market verdict but as a single demonstration. On April 19, 2017, Bloomberg published a report — with video — showing that Juicero’s proprietary produce packs could be wrung out by hand, yielding nearly the same amount of juice in nearly the same time, no $400 machine required. The internet did the rest. The image of a person squeezing a juice bag into a glass while a sleek connected appliance sat idle beside them became an instant parable for everything overfunded and over-engineered in consumer tech. The CEO published a defense; it did not help.
Sales were suspended, refunds offered, and the search for a buyer began. None of it worked. Juicero shut its doors, the press joined the small museum of gadgets remembered chiefly for being absurd, and a $120-million company became permanent shorthand for a question every hardware founder now has to answer out loud: what, exactly, does the device do that the customer could not do without it?
Jibo was an $899 tabletop robot billed as “the world’s first social robot for the home,” and in 2019 its servers were switched off and it went dark — roughly two years after the first units shipped and nearly five years after the crowdfunding campaign that made it a phenomenon. Built around a swiveling head, a round screen, two cameras, a microphone array, and a deliberately expressive personality, Jibo was meant to be a companion: it would recognize faces, turn to whoever was speaking, tell jokes, dance, take photos, and answer questions, less an assistant than a character that lived on your counter. It was designed by MIT roboticist Cynthia Breazeal, a founding figure in the field of social robotics, and it carried genuine pedigree into a market that did not yet exist.
The money followed the promise. After a 2014 Indiegogo campaign that raised around $3.7 million in preorders — at the time one of the platform’s most successful technology projects — Jibo, Inc. went on to raise tens of millions more in venture capital, with reported totals upward of $70 million. Expectations ran high and the timeline ran long: backers who ordered in 2014 waited until late 2017 to receive their robots, by which point the world they were entering had changed underneath them.
That world now had the Amazon Echo and Google Home — cylinders that cost a fraction of Jibo’s price and answered the same questions faster, with a vastly larger ecosystem behind them. Against them, Jibo’s charm could not carry its limits. Reviewers admired the personality and the engineering and found the actual abilities thin: it was, in the unkind shorthand of the moment, a tablet on a swivel that cost $899 and did less than a $50 speaker. The company laid off most of its staff in 2018 and sold its assets, and the servers Jibo depended on were scheduled to go offline.
What made Jibo’s death unusual was the death itself. As the shutdown approached in 2019, the robots delivered an on-device farewell — a short message, and a final dance, telling owners it had enjoyed its time with them and hoping that someday, when robots were more advanced, they might tell theirs that Jibo said hello. The moment was widely covered and genuinely moving to many owners, who had, against their own better judgment, come to feel something for a machine that was about to stop being able to feel anything back.
The CueCat was a small, cat-shaped barcode scanner, given away free starting in 2000 by a Dallas company called Digital Convergence, and within roughly a year it had become one of the most thoroughly mocked gadgets in the short history of consumer technology. The premise: instead of typing a web address, a reader would drag the cat across a special barcode — a “cue” — printed in a magazine, catalog, or newspaper, and their browser would open the corresponding page. It solved the strenuous problem of typing a URL by replacing it with the simpler act of locating a wired plastic cat, plugging it into your computer, installing its software, and dragging it across a code. The company burned through roughly $185 million before folding in 2001.
The CueCat arrived at the absolute peak of dot-com confidence, when the prevailing theory held that anything connecting the physical world to the web was inevitably valuable, and that the business model could be figured out later. Digital Convergence raised enormous sums from blue-chip backers — Belo Corporation, RadioShack, Young & Rubicam, and Coca-Cola among them — and struck distribution deals that mailed the scanners out by the hundreds of thousands. Forbes sent the first 830,000 to its subscribers; Wired sent over 500,000; RadioShack stocked them on shelves. Millions of cats went out into the world, free, to do a job almost nobody wanted done.
Two things finished it. The first was that the value proposition never made sense — the company, critics noted, never managed to explain why scanning a barcode was easier than typing the link it pointed to. The second was privacy. Each CueCat carried a unique serial number, and the software phoned home; the device tracked what users scanned and tied it to their registration, and in September 2000 the situation curdled into a genuine breach when a misconfigured server exposed the names, email addresses, age ranges, genders, and zip codes of roughly 140,000 registered users. A free gadget that surveilled you while solving nothing was a hard sell even when the price was zero.
