Fusion Garage CEO Renames CrunchPad “JooJoo” – Defends His Side of The Story

Just as we wrote earlier today and last week, Fusion Garage CEO Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan held a video conference this morning to unveil the new CrunchPad, which became a nightmare for TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington last week, when he announced he had been completely excluded from the project by Fusion Garage and its shareholders.

Anyway, here’s a summary of Fusion Garage video conference this morning. For starters, the tablet will not longer be called “CrunchPad,” as it has been officially renamed “JooJoo.” According to Rathakrishnan, JooJoo “means magic, and this device delivers magic.”

With that said, Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan went on to defend his honor by telling his side of the story, just like it was expected. Rathakrishnan explained that he approached Michael Arrington last year with the idea to create a cheap tablet. Arrington of course jumped onboard very quickly offering funding, investors and even promised to acquire Fusion Garage, “none of which came true,” he says. Seeing as Arrington did not deliver, he decided that Fusion Garage should move on by itself.

These are a few quotes by Rathakishnan:

“There was never any agreement of any kind between the two companies. This was nothing more than a potential acquisition that didn’t occur. Michael sat back while we took all the risk. The suggestion that Michael or TechCrunch owns anything is simply ludicrous.”

“TechCrunch didn’t contribute a single line of code… As Michael wrote in his own April 2009 blog post, ‘All credit should go to Fusion Garage.’”

“Publishing pictures of an unfinished product on a blog … is not a recipe for success.”

With that said, the new 12.1 capacitive touchscreen JooJoo tablet is expected to be launched on Friday, December 11th, with deliveries beginning in 8-10 weeks. It will run a UNIX web-based OS that boots directly into a browser in about 9 seconds. It does not have any physical buttons besides the on/off switch and it weighs about 2.4 pounds. Other technical specifications include a 5 hour battery life, a 4GB SSD, WiFi [no 3G], and an accelerometer. Unlike early promises pointing to a cheap tablet, JooJoo will be priced at a whopping $499.

Just like anyone might have guessed, the folks at TechCrunch have completely boycotted the JooJoo tablet by not covering anything related to it today.