Tuesday, June 19, 2007

a view of the nest


We took a couple of quick pictures of the "flock" before it left the nest. We're sad to see them go, but we know they'll be in good hands - enjoy!



27 comments:

Anonymous said...

How many were ordered?

Anonymous said...

i just read an old preview of the falcon and they said you originally had plans to release the falcon for under $100 but that is still the plan for the future. Whats happening with that?

How far into the future?

About Us said...

re: number of orders

We aren't publicly releasing sales numbers, but to give you some
indication of our growth objectives, we pushed hard to get the initial shipment out on June 18th, but haven't put any marketing effort into selling the Falcons yet. Yet, despite this, we sold out all of the Falcons that we were able to manufacture in this first run. We consider this a positive sign.

We are also in the process of getting customer support in place, fulfillment, and transitioning our games from beta to V1, as examples. As we do that we will increase our marketing efforts,
and increase our manufacturing. The overall goal is to grow everything together in a
manageable way, trying to lead into what we hope to be a big Christmas season for us. We have said it before in this forum, but many of the things that we feel will drive sales, like game announcements and game reviews, we are timing so that they coincide with our overall manufacturing ramp up. We expect to
begin our big marketing push in August.

About Us said...

re: releasing the Falcon for $100

We apologize for the lack of clarity in the past. We've said in the past that the Falcon was designed to retail for under $100, meaning that if the volume increases significantly, we expect to be able to get the retail
price to that level. That was the intent of the design from the very
beginning. That is still true, but it will require enough volume for it to happen. Over time, with enough volume, we expect to be able to get the price down even lower as well.

Anonymous said...

Great news all around Novint. Glad to see you ugys pulling all the pieces together and making things happen. Cheers and good fortune!

Anonymous said...

I see the pictures of the falcons in the box, the outer packaging (brown boxes) are those the ones that are used for shipping?

I didn't expect Novint falcon would be displayed on the outer packaging, with such a low quantity of these and such popularity i wonder if it would get stolen during shipping because someone in the know clearly can see what the box is and decide to steal it, don't you think you should removes any names off the outer box?

Anonymous said...

what happens right now for international customers...

Can they go ahead and buy the falcon now? and then wait till novint can ship internationally, that way there falcons reserved, is this possible?

About Us said...

re: the outer brown shipping box

Yes, the brown boxes are the outer shipping boxes for all Falcons. There is a nice, finished box inside (which came out really nicely). The Falcons will be in professional hands until they are delivered, so we are not overly concerned about theft, but if there were an issue, we will make sure our customers get one without any problems.

About Us said...

re: what happens right now for international customers

We are reserving some limited edition Falcons for international customers. However, we have not opened up international ordering quite yet.

Anonymous said...

Nice job guys. I can't wait for mine to come. Only a couple more days. Thanks so much for sticking to your word and shipping on schedule.

Anonymous said...

ill buy one when games like crysis unrealtournament 3 etc etc etc are supported

Anonymous said...

Interesting article in BusinessWeek yesterday about the Falcon, Novint and Lunar Design. Great press!!

Article states the following: "(The Falcon is currently being offered at an introductory price of $189 via online sales and will cost $239 when it hits stores in August.)"

Is this true? Falcons will be in stores in August!?!?! Awesome!

About Us said...

re: Falcon in stores

Novint is working to get the Falcon on store shelves so that people will be able to try it locally, but we can't confirm exact dates yet.

Anonymous said...

"so people can try it locally"...

Do you mean locally in Albequerque or locally around the United States?

About Us said...

When we get it into stores, people will be able to try it locally.

Anonymous said...

hey

why no reviews yet?

you might want to fix this blogs link from your novintfalcon website, it don't work and not good for business.

Anonymous said...

are you at E3 07, what booth number?

About Us said...

re: blog link

The link from www.novint.com to this blog appears to work properly on our end - I'm not sure what problem you're experiencing. If anyone else has trouble, please email info@novint.com.

