5 ms·

This is a "fun" story so it gets coverage far out of proportion to the actual product announcements... which is that in 2022 they put a chip in 100,000 wheels o

by eli 3y ago

This is a "fun" story so it gets coverage far out of proportion to the actual product announcements... which is that in 2022 they put a chip in 100,000 wheels of cheese. Presumably a trial run that didn't progress any further in the following 9+ months? The use of blockchain here is very questionable and makes the rest of the product suspect to me. "The p-Chip is like a special anchor that uses blockchain technology to create a digital copy of real things" -> lol what? It's just a chip that returns a unique serial number when scanned? Seems like you could accomplish the same thing with an RFID tag (or possibly even a bar code sticker) along with a centralized database.

trey-jones 3y ago
The article gives several reasons that p-Chip is the best candidate for this use case, and I think addresses your other question marks here as well. Did you read it? It's not very long.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- nitwit005 3y ago
  They clearly read the article, as they are citing numbers from it. You didn't read the hacker news guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
neilv 3y ago
> Presumably a trial run that didn't progress any further in the following 9+ months? Having been in a similar anti-counterfeiting startup, a few years earlier, which got chips into a larger number of high-end products... It might well have been a pilot project, and those don't get renewed for a variety of reasons. In our case, Covid disrupted our awesome first customer's industry right after our very successful factory launch. Covid had cascading economic effects to vendors and programs, of course, and Covid also prevented much of the field auditing follow-through we'd planned on. Other ways this could fail, even without a black swan global pandemic: * It's enterprise/corporate sales, which is very difficult and energy-intensive. Even having a no-brainer value proposition doesn't mean a yes. It might take several months of stakeholder meetings and tentative commitments to realize the yes isn't actually imminent like it had seemed. We had a few successes (including landing two top brands), but closing deals arguably took at least as much energy and clever ideas as all our software+hardware+logistics engineering and service design did. * There might've been effort needed on the customer end, which didn't pan out. We minimized these dependencies, by, e.g., installing our own bespoke networked stations in their best factory, and adapting to their current factory order process, to be almost "zero impedence" (e.g., minimize new IT effort, minimize new corporate effort, minimize ways that dependencies can make mistakes). What a customer is willing and able to do varies from customer to customer (due to, e.g., what their processes and systems are, the nature of the product and how it's made and distributed and sold, various stakeholder motivations, etc.) so you have to tailor it. We thought hard and did a great "prescient" first pass at this for our pilot customer, preventing all sorts of things that could've/would've gone wrong, and still had to respond nimbly to many things we learned in the process. * You want to show business value from the pilot project, which means stopping some counterfeiting sales effort, or unmasking some gray market diversion. And probably being able to attach a dollar value to that, and/or least show defending goodwill/reputation of the brand (e.g., reduce negative reviews due to people receiving lower-quality counterfeits). This probably means field investigation, since you probably can't arrange for the end customer or intermediaries to do it (merely having the chip and some tracking data alone probably won't do it), which is tricky... but is when you actually get the payoff for all that effort.
- fragmede 3y ago
  > You want to show business value from the pilot project, which means stopping some counterfeiting sales effort, or unmasking some gray market diversion That seems easy enough to arrange to have happen, so why didn't it?
- eli 3y ago
  Yeah that's fair. You can't necessarily draw conclusions from the fact that it hasn't outwardly progressed beyond a pilot. But my point is more that the "news hook" on this story is so weak. Announcing the pilot launch of an interesting new product is news. Announcing a pilot launch that already concluded (?) months ago, less so. How did it go? What does the cheesemaker think? Honestly if I were covering this story I'd want to confirm that the product even really exists.
  - neilv 3y ago
    Yeah, I don't know why more wasn't said here about impact thus far. Looks like the p-Chip company did an impressive "road show" of major news outlets in August. I'd guess for promoting to customers or investors (and they'd have to coordinate with the customer brand, and maybe also they were being discreet about the measures to make the first catches easier). So I'd guess that the outlets are writing because the company is putting itself out there, and the story does interest. (Ordinary people are noticing counterfeits on Amazon and such, and I'd guess the idea of marrying high-tech with something as old-world charm as Italian cheese wheels has some clicky light news appeal.) Since we're on HN, from a startup's perspective... we should hope that someday we could swing favorable coverage from top news outlets, and limit hardball interrogations to private dialogue with investors and prospects. :)

