FloJack orders delayed?

[ChoiParticipant]

Dear flomio
Please let me know the order status.
I will not tolerate any more.

[KennethParticipant]

This is a one person company now and he makes promises he does not keep. I have been invoiced for many orders that have not shipped. Total scam. Report him to the police. No one place any more orders! SCAM!

[RichardKeymaster]

Choi, your order #4849 was for a FloJack. We have FloJacks in stock but as indicated on this blog post we have experienced issues with the FloJack on iOS7 and have stopped shipping orders until we can resolve these issues. Meanwhile, we’ve been working on a new NFC reader that circumvents the audio jack with Bluetooth Low Energy that may be of interest to you. We offer customers that ordered FloJacks the option of swapping for a FloBLE by filling out this form.

Kenneth, while it’s true that our company has shrunk we are still very much alive and working to improve where possible. Our records show that you have only placed one order with us, #2315 for $98.35, and it was shipped 2013-07-21 06:52:25 GMT. If you have other orders that haven’t been processed, send me the order number and I can look into it for you.

[KennethParticipant]

Richard, you are full of crap. I have orders that have never been filled for Flojack’s that were never shipped. They were paid for via credit card.

I now have disputed charges with my credit card company that is investigating your company. You business practice of collecting money for products that you never ship is illegal. Doing it across state lines makes it a federal case.

My advice to all: contact the FBI in Florida.

[KennethParticipant]

Warning to all: This is the reply you will get when you order things from this company—-by not shipping partial orders, they collect your money, never produce a product, and repeat the cycle. STAY AWAY.

Hello Kenneth, we don’t send out partial orders and you have a FloJack in your order. As indicated on this blog post we have experienced issues with the FloJack on iOS7 and have stopped shipping FloJacks until we can resolve these issues. As indicated in this blog post, we are in the final stages of building the FloBLE which circumvents the audio jack with Bluetooth Low Energy. We offer customers that ordered FloJacks the option of swapping for a FloBLE by filling out this form.

thanks,
ᐧ

On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 1:02 PM, KENNETH WAHLER <kennethwahler@me.com> wrote:
I have an order that was placed and billed to my credit card. Either ship the order or provide a credit to the card you charged.

Thank you. Kenneth Wahler

[RichardKeymaster]

Kenneth, there are currently 2 orders under the name Kenneth Wahler, order #1799 and #6042, and they are “on hold” because they contain FloJacks. These will be fulfilled with FloBLE’s once we complete our production run. If you’re unwilling to wait for that please say so and I’ll gladly ship your FloJack orders immediately. We can’t afford to split orders and fulfill them in parts because the shipping costs would be more than what’s covered by each order.

As far as Flomio’s business practices, we are acting under the law and maintain a consistent message regarding our Kickstarter campaign for the FloJack. Crowdfunding is a grey area where consumers are more like investors than anything else. There has been a lot discussion about what rights and responsibilities each party has so we’re trying to abide by those as closely as we can. The project team is risking time and effort to create something that doesn’t exist in the market and the campaign backers are risking waiting indefinitely for project deliverables. The reality in the hardware space is if you don’t order in volume, you can’t get price points that will satisfy the market. With crowdfunding, it’s been possible to experiment and innovate at a faster pace.

The Flomio team, as small as we now are, continues to strive to deliver on our Kickstarter promise, almost 2 years after the campaign has concluded. We (I) will continue to do that until we can fulfill every pledge or order that was made. If you’d like to speak to someone directly about your order, you can reach us at our contact number on our About page.

[RonaldParticipant]

