Technologies which failed

The ultimate takeaway from the board catastrophe is an important one: Lithium-ion batteries are dangerous, and cheap, low-cost ones especially so. People loved the idea. Neither the hype nor the capital from backers was enough to get the products off the ground. Coin recipients had trouble swiping the card. Plastc never even shipped its hardware.

In , the startup announced that it was shutting down and being acquired by Edge, a fintech company working on yet another smart card. Edge offered Plastc and Coin backers a discount to preorder its upcoming product.

Mobile payment wallets, like Google Wallet and Apple Pay, would later take over, consolidating credit and loyalty cards onto the gadget already in our pockets. The company had already made popular gadgets: the Kindle e-reader and Fire TV media streamer. Why not a smartphone? Its standout feature was a 3D- and gesture-based interface that showed different content onscreen based on tilts and the position of your face.

While the Fire Phone was great for buying things on Amazon, it was awful at being a smartphone. In late , the price of Bitcoin started to grow, and grow, and grow. Profiteers rushed to acquire coins from dozens of different cryptocurrencies. The bubble, which also saw the rise of other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, minted overnight billionaires.

Investors and opportunists rushed to buy crypto. Early Bitcoin holders who lost their passwords were devastated to forfeit tens of thousands of dollars' worth of the currency. After that December peak, a crash ensued. Plus, the crypto economy was ripe for fraud. Scammers disseminated fake news to manipulate the price of their holdings.

There were a number of pump-and-dump schemes. You know, Facebook. The one that singlehandedly exposed the personal data of over 80 million people , disseminated more fake news than real news leading up to the election of President Donald Trump, and tanked traffic to news sites , thanks to its massive influence over the media industry.

Among other things. That date was pushed to July , then Coolest never shipped those orders and shuttered operations in December People were convinced that the cooler really could do it all. The difference was that the Note 7 was made by Samsung, one of the biggest battery manufacturers in the world. So when the batteries in Note 7 phones started exploding in planes , cars , and homes , longtime Samsung loyalists were surprised.

Samsung cited poor production quality and uneven, or even missing, insulation tape as the reason. But the company played a vital role in the way tech develops through the antitrust lawsuit it won against Microsoft, a decision with implications that still influence the industry today.

This merging was arguably brilliant and too far ahead of its time. And it certainly helped popularize the basic concept of social media and online profiles. But this once-king of social media was overtaken by rival Facebook around What happened? Facebook, which now boasts 1. Advertisement 11 AltaVista At a time when the idea of retrieving answers to questions by typing a question into a computer seemed like magic, Altavista thrived.

So what went wrong with Altavista? No one seemed to know what to do with it, which means it ended up being neglected and was poorly managed. Over the years, AltaVista bounced from original parent company Digital Equipment, which Compaq bought in , to CMGI the following year, and then to Overture in , a company that Yahoo bought later that year. Yahoo officially killed AltaVista 10 years later in , and Google continues to dominate the Internet search landscape.

Few gadgets have debuted with as much buzz as Google Glass, the smart spectacles the search giant unveiled in From its flashy introduction demo that featured skydivers streaming their jump through the device, to a spread in Vogue, Glass had possibly one of the most-hyped gadget launches of all time. Namely: Nobody likes to be recorded without their knowledge. Unable to lure gamers mesmerized by the marketing hype around next-gen Sony and Nintendo systems, the Dreamcast has since become an exemplar of how to fail in an industry, but go out with a thunderclap.

Still, it foretold a better future, one in which our phones can summon up nearly any song on command. Perhaps no gadget evokes the early turn of the century like the Segway, a personal motorized scooter that riders control by leaning in one direction or another.

Designed as a revolutionary new transportation option, Segways have largely been relegated to the realm of the mall cop and tour group. But for whatever reason, technologists never tire of trying to replace the well-proven movement method of walking around — The Great Hoverboard Craze of can trace its origins directly to this stand-up scooter.

QR codes sound like a genuinely useful idea: Barcode-like symbols that smartphone users could scan for more information about some real-world object, be it a movie poster or a museum exhibit.

The idea? We can even blame it on the ever-hopeless state of human interface technology. Whichever option you choose, you won't be telling your computer what to do anytime soon.

Get clicking, citizen. An entire generation of kids grew up with the promise that theirs was the Space Age. They were lied to. Space was merely the age-old tower game: two castles either side of a river trying to built a taller turret than the other. And as soon as there was a clear victor, the dream was done for. After the moon landings, space stations were the next frontier, the stepping stone to moonbases, Mars and exploration of the planets. Getting a can in orbit and keeping it there indefinitely, however, became the end of a withering vine, with America's Skylab beset with woes from the moment of its launch, and ending in farce when an Australian town fined the U.

Russia's Mir was more successful, but became an unsafe engineering nightmare whose decline became symbolic of its nation's. When it finally burned up on re-entry, Taco Bell promised a free Taco to every American if its pacific target was struck by the chunks.

The International Space Station, our latest orbital megafolly, is good for a few science experiments and as a holiday home for the super-rich. The cost to planet Earth for this petri dish with a view? So much for space stations. As for the Shuttle, it's a twice-doomed deathtrap that costs half a billion dollars per launch and never lived up to its promise of cheap, regular space flight. I know it's pretty, but it's time to get real. Orion , the replacement, can't come soon enough.

The Anglo-French Concorde remained the world's coolest jet from the day it entered service in to the day British Airways ditched the last one rather than sell it to Richard Branson.

Turning the London-New York trip into a 2-hour commute, it could have heralded a revolution in international transportation. But it didn't. Public complaints about the noise were relentlessly exploited by the project's enemies, and the oil crisis made fast flight less economical. Despite being one of the twentieth century's most amazing engineering feats, with a near-perfect service record and the obligatory communist copy , the world just wasn't ready.