Does anyone know what happened to Golden-Shellback? Supposedly a company developed a technique for waterproofing electronic gadgets, but after a lot of intial hype and media attention, they seem to have disappeared. Where'd they go?
www.golden-shelback.com (no longer a functioning website) garned a lot of attention for what they tauted as a breakthrough technology that allowed them to vacuum treat small personal gadgets, such as cellphones and gps units, with some sort of invisible polymer that made them impervious to water damage. i.e. you could supposedly send them an iphone and have it returned to you waterproofed with virtually no visible change. The company went so far as to show off the tech to CNET and even on NBC today show and was supposedly taking orders for a brief time last year. I called to arrange to have a phone treated last year and was told they were backlogged and would contact me when they were accepting more units for treatment. No one ever got a hold of me and I recently checked back with the website only to find it no longer in service. Has anyone heard of this or know what happened? Did they sell the tech to a third party and shut down? Or was it vaporware from the start?
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I remember them, but their treatment was really expensive. There were youtube clips of an iphone playing songs under water, even using the screen to navigate to show it wasn’t a dummy phone. That’s unfortunate, I wish they would treat iPhones with this waterproofing and Gorilla Glass. Then I wouldn’t be so paranoid about dropping it in a rain puddle : )
Hmmm – I did a bit of digging,
Last tweet 4th Oct ‘09
Patent published 17 Dec ‘09 (also here)
Website closed 7th Jan ‘10
But the guys involved (particularly Eric Dawicki who backed Sid Martin’s invention) is still running aroiund with the Golden-Shellback name tag : link 11th Mar ‘10 visit to SNEEF.
So it looks like its all go – even though their website is down and you can’t buy it from them under that name…. Its still available from SCS Coatings (same technology = Parylene conformal coating).
Jahono, I salute you sir. You answer was as complete and thorough as anyone could hope for- or, if you like, simply great! I’ll keep my eyes and ears open for them to pop up again in the future, but for now, case closed as far as I am concerned.
Thanks for the concern all . . . As this was not remotely close to our core business, maritime education and training, we decided to sell the IP to a company who simply defaulted on their payments.
We have decided to make a go of it on our own and begin selling a line of consumer electronics that the public wants the most. We are pretty excited and hope that we will get the support needed to really create something that the public both wants and needs.
Keep your eyes out soon as we will be selling products on Ebay starting Monday, 24, May 2010. We will also be launching a new website within weeks from that.
Thanks again . . . Eric R. Dawicki
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