Hey Richard and Jake, my thread and inquiries were never addressed since the last message I sent to you guys. Please see Tagged: （# flo10002）. I pretty much waited for a YEAR (all paid up in advanced which now I think is an incorrect practise by you guys) and still not get any respectful reply and your failed promise of delivering the FloBLE. If this project is way above all your team’s skillsets and ability to produce and deliver to the market, you guys have to be totally honest with it and refund the money to customers. I didn’t place your order via kickstarter. I placed it directly in your website which in no way was I being told clearly that it was a non-existent product during the time of placing the order (or kickstarter driven to deliver kind of project). If you see my thread, I actually have a person who was working in your Flomio team telling me after placing my order I would get it after a week. I ordered the scanner and also the NFC stickers, which I really don’t believe you guys can’t ship out the NFC stickers because it is still in development when they are not even the so called innovative core part of the hardware things you guys are making. If you guys keep basing replies with one lie after another, and disregard giving me proper options like actually shipping a piece of hardware that works or refund the money back to me since you guys can’t deliver, and yet you guys still don’t own up to the problem you guys created for me and refuse to respectfully follow up with me within this week, you literally force me to make the next move which is to file a criminal report to the police, inform my lawyers, alert my credit card bank about this transaction fraud to also file an investigation, and also alert all kinds of tech media organizations like Techcrunch and all relevant people who had given public marketing exposure for your product about this incident and your business practices which includes failing to deliver and show absolutely no respect to me in following up my order (and I am sure all the people in the same situation as me with you guys will definitely voice out to the public). You have my email and contact and there is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON to not follow up with me and rectify the PROBLEM YOU CAUSED! I am posting this to ALL YOUR THREADS SO YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE TO NOT SEE THIS MESSAGE. I hope you understand that if you guys keep running the business like this in the dark (absolutely no weekly or monthly updates on development /shipment progress), you risk tarnishing your brand and respectability and even if you guys deliver the promised project after another 2 more years because it seems like its your hobby project funded by innocent victims like us, the product will basically be D-O-A when reached to the mainstream market regardless of how amazing it will be.

[KennethParticipant]

They are committing and interstate crime which puts this in Federal jurisdiction. Contact the FBI Office in Ft. Lauderdale to lodge your complaint. Probably never get refunded—next option—jail time.

[RichardKeymaster]

Hi Ronald, many customers -Kickstarter and pre-order alike- have asked for refunds with the same reasoning as you have posted. Our position has remained consistent ever since the FloJack campaign began: in order to achieve a price point the market could bare we need to place a bulk order of at least 1000 units. We achieved that goal with the Kickstarter campaign and placed the order with the factory, assembled all the units, and developed the iOS SDK for most of the Apple mobile devices (iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad, iPad Mini). This was of course for iOS6 and below. There is plenty of evidence to corroborate that claim. When iOS7 was released it became clear that porting all the SDKs to the new OS was more effort than we had the resources for since we spent all the pre-order dollars developing everything for iOS6. That’s when the FloBLE idea came about and a willing enterprise to fund it’s development and bulk order. That effort is still ongoing.

Flomio has restructured time and again to try and deliver something our customers can use. We have FloJacks in stock but stopped shipping them because customers complained that it didn’t work with there iOS7 devices. If you want your FloJack hardware, we are more than glad to ship it to you since that is what you paid for. If your order contains other items we sell, we keep the whole order on hold. We don’t ship partial orders because the shipping charge does not cover two separate shipments, only one.

We welcome customer feedback like this. That’s why we setup this Forum to being with. Positive or negative, it’s the reality of our situation. Something we have no intention of hiding. The Flomio brand is, at the end of the day, a reflection of what we can deliver based on the resources we have. Today, that isn’t much but we are not giving up. We are a competent and capable team and have shown it many times. The FloJack history may not reflect it, but iOS7 was a challenge we did not foresee or plan for.

[KennethParticipant]

And the iPhone 6 changes everything again since it will have NFC. Quit the nonsense and refund charges for products never delivered!

[RonaldParticipant]