By May 2001 Digital Convergence had fired most of its 225-person workforce, and by that September Belo had written off its entire $37.5 million investment. The CueCat has since become a fixture on lists of the worst products ever made — ranked twentieth among PC World’s worst tech products in 2006, and included in Time’s “50 Worst Inventions” in 2010 — a permanent monument to the dot-com conviction that a clever bridge between print and web was worth building whether or not anyone needed to cross it.
Pebble was the smartwatch that proved the category before the giants arrived to take it — a developer-friendly e-paper watch funded by the most famous crowdfunding campaign of its era — and in December 2016 its founder sold what remained to Fitbit, which kept the talent and the intellectual property and shut the company down. Founded by Eric Migicovsky and routed through Y Combinator, Pebble turned to Kickstarter in 2012 after struggling to raise conventional money, and the result rewrote the platform’s record books: roughly $10.3 million pledged by tens of thousands of backers, the most-funded project in Kickstarter’s history at the time. A 2015 follow-up for the Pebble Time raised about $20.3 million, hitting $1 million in 49 minutes.
The watches were modest by design and beloved for it. A Pebble used a low-power, sunlight-readable e-paper display that ran for days on a charge, paired with iPhone or Android, and threw its doors open to developers — an SDK, an app store, and a hacker-friendly culture that produced thousands of watchfaces and apps. Priced from around $99 to roughly $250, Pebble sold more than two million watches across its models. For a stretch in 2013 and 2014, it was the smartwatch, the proof that wrist computing could work and that an enthusiastic community would build atop it.
Then the platform owners showed up. The Apple Watch arrived in 2015 with Apple’s marketing budget and ecosystem behind it; Fitbit and others pressed in from the fitness side. Pebble, a hardware startup living campaign to campaign, could not match their spend, their distribution, or their balance sheets, and by late 2016 it was running low on cash. On December 6, 2016, Fitbit announced it had acquired Pebble’s software and intellectual property and key personnel — hiring a portion of the staff, reportedly around 40 percent, and laying off the rest. The watches Pebble had not yet shipped were cancelled and refunded; the ones already on wrists would keep working “for now,” with support withdrawn and future functionality, the founder warned, likely to shrink.
The company was gone, but the watches refused to die. A volunteer community called Rebble stood up replacement servers when Pebble’s own cloud services went dark in June 2018, keeping the app store, voice features, and watches alive long past their maker’s death. And in a genuinely rare turn for this catalog, the story bent back toward life: on January 27, 2025, Google open-sourced PebbleOS, releasing the code that had been locked inside a defunct acquisition, and Migicovsky used it to relaunch Pebble hardware. The smartwatch Fitbit switched off became one of the few in this archive to get a second act.
Ouya was a $99 Android-powered game console that promised to break open the closed, expensive world of console gaming, and on June 25, 2019 its servers went dark and bricked much of what the device could still do. It began as one of the great crowdfunding stories: in the summer of 2012 the Ouya Kickstarter raised about $8.6 million from roughly 63,000 backers, hit its goal in a matter of hours, and arrived freighted with the hopes of everyone who wanted gaming to be cheap, open, and free of the gatekeeping of Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. It launched in June 2013 as a small black box you plugged into your television, ran Android games, and let anyone develop for. The dream did not survive contact with the product.
What backers and buyers received was underwhelming on nearly every axis. The hardware felt cheap, the controller was widely criticized as clunky and laggy, and the storefront was thin — a small catalog of mostly minor games, many of them free-to-try ports, with few reasons to keep the console connected to the television. The “open console” pitch was real, but openness without a compelling library is just an empty shelf, and the novelty that drove the Kickstarter curdled quickly into buyer’s remorse. Sales after the initial crowdfunded wave were poor.
Ouya the company could not make the economics work, and in 2015 the gaming-hardware maker Razer acquired its software assets, folding the storefront and content into its own Forge TV effort and ending the Ouya hardware line. For a few years the servers limped on, letting existing owners still reach the store and re-download what they had bought. Then Razer set a hard date: on June 25, 2019, it would deactivate Ouya accounts and shut down all online elements of the service.
