May update on production and shipment
almost 6 years ago – Tue, May 15, 2018 at 02:08:29 AM

Dear backers,

This is a quick update for you on our progress.

We continue to face some supply chain challenges. I am not entirely sure if it is because we placed confidence in the wrong people or we faced bad luck. Chances are it is a combination of the two, along with faults from our own team. We expect to finish manufacturing and shipping, but have to get through problems such as:

• As mentioned last time, distributor who holds ~$300K of inventory for us sold off some of our prepaid for goods and had a serious cash shortage to cover it. He is also now ill and in the hospital. We have sent our head of supply chain to go visit him in the hospital, and while he is actually ill, it is nevertheless unfortunate for our timeline. It sounds like the problem has been resolved, but after getting the runaround for a month, we can’t be 100% certain until our manufacturer receives the components. These are critical SoC chips that only a handful of exclusive distributors are allowed to access, so our options are limited beyond working with the distributor and being patient.
• Our firmware development has been quite a bit slower that expected, due to work of contractors earlier on in the development process. Some early design decisions resulted in a lot of fixes and workarounds that have slowed down mass production.

Time-wise, our main bottleneck is missing components from our distributor. Another 5.3k units have arrived in North America, making the total 6.3k in the US. We are waiting for our firmware development to finish, following which we can start sending out Superbooks. I am going to resist giving out timelines, only to say that the current problems are solvable within a few weeks. Please be patient, as our hardware team is working night and day to resolve a pretty sticky challenge.

Finally, I deeply apologize for not communicating as frequently as we had in the past. It is hard to be open when nothing seems to be going right, and the easy thing to do is to push off communicating, waiting for good news instead. That is my mistake as a founder. I never realized just how hard it is to tell bad news to people who believed in you and supported you.

We will work hard to do better.

Best, 

Andrew and Gordon

April: Another container heading towards US!
about 6 years ago – Thu, Apr 19, 2018 at 01:44:56 AM

Hi backers and supporters,

Hope you’re doing great. We’ll keep this update brief, as there’s nothing to do now except ship.

TL;DR

• 12k manufactured so far
• 5,400 currently on a boat to Oakland
• 1,000 currently in our warehouse in Gilroy
• Couple recent obstacles: 1) waiting on a needed firmware upgrade to fix a power delivery issue and 2) our chip distributor sold 10k of our DisplayLink chips (that we prepaid for) to another customer without telling us. Now they’re experiencing a cash crunch, which has resulted in a delay in us getting the chips we need.

The home stretch has been a little longer than any of us had hoped for, but we’re making good progress. 

We’ve gotten 12k Superbooks manufactured so far (1080p units). 5,400 of them are headed to Oakland, CA port as we speak:

A couple recent obstacles are worth mentioning. The first one is that while there are units sitting happy in a warehouse in Gilroy, CA, we can't send them out just yet. We are resolving a power delivery firmware bug, but expect that to be done by next week.

The second one is a little unfortunate, which is that one of our distributors sold off the inventory we prepaid a year in advance for. Now the distributor has financial issues, meaning additional delay on the chips we need to finish up manufacturing. We expect this to be resolved by the end of this week -- but I'm telling you this to let you guys know the type of issues we face regularly as a small company trying to manufacture a lower cost good.

So timeline for shipping right now looks like this:

• Late Next Week: We expect the power delivery firmware fix to be completed mid next week. 1,000 US Backers should start receiving shipping notifications late next week. 
• Late April: Assuming we are able to resolve our chip delay, units should be ready to ship out to Europe and Asia / Rest of World. Units will go out on a boat to the Netherlands. Backers in the APAC region should start receiving shipping notifications shortly after. 
• Early to Mid May: The shipment of 5,400 Superbook arrives at our warehouse in California. US and Canada backers should start receiving shipping notifications by the 2nd week of May.
• Late May: The remaining Superbooks should arrive in Europe. Backers should start receiving shipping notifications shortly after.

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Important - Confirm Shipping Address 

By request and since we've had a few more weeks go by than we anticipated, we're going to ask all of our backers and pre-orders to verify their shipping address. Go into your backer portal, click on your order, and in the Order Information area, click on the 'CONFIRM ORDER' button. 