by eli 3y ago

trey-jones 3y ago

The article gives several reasons that p-Chip is the best candidate for this use case, and I think addresses your other question marks here as well. Did you read it? It's not very long.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nitwit005 3y ago
They clearly read the article, as they are citing numbers from it. You didn't read the hacker news guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

neilv 3y ago

> Presumably a trial run that didn't progress any further in the following 9+ months? Having been in a similar anti-counterfeiting startup, a few years earlier, which got chips into a larger number of high-end products... It might well have been a pilot project, and those don't get renewed for a variety of reasons. In our case, Covid disrupted our awesome first customer's industry right after our very successful factory launch. Covid had cascading economic effects to vendors and programs, of course, and Covid also prevented much of the field auditing follow-through we'd planned on. Other ways this could fail, even without a black swan global pandemic: * It's enterprise/corporate sales, which is very difficult and energy-intensive. Even having a no-brainer value proposition doesn't mean a yes. It might take several months of stakeholder meetings and tentative commitments to realize the yes isn't actually imminent like it had seemed. We had a few successes (including landing two top brands), but closing deals arguably took at least as much energy and clever ideas as all our software+hardware+logistics engineering and service design did. * There might've been effort needed on the customer end, which didn't pan out. We minimized these dependencies, by, e.g., installing our own bespoke networked stations in their best factory, and adapting to their current factory order process, to be almost "zero impedence" (e.g., minimize new IT effort, minimize new corporate effort, minimize ways that dependencies can make mistakes). What a customer is willing and able to do varies from customer to customer (due to, e.g., what their processes and systems are, the nature of the product and how it's made and distributed and sold, various stakeholder motivations, etc.) so you have to tailor it. We thought hard and did a great "prescient" first pass at this for our pilot customer, preventing all sorts of things that could've/would've gone wrong, and still had to respond nimbly to many things we learned in the process. * You want to show business value from the pilot project, which means stopping some counterfeiting sales effort, or unmasking some gray market diversion. And probably being able to attach a dollar value to that, and/or least show defending goodwill/reputation of the brand (e.g., reduce negative reviews due to people receiving lower-quality counterfeits). This probably means field investigation, since you probably can't arrange for the end customer or intermediaries to do it (merely having the chip and some tracking data alone probably won't do it), which is tricky... but is when you actually get the payoff for all that effort.

fragmede 3y ago
> You want to show business value from the pilot project, which means stopping some counterfeiting sales effort, or unmasking some gray market diversion That seems easy enough to arrange to have happen, so why didn't it?
eli 3y ago
Yeah that's fair. You can't necessarily draw conclusions from the fact that it hasn't outwardly progressed beyond a pilot. But my point is more that the "news hook" on this story is so weak. Announcing the pilot launch of an interesting new product is news. Announcing a pilot launch that already concluded (?) months ago, less so. How did it go? What does the cheesemaker think? Honestly if I were covering this story I'd want to confirm that the product even really exists.
- neilv 3y ago
  Yeah, I don't know why more wasn't said here about impact thus far. Looks like the p-Chip company did an impressive "road show" of major news outlets in August. I'd guess for promoting to customers or investors (and they'd have to coordinate with the customer brand, and maybe also they were being discreet about the measures to make the first catches easier). So I'd guess that the outlets are writing because the company is putting itself out there, and the story does interest. (Ordinary people are noticing counterfeits on Amazon and such, and I'd guess the idea of marrying high-tech with something as old-world charm as Italian cheese wheels has some clicky light news appeal.) Since we're on HN, from a startup's perspective... we should hope that someday we could swing favorable coverage from top news outlets, and limit hardball interrogations to private dialogue with investors and prospects. :)