When that date came, much of the Ouya experience simply stopped working. The store closed, purchases could no longer be downloaded, and games that phoned home for licensing or content broke, leaving owners able to play only what was already installed and self-contained on the box. A console that had been sold on the promise of openness ended as a sealed brick — a small black reminder that a record-breaking Kickstarter buys a launch, not a future.
The Segway PT was a two-wheeled, self-balancing Personal Transporter that was supposed to change how cities were built and instead became a tourist novelty and a punchline. Inventor Dean Kamen unveiled it on December 3, 2001 on ABC’s Good Morning America, after a year of feverish speculation about a secret project codenamed “Ginger” and “IT.” On July 15, 2020, after nearly nineteen years on the market, its parent company Ninebot rolled the last unit off the production line and ended the original Segway for good.
The gap between the hype and the result is the entire story. Before anyone had seen it, the device drew claims that it would be “to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy” — a remark that captured the breathless register of the pre-launch leaks. Investor John Doerr reportedly suggested it might be bigger than the internet; Steve Jobs is said to have called it as big a deal as the PC. Cities, the prophecy went, would be redesigned around it. What actually arrived was a $5,000 contraption that topped out around 10 mph, weighed too much to carry, and looked faintly ridiculous in motion.
Reality arrived quickly and stayed. At five thousand dollars the Segway was priced like a used car for the performance of a brisk walk; it was too fast and too heavy for sidewalks, which many jurisdictions promptly banned it from, and too slow and exposed for roads. It found real customers — police departments, security teams, warehouse staff, and tour operators steering tourists in single file past landmarks — but never the mass market it had been promised to remake. The pop-culture verdict was sealed by Paul Blart: Mall Cop and a decade of comedians: the Segway was what you rode to look important while going nowhere fast.
A darker note hangs over the company’s history. In December 2009 the British entrepreneur Jimi Heselden bought Segway Inc.; on September 26, 2010 he died at 62 after riding an off-road Segway model off a cliff into the River Wharfe near his Yorkshire estate. Across roughly nineteen years the PT sold only about 140,000 units in total, and by the end accounted for around 1.5 percent of the revenue of Ninebot, the Chinese firm that had acquired Segway in 2015. The company that killed the PT did so to concentrate on the e-scooters and self-balancing gadgets the Segway’s own technology had quietly helped inspire.
Anki was the consumer-robotics startup that made the genre’s most charming products and then collapsed almost overnight when a single financing deal fell through. Founded in 2010 by three Carnegie Mellon robotics PhDs — Boris Sofman, Mark Palatucci, and Hanns Tappeiner — the company launched its first product, the AI-driven racing game Anki Drive, in 2013, and went on to build Cozmo (2016) and Vector (2018), two small desktop robots widely praised for genuine personality. On April 29, 2019, Anki told its roughly 200 employees that the company was shutting down within days. It was bankrupt.
The waste was the painful part. Anki was not a vaporware outfit or a crowdfunding ghost. It had raised in the region of $185 million from serious investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, and JP Morgan; it had reportedly sold around 1.5 million robots, including hundreds of thousands of Cozmo units; and its products were good — Cozmo and Vector were among the few home robots that critics and owners actually loved rather than tolerated. The robots used expressive movement, a tiny animated face, and real computer-vision and on-board AI to do something most “social robots” only claimed to do: feel alive on a desk.
What killed Anki was the brutal economics underneath the charm. Building a hardware-and-software company that designs custom robots, runs the cloud services behind them, and funds the next product is enormously capital-intensive, and Anki was burning through its money faster than the robots could replenish it. The company was negotiating a major new round when, in the CEO’s words, a significant deal at a late stage fell through with a strategic investor. Without that bridge, a business that lived on outside funding had no runway left.
The end was abrupt and the human cost was real: about 200 staff were laid off with minimal notice and little severance, a sober reminder that behind every “startup shuts down” headline are families that lost a paycheck without warning. The robots themselves were not entirely abandoned. In December 2019, the edtech firm Digital Dream Labs acquired Anki’s assets and later revived Vector, keeping its cloud services running and giving the little robot — and the people who had bonded with it — an unexpected second life. Anki’s products earned their affection; the company simply ran out of the cash that affection alone could never supply.