If your address isn't correct, please let [email protected] know right away so we avoid sending the order to the wrong address. 

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Administrivia

1. Please check your orders on Dashboard and help us confirm your order looks correct. Click confirm if everything is right. If you see something off, please email [email protected].

2. Any questions or issues? Check out our support or ask our Backer Slack group!

Love, Team Superbook

March madness: 1st batch is in CA and other updates
about 6 years ago – Sat, Mar 24, 2018 at 02:16:45 AM

Hi backers and supporters,

Happy March to everyone, and welcome to a long awaited update. Quite a bit of news, both on progress made in manufacturing (our 1st production batch is in Gilroy, CA) and on how we're handling various challenges in the production process.

1. 1ST BATCH IN CALIFORNIA, SMALL ONSITE FIXES

Last week, our first 1,000 mass production Superbooks landed in our warehouse in California. It was an exciting moment for us, but as we've grown accustomed to with hardware development there were some small issues that cropped up. As we inspected each of the units that arrived, quite a number of them experienced weakening of the glue that holds the trackpad in place during the ocean shipping process. This resulted in some units having the trackpad completely removed (or loose) on the Superbook. Gordon and members of our team have spent the last few days testing out solutions to fix this issue, and we've found the solution -- something that'll be applied to the remainder of our mass production process. 

These units will get fixed as well in our warehouse, which should finish up over the next week. Since these are our first units to ship, we are being ultra careful in our inspection process, opening and inspecting / testing each unit both at the factory in China and at our end warehouse. 

2. EMAIL UPDATES DURING SHIPPING

When your Superbook arrives in the warehouse, you'll receive an email from us confirming its arrival and asking you to review your order (1,000 of you have already gotten this). It looks like this:

After your Superbook is passed onto the ground courier, you'll receive a separate email from our logistics provider, Rush Order, which will have your tracking code, which will allow you to track your order. 

3. MASS PRODUCTION IN PROGRESS (BUT SLOWER THAN WE'D LIKE)

We mentioned in the last update that mass production should kick into gear post-Chinese New Year. It indeed has gotten started, however we've had to pause for a week or so to diagnose and fix the trackpad issue. That, along with production constraints from our manufacturer mean while mass production has started, the progress is a bit slower than we'd prefer. 

For those of you that have experienced the joys of contract manufacturing, you'll know the challenges of trying to push your manufacturer -- sometimes it works, but most times unless you are a major customer, it requires treading very carefully lest you annoy someone who holds your company's lifeline in their hands.

In any case, we currently expect the following timeline:

• Now until Mid-April - Mass production continues until around mid-April
• Mid-April - Shipment of units to warehouse in Hong Kong; Containers to head to our warehouses in the Netherlands and US.
• Late April to Early May - Backers in Asia to start receiving units
• Mid-May - Containers to arrive in warehouses in Netherlands and US, sorted and sent via ground.
• Late May - Backers worldwide to start receiving units 

We'll continue to keep you guys posted with the timeline. I realize right now it feels like the timeline keeps shifting (it indeed does as we resolve small issues left and right), but it is a bit of "one step back, two steps forward" and progress is being made, close to the finish line. 

ADMINISTRIVIA

1. Please check your orders on Dashboard and help us confirm everything looks correct. We've had some issues pop up on the database side, with some cancellations that were incorrectly displaying. If you see something off, please email [email protected]

2. Any questions or issues? Check out our support or ask our Backer Slack group!

Love, Team Superbook

February Update: Shipped the first mass produced batch!
about 6 years ago – Sat, Feb 17, 2018 at 01:07:01 AM

NOTE: Important info about the Flash Sale in the last section. Please scroll down to see all the details!

Hi backers and supporters,

Hope you’ve had a Happy Valentines Day, Happy Chinese New Year, and just a generally happy set of days.

We’re pretty happy here. You know why?

Because we shipped the first entirely mass produced batch of Superbooks! 😀🎉

It wasn’t easy (as has this entire journey so far). We ran into a few *small* hiccups along the way this past month including: 

• One of our distributors got thrown in jail, along with the majority of one critical component
• One of our suppliers shipped 20k of parts that were a variant from what we had ordered, without telling us (more on that below). 
• Florian got sick, after working pretty much nonstop this year 😔

I wish I were kidding, but stuff like this happens a lot.

