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.
Most popular posts this month
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass from Fernando Borretti
- Is it ethical to use AI? from charity.wtf
- The logical destination of LLMs from Andy Bell
- Revised rules of engineering leadership. from Irrational Exuberance
- The circus freaks of open source from Drew DeVault's blog
- Clanker: A Word For The Machine from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
- I ran a half-marathon! from gluecko.se
- My Running Tips from Kevin Bell's Blog
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Workshop Basel day one
On this hot summer’s day in Basel, Switzerland, the seventh HTTP workshop started. These events tend to work roughly the same way and the people in the room are also to large extent familiar and known since previous editions. Forty people in a meeting room...
via daniel.haxx.se July 14, 2026Sets of overlapping circles
This is a design joke that always makes me laugh: This was made by… someone, a while back, I believe in response to the Twitter logo redesign of 2012, which showed the new logomark as composed of exclusively circles: Now, to be clear: that Twitter logo red...
via Unsung July 14, 2026How I use HTMX with Go
When I want to add sprinkles of interactivity to a web application, I'm a big fan of using HTMX. I like that it makes it easy to give interactions a smooth app-like feel, I like that it minimizes the amount of JavaScript that I have to write, and I like th...
via Alex Edwards July 14, 2026Generated by openring