High-profile flops fill the gallery at CES Gadget Fest

A gallery of flops, including a tweet-only handset and a fancy Apple stereo, warned entrepreneurs at CES Thursday that dreams of market glory may crumble.

Iconic product bugs on display at the CES consumer electronics trade show included a skin-tightening face mask reminiscent of a horror movie; Glasses with embedded therapeutic magnets and a model of the failed sports car DeLorean from the 80s.

“A lot of founders have this tendency that they think they’re geniuses and everything they do is super right,” said Gallery of Mistakes organizer, prelaunch founder Narek Vardanyan AFP.

“(But) you can burn a lot of money and lose a lot of years.”

The annual CES concert electronics extravaganza opened its doors in Las Vegas on Thursday as the industry looks at the latest innovations to ease the pain of a struggling global economy.

The bugs featured in the warning gallery of flops also included Zune MP3 players launched by Microsoft and Apple’s defunct Pippin gaming console, which never became popular.

According to Vardanyan, around 80 percent of the products launched each year often fail because the founders were unable to assess whether people were really willing to spend money on what they were selling.

While tech giants can afford the occasional product bombardment, such an outcome could spell the end of a fledgling startup.

“I think it’s great to think about failure because failure is a valuable learning experience,” said Brad Holliday of ID8 Innovation, which advises large companies on startup projects.

“If you can speed up your process of understanding when something isn’t going to be successful, you can save yourself money in the long run,” he added.

Armenia-based flop show promoter Prelaunch specializes in checking potential demand for new products early in the development process, according to its boss.

“For a bright-eyed entrepreneur, that kind of idea could probably help avoid wasting a lot of money or time chasing something that doesn’t make sense,” said Mark Harrison, founder of MH3 Collective, whose group of companies in Canada includes marketing agencies and nonprofits organizations.

“It’s interesting, you could have a whole museum,” Harrison added while looking at the flops on display.

Creative Strategies analyst Carolina Milanesi told AFP that gadget makers innovating this year will be interested in getting products to market quickly.

In the face of a troubled global economy, startups don’t have the five years they might have expected to perfect their projects and stave off failure, she said.

Startups today have to “bet on money that will flow into their coffers in the near future,” said Milanesi.

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