Before I sound too negative, I would like to say that it does look like a lot of hard work went into this, and I really do think it’s a good product. Unfortunately, it seems like another solution looking for a problems. From what I can tell, this product has little to no compatibility with Cakes and Deserts. At Small Startup – which this entire comment was written to promote – we heavily utilize Cakes and Deserts and can’t really imagine releasing a product in 2014 under the food category that doesn’t fully integrate with Cakes and Deserts. Is there any hope for updating compatibility in future releases or is this just another product that doesn’t even look at market needs before releasing a product?
EDIT: I was able to find a tutorial online for integrating Carrot with Cakes and Deserts, which may work until a better solution is found:http://www.chow.com/recipes/21792-moist-carrot-cake-recipe . I would still like compatibility with some specific use cases like Scones and Tiramisu.
Come on.... Carrot integrates beautifully with Cake there is even a Chef recipe for it (AHA!!!) ! It's my favorite bundle when working on Breakfast module.
Jesus, what's wrong with people today? Whatever happened with "do one thing and do it well"? Not everything new has to be like the Golden Corral buffet
This is just a nitpick but this type of headline doesn't tell us anything about carrot or why should we care for its introduction. I love new stuff as much as the next person but can we we change the headline to something like "introducing carrot - an innovative nutrient carrying system for a new world"
Both of these supposed market incumbents lack the simple approach of Carrot. Cabbage requires significant preparation to be enjoyable. Carrot is easy to use and eat right away. Leek is really only enjoyable in cooked form, whereas Carrot is available in both raw and cooked form.
Carrots also have far less fragmentation in shape and size - leaving aside the Carrot Mini which offers the same simplicity in a smaller form factor. This lack of fragmentation means that everyone can immediately recognize and use Carrot. It also means that children will immediately be able to recognize and use Carrot.
1. For a gardener, you can already grow such a vegetable yourself quite trivially by getting seeds, planting it locally with compost, and then using water and potash on the planted seeds.
2. It doesn't actually replace a potato. Most people I know add flour or bread to be able to make stews, but they still carry a potato in case there are thickening problems. This does not solve the thickening issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
Pfff. I can make my own carrot FOR FREE by hacking a raised-bed and hooking it up to my local water provider using a polycarbonate pipe and standard spray head. Why would anyone need to BUY ONE?!
Depends on the copyright laws in your country, and what will you do, if you grow too much of them at once? Sharing is prohibited in some areas! Be careful!
Maybe someone should invent a subscription based carrot delivery service, or even a flatrate service for carrots, like spotify or netflix.
It looks like you've built your landing page in PHP, which is renowned for its scaling and security problems. I'd highly recommend looking into something like Scala or Lisp if you want your unlaunched product to have any chance in scaling to the millions of users you probably won't get.
I don't know if you have tried PHP recently, but with the frameworks like Symfony2, it's much more robust and feels natural to code into. I think you should give it another try. :)
I'm just not sure about the form factor. Carrot is probably a bit too big for my hands and Carrot mini won't be released before 2015 so I'll skip on Carrot for now.
I kept mine in my back pocket while at a wedding reception, last weekend, and when I finally pulled it out to use it, it had warped, and would no longer lay flat. While it still seemed completely usable, I'm definitely going to return it, right after I post to Youtube.
Compliments on the thing as a whole, but one thing stuck out to me (negatively).
When I read about vegetables and interaction and saw the screenshot of how interfaces haven't changed much, I got rather excited about the idea of a vegetable that truly tried to change the way we process nutrients.
Instead, it seems Carrot mostly focused on the stuff surrounding vegetables. Which is a noble goal, but not what I was hoping/wishing for.
I'd like to see someone reinvent vegetables, or update them for wearable interfaces. In the same way that the mouse greatly changed the way we work on 'normal' computers, surely Carrot should give us similar new advantages.
I've been following a number of projects that try to do this, but they are hyper-focused on just that nutrient-input part. I'd love to see the best ideas from those experiments find their way into Carrot.
(This is just a general observation, not an attack on Carrot. I can understand that you have chosen a specific focus that doesn't happen to be what I care about.)
Nice idea. I would pay you money if you made a version I could grow in my own garden. I don't want my food growing on someone else's land. I value my privacy enough that I would pay you for this. I don't want it growing on your land and then all of a sudden Google acquires you, shuts you down, and I never have a carrot again!
Devices like this, nice, sleek and integrated, are, as usual, not very hackable. Try getting it to change colors, for instance. (Though I did see yellow and purple prototypes, not yet on the site.)
On the other hand, the device has an unexpected, but well-documented and very cool ability to run genetic algorithms! It's ridiculously slow, like 1-3 iterations a year (!), but you can run great many in parallel, since the device is so inexpensive — and, you know, sun-powered, so you don't pay for running it at all. Beats your server farm hands down.
Great product, great design. But how will you pivot if Apple enters this market? I'm pretty sure their design and taste should be sweeter than yours. How do you intend to compete?
Wow, so much work was put into this product and the design, but the call to action is put at the very bottom. What a shame, did any A/B testing go into this?
You can't actually buy it yet. But you can contribute to its development via Kickstarter. Acquaintance level donation at $5 will give you email updates when Carrot grows. Friend level at $20 and you'll get a Carrot seed. Baby Carrot level at $50 will get you a spot in the first harvest once development is completed in 3 to 33 months.
This is one of the best things I have seen in a while. Just when I'm hitting my head against a wall giving my pitch to investor after investor each day, answering the same questions...here comes carrot to rejuvenate me. With vitamins. And comedy gold.
Nailed it. The happy/lame/sappy music with little chimes, fast paced rhythm, and soft strumming acoustic that can be heard in commercials like this has started to make me go insane.
From the enterprise perspective this is a very dangerous product as it doesn't seem to have any security mechanisms. How can I prevent others from unauthorized access to my carrot?
Awesome, although the font, in my opinion, should be sans-serif, preferebly something like Helvetica, to be maximum web 3.0 responsive design javascript framework startup like.
Wasn't there something similar that came out in 2012 called Celery? It seems to me Carrot is a little late to the game. Either way, please shut up and take my money.
There's no joke to be left out of. The community sometimes just blows off steam by mocking itself. I don't particularly care for it, but usually it goes nearly as quickly as it comes.
EDIT: I was able to find a tutorial online for integrating Carrot with Cakes and Deserts, which may work until a better solution is found:http://www.chow.com/recipes/21792-moist-carrot-cake-recipe . I would still like compatibility with some specific use cases like Scones and Tiramisu.