So, if you could imagine Mark Cuban going something along the lines of “screw you guys, I’ll make my own hoverboards,” then you pretty much get the gist of this story.
Cuban, one of Shark Tank‘s most generous investors, has told BuzzFeed that he has called off a deal with Inventist, patent holder and maker of the Hovertrax, and will make his own hoverboards.
“We will come out with our own board that we feel respects necessary IP and introduces our own,” Cuban told BuzzFeed in an email.
As BuzzFeed reports, Cuban had signed a “letter of intent to buy exclusive rights to patents held by [Inventist’s] Shane Chen, inventor of the Hovertrax.” That deal just went down in August.
At the time, Chen just so happened to have a lawsuit against John Soibatian, president of IO Hawk, another seller of remarkably similar hoverboards.
Want to make this story even more convoluted? Segway filed a patent lawsuit against Inventist in September, according to Mashable.
Confused yet?
BuzzFeed didn’t have any specifics behind what ended Cuban’s deal with Chen — however, they did state that “in September, Chen traveled to China to meet with representatives from Chic, the Chinese manufacturer that makes IO Hawk,” and Chen told BuzzFeed then that “they are willing to pay me royalty for each one they sell.”
As BuzzFeed wrote in their breakdown of hoverboard players in August, “The biggest name in the hoverboard category is the IO Hawk, which sells for about $1,200 on Amazon and has a max speed of 6.2 miles per hour.”
Considering these “hoverboards” aren’t really hoverboards, like we were promised from Back to the Future II, just hands-free mini-segways of sorts (so you can kind of see the Segway lawsuit) it seems like much ado about nothing.
However, these gadgets are turning out to be the go-to cool accessory, and the market is heating up with celebrities driving interest. Wiz Khalifa was recently busted for rolling through LAX on one, and Missy Elliott features one in her latest song “WTF.”
So yeah, these are very likely to be moneymakers.
I’ve been struggling to find a way to fit Elliott’s new song/video into Geek Life this week, so here you go, in all her hoverboarding glory:
