tech companies with defunct devices and how they treat their customers

for this particular blog entry, i want to talk about two devices i found to be extremely useful and have loved using them. however, the companies these devices came from seems to have either disappeared or has gone on to do other things. that's fine and all, but theses devices that they sold are no longer supported. not only that, because these devices depend on the manufacturer's system being up and running, when they take those servers out of commission, these devices become useless.

the first one is call the iTwin Connect/iTwin Pro. this device looks like two usb drives that are paired. the idea is that you connect one stick to a computer in location A and the other stick to a computer in location B. with the two sticks paired. you could use one computer to access files on the other and it works flawlessly. i've used this device to access files on my home computer from work and vice versa. it couldn't be any easier. however, when the company producing this device went belly up, they never bothered to inform any of their users. the devices simply stopped working.

the second one is the mojio odbii vehicle diagnostic/vehicle tracker device. it plugs into the odbii port on your car and provides you information about the status of the car. it also has 3g connectivity and built in gps. so i used this device to give me assurance that my car hasn't been stolen. it's also great to locate your car in a parking lot when you don't remember where you parked. but the company decided that it would end support for this device and NOT tell its users about that decision. again, another device bites the dust.