THIS IS AN IMPORTANT NOTICE AND SHOULD NOT BE IGNORED. THE COMPANY NAMED HAS APPLIED TO THE REGISTRAR TO BE STRUCK OFF THE REGISTER AND DISSOLVED. ON DISSOLUTION ANY REMAINING ASSETS WILL PASS TO THE CROWN. THE REGISTRAR WILL STRIKE THE COMPANY OFF THE REGISTER UNLESS HE HAS REASONABLE CAUSE NOT TO DO SO. GUIDANCE NOTES ARE AVAILABLE ON GROUNDS FOR OBJECTION. IF IN DOUBT, SEEK PROFESSIONAL ADVICE.
Application for striking off. Filed on 18-06-2009This is the final step in the UK to close a company. Of course, the shareholders and Directors in the UK were as deceived as everyone else by the Cherrypal management. We are not quite sure what has happened with Cherrypal Inc. in the USA. They incorporated in Delaware in August of last year after they dumped their first investors and ran away from a stack of unpaid invoices, including a sizable amount owed to Genesi. It was not worth the aggravation or attorney's fees to escalate the matter. Unfortunately, we can trace the problems back a bit farther...
EFIKA Open Client with Limepc and keyboard, June 2008The Cherrypal C100 Desktop Computer was a
Limepc. The lime was swapped for cherries, otherwise the products were identical. Before we completely walked away from the whole mess, we had a good laugh when the Freescale Product Manager suggested we call the next version a _kiwi_. He is gone, and we digress (
but, imagine a fibrous, dull brown-green case).
In July 2007, we had an excited email from Jack Campbell, Vice President, Strategic Development, Product Design & Planning, Shenzhen Tongfang Multimedia Co., Ltd. Over the course of the next few months we developed a Marketing Requirements Document and finalized an agreement (
send us an email if you would like copies). The
5121Efika Advanced Development System was on the verge of shipping when we discovered a problematic deficiency.
The 5121e did not (
does not) support cache-coherency, making the 5121e impractical for a consumer device that required the use of multiple applications simultaneously. We discovered this on our own. This major and unreported design change made most of the software developed for the 5200B based EFIKA/Open Client practically useless. The Product Manager for the 5121e (
and even some of his technical staff) never understood the implications. We wasted more than a year of resources on the 5121e. In conclusion, the e300 PowerPC core has a brighter past than future --
too bad! Nevertheless, the Limepc still made it to CES 2008. The handhelds displayed did not work and the desktop and HDTV versions were actually running on hidden Intel based machines. In the aftermath of CES 2008 and knowing we had been cheated by Limepc, we published
Read All About It!In the Spring of 2008, the Limepc management and the Freescale 5121e Product Manager began to realize they had problems actually doing what they were promising. It is a wonder that Tsinghua Tongfang (THTF - Public, SHA:600100) based in Beijing and the parent company of Limepc never understood the level of the deception. The Limepc was actually featured in the Freescale CEO's Keynote at FTF 2008. All the way around, THTF and Freescale C-level management was bamboozled. It was at this moment that Cherrypal stepped into international acclaim, riding on the crest of a wave of false technology claims and hyped up marketing.
The Cherrypal management took these distortions to a whole new level. The best word that comes to mind is fraud. You can google the articles from late summer 2008 until earlier this year. The corporate site is still online. The claims and hopes are knowingly lined with fiction. Incredibly, Limepc tried again at CES 2009. Their website is still online too. Thankfully, it seems both companies are drifting into the past.
So, what is the big lesson learned? Stay away from crooks? Beware of mid-level managers with delusions of grandeur? If you want the job done right, do it yourself? All the above? Perhaps, but here is the Warning:
if your only resource in life is time, spend it with people that you like and people that you trust. People make companies, technologies do not.
The Community is the Computer -
Go Zig!R&B
