Sony Launches Crowdfunding Platform for Employee Projects

[Lizzy Finnegan]

Sony Launches Crowdfunding Platform for Employee Projects

Sony has launched a new crowdfunding platform designed to help their own employees fund projects that do not fit with the company's existing product line.

Sony's Seed Acceleration Program was put into place with the intention of helping promising new business ideas proposed by Sony employees grow into full-fledged businesses. The newest initiative of the program is a platform called First Flight [https://first-flight.sony.com/pj/3/%E6%9F%84%E3%81%8C%E5%A4%89%E3%82%8F%E3%82%8B%E6%99%82%E8%A8%88%E3%80%80FES%20Watch], a crowdfunding campaign aimed to help Sony employees raise funds from the public in order to have their business dreams recognized.

"Through the First Flight platform, Sony will support the launch and growth of new business ventures," the company said in a statement [http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/201507/15-061E/index.html]. "The platform will give nascent projects the opportunity to ascertain the actual needs of the market; realise a co-creation model of product development and improvement through direct dialogue with customers; and ensure timely sales operations that are also optimal for their business size."

The press release states that on July 1, "two new business projects nurtured within Sony will officially launch in the Japanese market via First Flight." The first is MESH, a DIY kit that "turns anyone into an inventor." MESH completed a successful Indiegogo campaign [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mesh-creative-diy-kit-for-the-connected-life#/story] in March.


Preorders are available for FES Watch, "a project that merges technology with fashion," with the band and the watch face changing in response to the user's wrist gestures.


There is also the HUIS home remote control, which features an e-paper screen and can be programmed to replace existing remotes.


"Sony's innovation is ingrained in the company's founding spirit of `doing what has never been done before.' Nothing embodies this spirit more than passionate entrepreneurs who give shape to their ground-breaking ideas and introduce them to the world, without fear of failure," said Kazuo Hirai, President and CEO of Sony. "The First Flight platform and other Seed Acceleration Program initiatives accelerate and optimize this process. Sony itself originated as a start-up, and through the Seed Acceleration Program we are challenging ourselves to return to our entrepreneurial roots. At Sony we will continue to explore ways of delivering new, emotionally compelling experiences and enhanced customer value."

First Flight is currently Japan-only.

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[Jacked Assassin]

These all seem like they could fail like Ouya....

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

We are already at the stage where we capitalise from the future. The wealth to be gained from the present is not enough?
Also I am certain Sony does not know fashion, but that is subjective.

 

[loa]

Why don't they use ickstarter to kickstart their project?
I'm not sure what this "sony employee exclusive" part is good for.
Kind of dooms the service to failure due to a severely limited pool of people who can use it.

 

[Made in China]

I absolutely love CEOs and their wacky boardroom ideas. This shows a clear misunderstanding of the world around them.
Yes, crowdfunding is successful, but it is meant to fund those without means but with a vision to release a product. That may even include companies, as the struggling DoubleFine showed us.
It is NOT meant to fund those without a clear vision and with exuberant funds. I'm sure that if those inventors had a truly profitable idea, Sony wouldn't pass it over.

Well, it's just another thing that exists now, I guess. It isn't truly harmful to me, but it just reflects poorly on Sony.

 

[mad825]

I absolutely love CEOs and their wacky boardroom ideas. This shows a clear misunderstanding of the world around them.

Quite the opposite one might conclude. They understand the world very much from a business sense, they'll get all the money want by investing nothing from their own pockets and retaining full rights to the product.

What do we get? A result, a result that be half-arse which is by our own doing.

I'm not sure what this "sony employee exclusive" part is good for.
Kind of dooms the service to failure due to a severely limited pool of people who can use it.

It's simply "providing a service" for the employees. This way, Sony can supply the employees with contacts (help with manufacturing, advertisement and so forth) in exchange for a small fee/percentage/ownership. I'm willing to bet that this "service" barely costs anything if anything other than time to operate. In other words; publisher.

I don't know the ToS but that's likly the case.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

No! Fuck off Sony!

