A $150 laptop — for real?
The Medison Celebrity appears to be too good to be true. It’s cheap, comes with Linux preinstalled (Fedora, according to the FAQ) and ships in only 4–6 weeks! We all know, that on the internet, when things seem too good to be true, they usually are.
If we look a little into this, the domain seems to be registered via Surftown A/S and if we look up the server hosting the site, we get:
madsen ~ $ host medisoncelebrity.com
medisoncelebrity.com has address 212.97.132.106
medisoncelebrity.com mail is handled by 10 mail4.surftown.nu.
madsen ~ $ host 212.97.132.106
106.132.97.212.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer ws6.surf-town.net.
The same is the case for medison.se, which is the Medison company web site.
All this seems kinda weird, since Medison states in their FAQ:
Q: Why is the laptop much cheaper than other laptops?
A: We see this from a democratic point of view where we believe everyone should be able to afford to have a laptop. The other reason is that we have our own plants where we assemble our laptops.[Emphasis mine.]
They have their own plants for assembling the laptops, but they don’t have a web/mail server and need hosting from Surftown? Maybe one could argue that it’s all to keep the laptop cheap, but I still think it’s fishy. Besides, their first reason for the low price is ridiculous — not a single company has ever survived on a business model based on charity.
Apart from that, their web sites (medison.se and medisoncelebrity.com) look really, really unprofessional and are really sparse on specific information except that they claim to have been doing some designs of different sorts, but apparently they weren’t able to transfer even the smallest amount of those skills to their web sites. Also, it seems strange that their contact address is in Kent, UK while the company claims to be Swedish, but there may be perfectly good reasons for that, I guess.
Furthermore, it appears that a second Medison exists — also a technology firm, this one is Korean though, but active all over the world. I find it hard to believe that both have existed alongside each other since 1996 (when the Swedish Medison claims to have been founded) without any legal clashes about the name and one of them being forced to take another name.
On top of it all, it seems really, really odd, that this completely obscure Swedish company all of a sudden offers some of the cheapest laptops in the world.
However, should this turn out to be true, then it’s absolutely great and I’d definitely recommend it to a lot of people. Let me know if you have any experience (good or bad) with them.
July 31st, 2007 at 7:40 pm
Lots of companies host their web (and some their mail too) with hosting companies. Then they don’t have to think or care much about that.
Don’t you think that the Korean company and the Swedish company are closely related? I don’t think anymore could make a profit assembling computer hardware in EU for very long.
(yeah, I know Dell’s are assembled in Ireland, but the parts aren’t)
That being said, I too think it looks shady at best. Stuff like “Every time we have a great and commercial idea we either start up a new company or help someone else get going with the concept.” just makes me laugh at them.
And their website is a complete mess with no graphical or lingual guidelines.
I wouldn’t send them any money — already I’ve spend too much time on them.
August 2nd, 2007 at 4:22 am
Re hosting:
Yeah, but Surftown… I mean… Come on… Surftown…
Re relatedness of companies:
The Korean company doesn’t mention _anything_ about the Swedish one and vice versa…
September 25th, 2007 at 11:59 am
[…] Unfortunately, Valdi Ivancic (CEO and president of Medison Europe Ltd.) is the kind of man who gets the idea, but doesn’t have any of the resources to pull it off — far from it. In this particular event he did try to pull it off, not knowing that his rather unimpressing past (to say the least) would be researched and analyzed, and all his references — and even his tax records — checked. When people (particularly on the internet) are dealing with a new company selling something that’s almost too good to be true, it’s not unusual to at least do a bit of Googling around on the company history and the history of the CEO. In this case it was the story of some 3, maybe 4, companies who’d never paid their taxes and usually ended up declaring bancruptcy. The company website (medison.se) and the product website (medisoncelebrity.com) weren’t exactly impressive either — they looked like something produced in Frontpage Express and that’s probably me being a bit generous. In general, from the beginning everything looked a bit shady. […]