UbuTab Case Study: How to be Taken Seriously
I was taking a look at the ubutab which is supposedly an upcoming Ubuntu/Android tablet that failed to meet its indegogo campaign goal last month. A couple of things about this site just make me sad. I see a lot of shady businesses with no SSL during checkout, no real email address, and a lazy themes for their site all the time. I am not sure if they are just lazy, don’t care, or a combination of both. This post is really a PSA. The 1990’s are over. People expect a higher level of quality in your product, your website, and your brand. If you are launching a new product here are a few tips to be taken seriously.
Use a Real Email Address
Use an Email Address at your own domain. It is not difficult to have a custom domain for your email address. Gandi gives them away for free when you purchase a domain. Having a custom domain instead of free email makes your company seem more legitimate.Don’t Send Customers to Paypal
Use a payment processing system or at least something like stripe that it integrated to your website instead of redirecting users to a paypal checkout page that sends their payment to a company that has a different name from your own. This is just silly. I would love to have a tablet that runs Ubuntu. But this entire operation just screams scam to me. It will be interesting to see if they actually release a product later on this year.Update:
It looks like the actual site was taken down. You can see an archive of the site here.Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
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Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Artificial Unintelligence – We are so inured to using AI that we believe we need it
Before people around the world were connected by the internet the proliferation of new ideas and modern technologies was slow. This was bad for the originators who had no means of quickly gauging…
via V.H. Belvadi June 1, 2025How often do LLMs snitch? Recreating Theo's SnitchBench with LLM
A fun new benchmark just dropped! Inspired by the Claude 4 system card - which showed that Claude 4 might just rat you out to the authorities if you told it to "take initiative" in enforcing its morals values while exposing it to evidence of malfe…
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries May 31, 2025OpenAI featured chatbot is pushing extreme surgeries to “subhuman” men
OpenAI's featured chatbot recommends $200,000 in surgeries while promoting incel ideology
via Citation Needed May 31, 2025Generated by openring