So as it stands, we were able to mass produce 1,000 Superbooks, which are on their way to USA right now! Backer Slack channel user @mschoolbus requested proof and an offering of love if I could prove something shipped. The below email of our Bill of Lading is the best I can do:

With that, I’ll let the team go into an update on manufacturing and timelines, as well as about the Flash Sale coming up next week.

Manufacturing and timeline update

Hey everyone, happy Chinese New Year! As Andrew mentioned, we ran into some small hiccups, but we were able to get our first 1,000 Superbooks mass produced, which means as soon as the factories open up after Chinese New Year, we’ll be able to produce the remainder.

What does this mean on timelines? Here is the update:

• Mid-January - Mass production begins with first batch of hubs, continuing on when the 2nd shipment of USB hubs arrive. First major batches will go to the warehouse in Hong Kong. [STARTED!]
• February 14th - First 1,000 Superbooks make their way to the US, arriving mid-March [STARTED!]
• February 12-23rd - China takes vacation for Chinese New Year [STARTED!]
• February 23rd - Mid March - The remainder of Superbooks will get mass produced and sent to Hong Kong.
• Early-Mid March - Backers in Asia will start receiving their Superbooks via courier
• Mid March - First 1,000 Superbooks arrive in the US. Remaining Superbooks start their ocean freight journey.
• Late March - First 1,000 Superbooks are sorted and sent via Ground for North America Customers
• Mid April - Remainder of Superbooks arrive in North America and Europe warehouses, start getting sorted and shipped via Ground Shipping. 
• Late April - Depending on the speed of Ground Shipping, backers in North America and Europe will receive their Superbooks.

Again, since manufacturing happens by product type (model and color), we will start with the 16k premium Superbooks (since they are the majority) and finish with the base Superbooks. This is just to be efficient with manufacturing time. They will all be shipped to the warehouses around the same time, over ocean.

A lot of you have also been asking us if we can select certain ground shippers over others. Since we need to manage shipment in 100 or so countries, we cannot manage that many vendors nor do we get good deals at our size. Our third party logistics provider handles both vendor selection, negotiation, and the shipping process. When the time comes for you to receive your order, you’ll get an email from our third party logistics provider RushOrder confirming your order has shipped.

HDCP and DisplayLink

As you guys know, we use DisplayLink to mirror content from your phone to the Superbook screen. Since the beginning, Android phones have been incompatible sending protected content over USB, which includes things like Netflix and Hulu (UGC like Youtube and Vimeo are fine). We've already developed workarounds for these use cases on Android, some of which we've demoed before.

However, for the small percentage of backers that wanted to have Superbook be a 2nd monitor for their Windows / Mac devices, we had paid for the HDCP license and ordered the HDCP variant of the DisplayLink chip (which also costs extra).

During the production process, one of our team members noticed that the components we received were the non-HDCP variants. We then learned that the vendor, without telling us, stopped making that particular variant and had shipped us the non-HDCP version. Both versions look the same (except for a small letter N) and are interchangeable, except for the ability to transmit protected video content. We were given no warning and have no choice but to continue production with these chips, as getting new ones would take 8 weeks. This means that for the use case of using Superbook as a 2nd monitor for Mac / Windows, currently Superbook won’t be able to show protected content like Netflix or Hulu without additional workarounds. After Superbook delivery, our team will spend some time on a software workaround.

Flash sale! Are you ready?

Hey guys, as we mentioned last time, we’re doing a flash sale for the extra Superbooks we’re making in this first mass production run. We have a limited supply, including a select number of Blue Superbooks. Here are the details:

• Starts: February 21st, 2018 at 9 AM PST
• Ends: March 6th, 2018 at Midnight PST
• Where: www.sentio.com
• For backers, your personal discount code is $25. We will send you your personal discount code by email when the flash sale starts. You'll also be able to find it in your Backer Portal dashboard.

The discount only applies to orders with a Superbook. Once a particular model or color runs out, it’s out for good — at least until we can do our next mass production run. Everything (including any Blue units for sale) will be first come first serve.

Don’t want to miss out? Add this reminder to your calendar to be notified as soon as the Flash Sale starts.