You know what this is in reality right? Lots of employees have ideas. And now Sony wants to profit from all of the ideas by making you, the gamers, pay for the ideas so that they wouldn't have to. It's brilliant if you're a businessman, but it's fuckin' mental if you're a consumer.

I told you that this was the next step. Corporations exist to make money. If they think they can offload risk to someone else and invest fuckin' nothing, or less than they actually should, then that's exactly what they'll try to do. This is like pre-ordering a game before it's even entered production. And I know that these words are pointless. Most gamers have no self respect and no impulse control. They'll buy into this crap immediately.

And you know what the next step is? Holding actually popular franchises hostage until you fork out money to publishers when the game only exists as a vague fuckin' idea.

 

[owbu]

We should just start calling cynical people prophets.

Not only giant companies abusing kickstarter for saving money, they also managed to negate the "big projects on kickstarter helping the smallones" advantage these shinanigans had. Yay.
I hope this will fail miserably. Like Uplay and Dlcs and Drm and Preoderculture! ...hrmpf.

 

[Outcast107]

Wonder how many people are going to defend Sony again.

 

[Burgers2013]

Wow...This is bad. At this point we're just doing Sony executives' jobs only without the getting-all-of-the-money part.

One of the things I like about crowdfunding is the fact that backers can have some (although widely varying) influence over the project. This can't be the case with Sony involved.

 

[Ken_J]

Why don't they use ickstarter to kickstart their project?
I'm not sure what this "sony employee exclusive" part is good for.
Kind of dooms the service to failure due to a severely limited pool of people who can use it.

Kickstarter takes a cut of the money that Sony probably wants to keep.

 

[Hairless Mammoth]

I guess this is good for employees that signed NDAs and non-compete clauses that make anything they invent, related to their job or the company's industry, property of the company, even if it was all done at home. I had to sign one of those almost 3 years ago, just to work for a sub-contracting company that fixed new cars with random crap wrong with them. If I came up with some hypothetical nifty tool to simplify the nightmarish electrical issues we encountered, I would only now have a patent going and Kickstarter campaign in the works.

From what I'm seeing here, this program still seems to be partially in Sony's favor. "Hey, Jim, you know that invention you have that you'd been holding off on patenting until you left the company (if you ever do), so you didn't loose the rights to it? Well, now you can follow your dreams while still remaining at your stable job. We're just going to get a good cut of the profits, though."

I also guess, depending on who needs to give the OK for a project to even get into the program, the concept at least might let lower level employees with great ideas get the exposure they need to develop those dreams, before the idea become obsolete years/decades later.

Other than that, it seems more like Sony is just trying to take the risk out of business. It's too early to tell if the Shenmue 3 Kickstarter success is what inspired them. But, I have this feeling they're liking crowdfunding's ability to simultaneously gauge public acceptance of a project and generation some funds.

To use one of those items as an example, the programmable remote is neat, but it should have been made a couple years after the first Kindle showed how great e-paper is on battery life. We've already seen customizable programmable remotes since the 90s. It shouldn't take external influence to get Sony to produce a high end model for home theater enthusiasts, or a low end model for Timmy to set up so Gran-gran can work the newfangled cablesat box and plasmajig TV without trouble. (Even after admitting they are short on cash and sold off their phone and PC divisions, they still have enough chutzpa to try and market a $1000 mp3 player. I don't see how a nifty remote could be any more of a risk.)

 

[bluegate]

Well I knew this kind of bullshit was gonna happen one day soon. I cannot fathom how anyone can defend this. Like seriously.

What's so wrong about it then?

I personally don't see a whole lot of harm in this situation. Big development companies like Sony have a lot of ideas for products, most of which will end up in the trash can because corporate investors aren't willing to take the risk of further developing them. With this, they are able to take these ideas, gauge interest for them and if enough interest is garnered, create the product and supply it to the people who actually want it.

 

[thewatergamer]

No, No sony you are not going to set a precedent of having kickstarters created by triple A publishers become a thing, stop right their, you got away with it at E3 because you managed to get our nostalgia going, but this becoming a trend is not something I am ok with, kickstarter is already a dodgy enough proposition with all the disappointment's and failures, the last thing it needs is the morons running the game industry into the ground getting into it