The one thing that a lot of people seem to be focusing on is how many units they have 'sold'. That's the part I think people need to try and change their perspective on.
5BARz is not selling these units to telcos, they are giving them away for free. The entire point of their endeavor is to make money on selling the data that the unit provides them. It's the Google approach, and can be insanely lucrative if done right.
So why the infuriatingly slow rollout? Because they are paying out of pocket for every unit, and not making any money until their 'big data' strategy starts to pay fruition. How close are they to making money from the data? That's the big question.
They will hit the tipping point where their data selling is making more money than they are spending, and then we should see a rapid increase in the rollout. But until then they are just spending investors money to build all of these units and hoping they can be profitable soon.
Or they will run out of money and fold. Still a gamble, but at least there's a pretty big upside if they pull it off.
