Onyx Motorbike went out of business in 2023. The category is super crowded, while most of the frames are not straight, sport mode cuts out frequently, and have trouble hitting 50+ even though they claim 60. The wiring inside them is a complete mess, the first thousand bikes did not even have full coverage of brake pads on the discs.
Launched in 2016 and discontinued in 2024, Amazon gave up on the cashier-less “Just Walk Out” technology at its Amazon Fresh grocery stores. New stores will be built without computer-vision-powered surveillance technology, and “the majority” of existing stores will have the tech removed. In the early days, Amazon’s ambitions included selling Just Walk Out to other brick-and-mortar stores. The problem was that the technology never really worked.
Just Walk Out was supposed to let customers grab what they wanted from a store and just leave, skipping any kind of checkout process. Amazon wanted to track what customers took with them purely via AI-powered video surveillance; the system just took a phone scan at the door, and shoppers would be billed later via their Amazon accounts.
Amazon had more than 1,000 people in India working on Just Walk Out as of mid-2022 whose jobs included manually reviewing transactions and labeling images from videos to train Just Walk Out’s machine learning model. Just Walk Out required about 700 human reviews per 1,000 sales, far above an internal target of reducing the number of reviews to between 20 and 50 per 1,000 sales.
In 1995, the Dodgers had a promotion where it gave out 15K baseballs. Fans didn’t like some calls from the umpires leading to the field being flooded with baseballs and the game being forfeited.
Launched in 2009, the Palm Pre’s biggest disadvantage was its app store, which had only about a dozen apps, compared with over 40,000 for the iPhone. There were only a handful of buttons, and these were rubbery and protruded too little from the body, making them hard to press unseen. The power button was clumsy to use when the keyboard is open. Plus the Pre’s autocorrect system, for instantly fixing mistyped words, is puny. Even with a physical keyboard, people make typos, and Palm only fixes about 2,500 common words, like “the.” By contrast, both the BlackBerry and iPhone have tens of thousands of autocorrections built in, including fixes for long, complex words.
Starting in 2013, the Los Angeles Kiss was an Arena Football League team owned by Kiss lead members Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley. The games were themed to echo a Kiss music concert: games opened with an electric guitar rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner; there was “loud pyrotechnics and music” throughout the game; “the Kiss logo is plastered everywhere: on the arena football field, on the end zone and on the flame-emblazoned jerseys in the stands. There was also a Kiss Girls dance-squad in black leather. The team’s artificial turf field was also colored in a unique silver color scheme. Unable to be financially viable and after being Los Angeles’ third attempt at an Arena Football League, the team’s last season was in 2016
Milwaukee Mustangs was an Arena Football League franchise from 1994-2001. The franchise started with a 0-12 campaign in 1994. Over the course of the eight-season span, Milwaukee only made the playoffs four times. The team never won its division, never won its conference, and failed to ever bring a championship back to Milwaukee. The team returned from 2010-2012, but still didn’t have enough success on the field nor could attract enough fan interest.
Atari’s game, Extra-Terrestrial, was designed in a record five weeks by a single programmer in 1982. The game was a commercial failure due to its poor quality and difficult gameplay. Atari struggled to recover from the poor sales of E.T. and never recovered its reputation among the gaming community. The game is widely held to be the worst video game of all time. Millions of copies went unsold, and Atari ended up literally burying the game by dumping many 728K surplus cartridges into a New Mexico landfill. Within a year of E.T.’s release, the entire video game industry collapsed.
The Women’s Professional Football League was a women’s professional American football league with 15 teams from 1999 until it’s demise in 2007. The league operated in the fall and competed for fan’s attention with the NFL.
With NeXT, Jobs wanted to create computers for universities and researchers. NeXT was a project where Jobs could regain the control he had lost at Apple, and he was confident enough in this idea to invest $12 million of his own money. In 1988, NeXT released its first computer. It was a powerful machine that embodied similar design philosophies to current-day Apple. Even down to its custom circuit board. But the NeXT computer was expensive. While other computers at the time ranged from $700 to a few thousand dollars, the NeXT computer had a base price of $6,500.
But the education market it was targeting already had a lot of older computers and limited budgets. NeXT’s computers never found mass success. So in 1993, NeXT completely stopped developing its hardware and shifted its focus to the real innovation: software.
The Mets released Bonilla in January 2000 but were still on the hook for his $5.9 million salary that season. Believing they were poised to make a significant profit through their investments with Bernie Madoff, Mets ownership instead agreed to defer Bonilla’s salary with 8% interest, and spread the payments across 25 years from 2011-35.
Madoff’s Ponzi scheme fell apart, and Bonilla’s $5.9 million swelled to $29.8 million from 2000-11. That $29.8 million divided by 25 years equals the annual $1.19 million payment he receives every July 1 from 2011 until 2035.
Incredibly, Bonilla has a second deferred salary agreement with the Baltimore Orioles, who still owe him $500,000 a year from 2004-28.
