The CrunchPad is dead, long live the Joojoo. Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan, CEO of FusionGarage, claims that there was simply no contract between TechCrunch and his company. After cutting TechCrunch out of the picture, it now plans to release the tablet under the new name. Meanwhile, TechCrunch's Mike Arrington plans lawsuits.
"We have had several discussions, with no contract whatsoever," Rathakrishnan said in a webcast interview Monday morning. " … Nothing was delivered on Michael (Arrington's) part, and we have done all of the development…. Michael promised on a lot of things but never delivered. We did everything, software, hardware and funding."
All TechCrunch did, Rathakrishnan suggests, is create "awareness" about a product that was already in development. Here's Arrington's side of the story. Given the purported (and curious) lack of contracts, one wonders if his most potent weapon against FusionGarage is now not the courts, but his ability to ink it to death at TechCrunch–surely a stark irony for a lawyer-turned-tech writer.