Richard, as a capable person you claim to be or being part of this capable Flomio team, how can you put all backers and actual customers like me in such a risk when you guys make a new decision to pursue the FloBLE path which requires you guys to completely rebuild the product when you guys don’t even have the resources and capital to do such an action. You guys announced the new direction since the beginning of this year like January. It is now more than 7 months and almost heading towards Christmas and still no signs of a finished FloBLE product. Didn’t you guys take into account that a new iPhone is about to come out in September this year with iOS 8 and there is going to be a more radical change which will render your development work useless again if you are building really boiler code or hack type of hardware? Honestly, Apple is probably aware of startups like you guys that are building iPhone hardware add-ons/accessories that are not conforming to the iPhone hardware and software protocols, so will even modify newer iPhone hardware and software to ensure you guys can’t hack their hardware to deliver NFC capabilities (after all, Apple did not buy into the NFC technology and refuse to offer it after so many subsequent iPhone generation launches or otherwise they would have added it themselves into the phone in the first place). Third party NFC add-ons to iPhone will only work if companies deliver and fix issues quickly, which in your case is no where near this kind of capability level. If you are still just presenting a believe and no real solid proof that your continuation with the current development and business practices will work, you really need to stop giving false hopes to all your involved backers AND customers and actually put your team on the path to salvage what is left in your project and liquidate to return funds to customers and move on to a new idea (and PLEASE STOP using Kickstarter as your shield and excuse to fend off any wrong-doings you guys committed). So far the last most substantial update you guys broadcasted out was a change of direction to produce FloBLE. There is no substantial follow up or blueprint/demo prototype of the actual device being build and on any final step to launch it. This is a very strong disappointment and I would be terribly shocked if you guys are actually Silicon Valley based talent kind of startup. One simple solution to your iOS 7 problem was really building the bridge hardware to bypass the jack input and link Bluetooth to the NFC detector hardware of the FloJack. If resources and capital was limited your capable team should have dismantled the existing FloJack inventory and modify all of them with the bluetooth bridging fix which suppose should be a small micro chip solution to integrate into your existing FloJack hardware and re-create the casing with newer, cheaper and faster manufacturing processes like 3-D printing instead of completely re-manufacturing a new batch of inventory. It takes you guys more than 7 months to create such a fix?? This is a joke… REALLY!! Before you procrastinate onwards with your repeated and lame excuses, you better think hard how you and your team are going to explain all these flaws one after another continuously to the panel of judges in a court hearing which they are most likely going to give precedence to suppressing fraudulent businesses and setting a strong example to curb future potential frauds.

[RichardKeymaster]

Ronald, I think you missed this blog post sent out in March, 2014 with FloBLE progress and working proof of concept. BLE is a standardized interface and not something any device that conforms to the specification can block. The pace of our development is slow because we have to work on other consulting projects in parallel to keep the business running. The FloBLE solution is in fact a bridge implementation that bypasses the jack input with a BLE chipset, but in no way is it “simple”. BLE doesn’t support serial UART emulation as a standard profile so aside from the laying out of a new PCB, new power and antenna front end design, and bootstrap firmware development, there was the BLE ramp up work and serial driver work that has taken the longest. In fact there are still challenges in the broad BLE community to achieve consistent serial data throughput across BLE.

Again, this feedback is helpful. We stand by what we have done and continue to work on. If legal action is taken against us, we will present the facts as we see them.

[RonaldParticipant]

You are still in denial of the problems you are causing customers like us. The fact that one of your employees or representative promising my order will be filled after 1 week of placing of the order (solid prove shown in the forum page that involved my question) and not meeting the delivery time for more than a year is a serious breach of contract of sales. An involvement of a court hearing will be multi-dimensional (i.e. not just why your kickstarter project keeps delaying and delaying). You charged my credit card quickly (i.e. solid prove of establishing the contract of sales) after placing my order and failed to satisfy the delivery period promised to me (i.e. fundamental breach of sales of contract), you even have the guts to refuse answering my last message for several months until today when I have to initiate a following up response and now you have absolutely no idea or even tell me when you can deliver the product to me (i.e. no intention of warranting the contract of sales). This is a lot of stuff on your plate at the moment. If you honestly think you can serve all your backers and customers right now without a solid deadline (something you guys supposed need to work hard and commit to) and you guys are still getting new orders and only taking in new capital (regarding whether its investors or product buyers) you guys are seriously running a scam closely comparable to a pyramid scheme which is an undeniable fraud. Do you guys still need another 6 months holiday in Miami Beach before you can come up with a deadline delivery date which is gonna be another 5 years later just because you guys suddenly become full time third party contractors to other non-related companies and demoted yourself to being casual time flomio developers which has an important legal duty of trust and responsibility to your backers and customers?
This is not a feedback to support your continuation of procrastination. This is a request to resolve my issue now and give me (the victim) respectable and acceptable options to quit this scam that you are running now.

[RichardKeymaster]

Hi Ronald, we apologize that you were misinformed by our customer service representative. He should have followed up with you directly about the non-shipment of FloJack orders late last year. The issue was that we were learning about the problems with iOS7 at that time and didn’t know what to do about it. I will ship out your order #4232 as is but be warned that it will only work as designed on iOS6.

[RonaldParticipant]

This is no apology and correct attitude Richard. You are literally giving me no decent option but to accept your “now turned junk” inventory which there is no way I am able to use now because all my devices are iOS7 and there is no way to downgrade it back nor will I do that to render my devices useless just to use your hardware. I am not your project backer nor direct investor so I should not be responsible for or have duty to absorb your business risks and losses. Any customers that purchase an item from a seller have the right to obtain a fully working and functional product. Your company failed to deliver the sales goods within the time period and caused me to lose out on the return faulty goods period entitlement is literally stripping me of lawful rights as a customer (and you cannot assume that in that order period the item was fully functional because the goods were never delivered and you cannot prove that the particular items you were suppose to send to me would be 100% functional). After a year, you still intent to ship me a failed product (which you already confirmed that it will not work with existing iPhones that run existing generations of hardware and software OS). If you do so, you are still in breach of contract of sales. If you work out the maths, your company holding my money for more than a year must accrue interest charges (which your company owes me principle and interests). Any capital issues you are facing now with your company is something you have to work out with your banks/shareholders/business partners owners of Flomio. If you give me a fair, respectable, and proper options that I agree with as well, we can still work out something together that will result in a win-win situation. Otherwise you need to own up the full consequence of this ordeal which you have caused to your customers like me.

[RichardKeymaster]

Hey Ronald, I understand your position and agree with most of it. Where I object is to the notion that the product we fabricated is “junk”. The device operates as we said it would from a hardware standpoint. The issue is with the host device side of things, in this case iOS devices. We developed an open source iOS SDK that demodulates the data that comes from the FloJack. This SDK works consistently with iOS6 (as promised) but not consistently with iOS7+. Other companies that have audio jack accessories on the market like Square and Paypal have resolved these issues with iOS7. So clearly the problem isn’t impossible to solve, it’s more about whether it’s worth our time or not. We decided after understanding what was happening that it was better to focus on a standardized interface with BLE.

That being said, I want to reach a win-win situation with you and the many other frustrated backers that saw value in what we were creating. Our options are 1) to work consulting to generate enough profit ourselves to take FloBLE to production (thereby developing at a slower pace than normal) and deliver something to backers like you or 2) quit and close everything down. Myself and the team have chosen option 1 for the time being. Part because we still believe NFC is a winning technology ( one that Apple is likely to embrace soon) and part because of our commitment to a community that has supported us.

If those that have lost faith and think we’re just a bunch of scammers rather we choose option 2 then I would suggest they keep polluting these Forums with fallacies about our incompetence and inability to make what we’ve proven we can make. Either way, the Flomies are going to stand tall about who we are, what we’ve done, and where we’re going.

[RonaldParticipant]

Richard, there is no change to my shipping address. I have ordered 2 x FloJacks, NFC dry Inlay Tags 64B (Perfect for Cloud Actions 10 pack #FLO12503), and I have fully paid up the above mentioned plus the international shipping cost already. Don’t come back to me and say I need to pay more, and you owe me 3 items. You please give me a shipping date for these new FloJacks that you claim to work with iOS7+ as I am already disgusted with the words but no action plan experience here. Initially if you guys could deliver what you promised at the start, we could have built an ongoing business relationship as my product software to use this would require mass order of these FloJacks by my customers. You cannot deliver me a workable testing unit, and you’ve really killed our confidence in giving you guys mass orders.

[RichardKeymaster]

@Ronald, we’ve shipped out your order today. Your tracking number is:

https://tools.usps.com/go/TrackConfirmAction!input.action?tRef=qt&tLc=1&tLabels=LN799601784US

Please give the system a few days to register tracking information. We use USPS and their service takes a bit longer than the others to turn on.

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