About Us said...

re: E3 2007

We are not at E3 this year. However, we do plan to have a presence at these venues:

GenCon – August 16-19: Indiana Convention Center/RCA Dom, Indianapolis (Booth 833) (URL is http://www.gencon.com/)

World Cyber Games Grand Finale: October 3-7, Qwest Field, Seattle (Booth TBD) (URL is www.worldcybergames.com)

E for All – October 18-21 – Los Angeles convention Center, Los Angeles (Booth 502) (URL is www.eforallexpo.com)

DigitalLife – September 27-30 – Javits Center, New York (Booth 1515) (URL is www.digitallife.com)

Anonymous said...

Sailing:
The forces and the challenge of, would be interesting.

Venkat said...

Can anyone tell me if the Novint Falcon is PSE compliant?

About Us said...

re: PSE compliance

The Falcon is FCC and CE certified, but I'm not sure what you mean by "PSE compliant".

Anonymous said...

I am dissapointed in the Falcon. A colleague of mine purchased the Falcon and has had nothing but problems with it. Customer support has been unable to help him and he has gotten nowhere with being able to make the Falcon work properly. Both of us have been shareholders since inception however I think it has come to the point in time where I no longer have faith in the product. This is also evident by the Message Boards in which it appears the Falcon is not functioning properly. Best of luck and I probably won't be a shareholder for much longer.

About Us said...

We're sorry that your experience with the Falcon was not a good one.

For the most part, our customers have reported that they have been very happy with their purchase. For example, in our first month's worth of surveys, 45% of people said they strongly agree that they would recommend the Falcon to others, 36% agreed, 9% were neutral, and only 9% disagreed that they would recommend the Falcon to others. A majority of responders agreed or strongly agreed that the Falcon was easy to set up. So although there are definitely some kinks we have had to work through with a small subset of customers (like any new technology), overall things have gone relatively smoothly.
There are a few places where we have seen multiple customers experiencing issues (i.e. some common known issues and bugs), but the last of the big known issues will be fixed with a patch that is going out next week.

There have not been very many customers we could not help when contacting our customer support, so I am not sure what problems your colleague was experiencing. However, we will continue to work with him until any problems he has are solved, whatever time it takes. The main problem we have not been able to help people with is the situation where a user's computer does not meet the minimum system specifications.
Primarily, one should check to make sure their graphics card has 128MB of memory - that is a good indication that the graphics card will be powerful enough to work. Without a computer that has strong enough graphics capabilities for gaming, the Falcon games will not perform ideally. We are currently putting development into lowering the minimum system requirements as well (although, there are no computers sold today in Best Buy, for example, that do not meet the minimum system specs - our goal is to have more compatibility with older computers). The other area where there have been some common issues occurs when the user has difficulties with the found new hardware wizard. If the Falcon drivers are not installed correctly, it causes some other problems when the applications try to run, but we have been improving the error messages to give better information. We are also in the process of finalizing our
V2 Microsoft certified drivers which will make installation automatic and easier and remove many of the issues some customers have had.

It is disappointing to hear that you no longer have faith in the product. We hope that you will bear with us a bit longer through any early kinks. It is still the same Falcon that has received all of the reviews you can read on our web site, and when it is working properly, it is very powerful. I hope that with the fixes we have been putting in, fixes in the patch next week, and some upcoming press releases and news, we can win you back. If you call customer support, we will work with you to a resolution on any issues you have.

Unknown said...

Have to say that I'm greatly enjoying the Falcon that made it to my doorstep. Any chance of Vista/XP 64-bit drivers in the near future? Besides Valve has there been any other developer support for this product; perchance the folks at CCP ( http://www.eve-online.com )?

Is there a chance that you'll be selling this product in a store chain, if so, which one, please?

Looking forward to a few more of the NovInt-created games becoming available and hopefully a few of the mini-games within "Newton's Monkey Business" getting full releases.

Really digging Haptics Life 2 and the demo and look forward for more to come from NovInt in the future!

Thanks again!

Unknown said...

One last request, and one that I should have made in the prior post; if or when will the SDK be available and then are there any plans for Linux/FreeBSD, OS X, support?

I would also ask about the different pay-to-play UNIX variants, too, since those might come up from other users, especially from the Solaris, AIX and HP-UX end of OS'.

Again, many thanks!

Anonymous said...

Thanks for bringing one of these guys to GenCon. I'm definitely keeping an eye on the future of this interesting device, and I hope it'll get more use in mainstream video games.