Famo.us pivots from JavaScript engine to micro-app CMS | Hacker News Reader

Famo.us pivots from JavaScript engine to micro-app CMS

famous.co

20 pointsdylanpyle7 comments

Background: Famo.us was trying to build an open source javascript animation library meant to unlock native performance on mobile[1]. They took many millions of funding to do so[2] .

It didn't quite end up working out that way. Also, there's a community-run "fork": infamous[3]

[1] http://famous.org/ [2] http://venturebeat.com/2014/08/13/famo-us-raises-25m-to-doub... [3] http://infamous.io/

I never understood their original business model, they were going to sell classes and events (conferences) around an open-source project that would compete with other open-source projects? Was that really what was worth 20+M of funding.

Now, seeing this pivot, I am still scratching my head a bit. So they are leveraging the work they did on famous to create a CMS which lets marketers easily create apps. Ok, I'll by that as a potential pivot, leverage what you've got in the high-performance library.

But I have a few issues with their new homepage and possibly business model.

1) you have to contact Sara from Famous to get her to sign you up. I'd think a company like Famous with access to so many potential customers would have been able to get a bunch of beta testers to try their product before setting up their homepage.

2) I clicked the play button under 'simple' expecting to see a video demonstrating the product, but it just led me to a bit of text describing a 'micro-app', I can't even touch an example micro-app they've created. Same with 'beautiful' and 'elegant'. Nothing here. I may expect that of a company trying to figure out their market, but the expectation is higher here. Maybe it's just me.

They didn't really have a business model to begin with, they were one of those "let's create a hype and see what happens" startups, led by a guy who thinks of himself as another Steve Jobs. The problem is that their framework was buggy and not really that high performing (the idea of adding matrix transforms on every single dom element is actually not such a good idea at all). If you really wanted a very animated GUI, native is still the only option. Plus, the whole over-animated GUI trend is also starting to fade (do we really need our apps to look like flash intros of the 90s?). Later I've heard they were aiming for a flash-like IDE for their framework to generate money, this might be somewhat in line with what they're trying now. On reddit a developer who left famo.us only 6 weeks ago said he didn't know anything about this project. So I think that they are running out of money quickly and this is all made up very fast without yet having a real product or example apps.

I remember how Apple mocked them when demoing Safari the previous WWDC, heh.

That's odd... The site seems to be created with webflow.

For a company that has raised so much funding for JS animations library and mobile web app performance, you'd think they would be able to get their mobile navigation working properly.

Is anyone else on iOS safari able use their nav?

Some jarring mistakes in the copy:

"programatically"

"It's headquarters are at"

"branded to our clients exact needs"

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