Administrivia

1. We can no longer make changes to orders. Sorry - we finalized everything with our third party logistics provider.

2. We are currently updating timelines in backer portal. It'll get updated soon, sorry for the delay!

3. Any questions or issues? Check out our support or ask our Backer Slack group!

Love, Team Superbook

Mass production, finalizing orders, and some cool stuff from CES
over 6 years ago – Sat, Jan 20, 2018 at 01:04:12 AM

Hi there backers and supporters,

It has been a super busy month. Production has started, and we are in the process of preparing the warehouses for receiving product to be shipped. We have also had a wonderful month with our partners, who have shown of exciting prototypes and demos with our technology at CES. You may have noticed we’ve been a little less active on Slack and in comments, but that is 100% because of heads down focus to get the product out.

This update contains a lot of info, please read it carefully. We have updates on the production and shipping timelines, administrative updates on updating/changing orders, and some news from CES on cool projects and innovations with Sentio.

One more thing: we prioritized a few other things on engineering, and we did not get a chance to send out the 10 Superbooks to backers yet. We will aim to have it by the next major update.

Ok, let’s dive in.

Production and shipping timeline updates

We have started manufacturing! Behind the scenes, we have resolved a lot of smaller nuisances in the last month, including a strange issue with the LG V20 (make sure you upgrade to the latest system update!), some missing connectors (found them!), and a general lack of sleep. The happy news is that we have successfully finished the last sample run of 140 units, and we have started MASS PRODUCTION.

Carlton aside, what this means is that we should be able to get most of the Superbooks produced before Chinese New Year and start shipping. Since manufacturing happens by product type (model and color), we will start with the premium Superbooks (since there are the most of them) and finish with the base Superbooks. They will all get shipped to the warehouses at around the same time, as everything is ocean shipped together.

 So what does that mean? Here’s the updated timeline with slightly more refined detail than last time:

• Mid-January - Mass production begins with first batch of hubs, continuing on when the 2nd shipment of USB hubs arrive. First major batches will go to the warehouse in Hong Kong. [STARTED!]
• February 12-23rd - China takes vacation for Chinese New Year
• ~February 23rd - Superbooks start their ocean freight journey
• Mid to Late February - Backers in Asia will start receiving their Superbooks via courier. Some may ship out before Chinese New Year, as Hong Kong ends CNY holidays earlier.
• Late March - Superbooks arrive in North America and Europe warehouses, start getting sorted and shipped via Ground Shipping.
• Some Time in April - Depending on the speed of Ground Shipping, backers in North America and Europe will receive their Superbooks.

Last week for order changes

Since manufacturing has started, we are going to give everyone one more week for order changes, including shipment addresses, cord changes (if you got a Type C device recently…), and cancellation requests. At 6 PM on January 26th, Pacific Standard Time, we will close off to any changes whatsoever as we are required to submit paperwork. Need to make any changes? Go to dashboard.sentio.com, login, and change your order shipment address or cords. Can’t wait anymore for your Superbook and want a cancellation? We will still offer refunds until 6 PM on January 26th, PST. Reach out to [email protected].

One thing we could use your feedback on as backers: we have a few hundred units extra in this first mass production run. If there is enough demand, we would love to open it up to backers and preorder customers before the general public. Let us know what you think about a mini-flash sale just for our current backers and preorderers.

CES: Cool partner collaborations 

This year was a little bittersweet for us at CES. As most of the team was in Asia, we didn't exhibit. But we did collaborate with some really cool partners that showed off some really exciting new innovations. 

Razer Project Linda - One of the coolest and most talked about products at CES. Truly proud to play a role and get Sentio Desktop front and center.

Lattice Semi's Magnetic Docking - Our friends at Lattice put together an incredibly cool demo, showing off magnetic docking with the Essential phone. The demo uses the magnetic dock on the back of the Essential phone. The magnetic docking experience is so nice - definitely something we want to bring to life.

Administrivia

1. Last week to make order changes, including address changes and order cancellations. To make changes to your order, login to your dashboard. For cancellations, email support at [email protected].

2. Check out the awesome Sentio Desktop app, which is live in the Play Store. If you have an Android 7.0+ device, give it a try - we'd love your feedback (send to [email protected]). 

3. Any questions or issues? Check out our support or ask our Backer Slack group!

Love, Team Superbook