Stealthy mixed reality startup Magic Leap has been having a bit of a tough time on the publicity front of late. Its head of PR departed last month , following a report by The Information suggesting it had inflated claims about its tech, and that a commercial product remained far further out than its marketing messages had suggested. And that despite investors ploughing some $1.4BN into the three year old, still productless startup.
All of which perhaps explains why CEO Rony Abovitz felt the need to leapt into 2017 by penning a blog post aimed at putting some positive puff back into Magic Leap’s image.
The problem is, you can’t fight cynicism with hot air. And Abovitz’s post has Zeppelin’s worth of the stuff.
First a few sample reviews from some nameless grumpy mouse tech bloggers : “this is the dumbest thing I have ever read”… “it sounds like an ‘essay on creativity’ assignment written by an 8th grader”… “wow”.
And now a few sample lines from Abovitz’s post itself:
You get the idea. (You can read the blog in full here .)
The whale-sized problem in the room here is that penning some trippy PR is not going to go very far towards correcting a growing suspicion that all might not quite be as it seems at this highly financed, heavily hyped mixed reality startup.
And as my colleague Lucas Matney wrote last month: “It’s clear that the time has arrived for a shift in the way the company communicates its ambitions.
“While the process of miniaturization has advanced more slowly than the company may have expected, where the clearest failures have lied is in the cult of mystery and high expectations that Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz seems to have chased in order to inflate his company and his own premature illusions of grandeur, all of this before the company has anything to back that visionary status up with.”
Yet instead of a shift in PR strategy, Magic Leap’s New Year’s Resolution appears to be to lay on the mystique even more thickly — rainbow powered unicorns and all…
So what, if anything, can we takeaway from Abovitz’s post? And I don’t mean idle considerations about what all those dreamers might be smoking inside their “really big space”. What concrete things can we learn?
In truth not very much — but here’s what, to my eye, looks like a few creeping realities intruding on this fantastical dreamscape.
1 – Magic Leap does not have a coherent product roadmap or unified vision for the company yet
“I see our journey at Magic Leap extending out over many decades, over many products and technologies.”
2 – Magic Leap has not yet identified a clear use-case for its technology
“Creative and practical.”
3 – Its first product still does not have a release date (despite talk of it debuting “hopefully soon-ish” way back in July )
“Our first product is coming.”
4 – Their first product might not be quite so reality-bending as people have been led to believe
“Our first system will be the first step towards a really cool dream… We are not going for perfect, but for a feeling , a flow , a moment to high-five our inner child.”
5 – The first product might launch this year. But — equally — it might not
“2017 will be a big year for Magic Leap… We are not about building cool prototypes. We are scaling up so we can manufacture hundreds of thousands of systems, and then millions. That requires a level of perfection, testing, and attention to detail by determined professionals.”
6 – Magic Leap does have a smallish prototype. But it might not be up to “rainbow unicorn levels” of reality mixing (hence, no doubt, the delays)
“We have made something that is small, mobile, powerful, and we think pretty cool.”
Abovitz does also tell us about a personal concern of his — relating to the rise of AI and how information systems might edit out the intangible things that are really important in life.
On this he writes:
This is a rather interesting thought. It’s just a shame it’s drowned out by all those banal rainbow powered unicorns.

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Freshdesk announced today that it has acquired Banglaore-based startup Pipemonk for an undisclosed amount. Pipemonk helps companies move data between cloud platforms, which should come in handy for Freshdesk and its partners.
Pipemonk, which was born as ZapStitch, had raised just over $2 million since it launched in 2014, with its primary funding round coming in May, 2015 , when it landed $2 million in seed funding led by Helion Venture Partners.
Pipemonk offers customers the ability to move data easily between cloud applications such as CRM, eCommerce, marketing and help desk services. The latter is particularly important to Freshdesk, whose primary products include customer service and help desk offerings.
The company has simplified data integration, a process that has traditionally been fraught with complexity, says Satya Padmanabham, co-founder of Pipemonk. “With the Pipemonk platform, we made it possible for even non-engineers to configure and run an integration in a matter of minutes,” he explained in a statement.
One of the primary differences between cloud services and the on-prem software that came before it, is that they have been designed for the most part with open APIs that allow various services — even those that compete with one another — to work together. The strategy is no longer to keep you locked inside a proprietary stack. Instead, cloud services recognize that you will need to work with other services, and they accommodate that because customers demand it.
Pipemonk gives Freshdesk more than simply a generic way to automate the flow of data between services. It will have practical application in-house, helping pull together the half dozen services, Freshdesk has acquired in a mini shopping binge over the last 16 months.
All 13 Pipemonk employees will be joining Freshdesk, essentially giving it an in-house data integration team. “Having your apps talk to each other and enabling seamless flow of data plays an important role in any business today, and we at Freshdesk are focused on making that workflow process simple for our customers,” Freshdesk CEO and founder Girish Mathrubootham, said in a statement.
Freshdesk launched in 2010 as a cloud customer service platform. Since, it has expanded its products to include IT help desk, CRM, live chat, in-app chat and social testimonial tools. The company has raised almost $150 million.

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