TechCrunch’s Arrington alleges betrayal in Crunchpad demise
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Michael Arrington, the mercurial head of TechCrunch, today lobbed a grenade across the blogosphere with a post that alleges betrayal, greed and theft of intellectual property in describing the demise of the Crunchpad, a tablet device Arrington and Fusion Garage had been jointly building.
In a lengthy post, Arrington accuses Fusion Garage Chief Executive Chandra Rathakrishnan of trying to oust Arrington from the project, which began a year ago as an effort to build a touch-screen device to surf the Internet. Here’s an excerpt:
Chandra said that based on pressure from his shareholders he had decided to move forward and sell the device directly through Fusion Garage, without our involvement.Err, what? This is the equivalent of Foxconn, who build the iPhone, notifiying Apple a couple of days before launch that they’d be moving ahead and selling the iPhone directly without any involvement from Apple.
Thus, Arrington relegated the much vaunted Crunchpad to the FAIL bin.
The story doesn’t end there, but could soon get uglier. Arrington said he ‘will almost certainly be filing multiple lawsuits against Fusion Garage, and possibly Chandra and his shareholders as individuals, shortly.’
We’ve reached out to Rathakrishnan to get his version of the tale and will post an update should he reply.
-- Alex Pham
Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.