Linux Solutions

CherryPal has announced that they will be shipping out its, $249, 2 Watt, cloud desktop pc next week, but according to an email from the company’s CEO, Max Seybold, the new company is having some pretty major funding issues – they just haven’t got any money.

An email from Seybold just before Halloween revealed that they have been screwed over “a firm and binding funding agreement with a UK based African-born family. Unfortunately they never followed through and left us high and dry.”

Seybold went on to explain that they sought out investment angels (high powered business men and women with a ton of spare cash) to help balance the company’s books. However, with seven investors interested, and “oral commitments” in place, the stock markets plunging all over the world caused the investors to hold on to their money.

“In a nutshell, we need to raise funds ASAP,” Seybold wrote.

CherryPal’s first PC caught the eye of many as it boasted cloud computing, as well as being more green – the concept involved a small computer with no moving parts, running a low-power hip with 246MB memory and an 8GB hard drive.

Rather than storing files, music and other applications on your hard drive, the CherryPal used Amazon’s S3 service to store your data online for free – a feature funded by advertisements.

The CherryPal’s original release dat was around July, but it had to be pushed back a couple of weeks due to a fault with the systems graphics card. However, two months later CherryPal changed the release date to November 4th.

CherryPal has plans to launch an open source initiative with Freescale in about two weeks time, called “Maraschino”.

Maraschino, Seybold wrote, is to consist of ten sub-projects, starting with embedded Linux, browser optimisation, and local and hosted applications. He believes the scheme is a “combination of Facebook and sourceforge.net”. Seybold said that Freescale will supply free developer boards of the 5121e PowerPC processor for the project.

But with the global economy in meltdown, governments changing, and a general feel that recession is upon us, its understandable that CherryPal as suffering.