A small “f”.

When I said “Fuckit” a few days ago, it really should have been a small “f.” I’ve received a few inquiries trying to understand if my skunk works had in fact been skunked, or not…

The cleats aren’t hung up, but the strategic focus is changing even as we speak.  I went into this zonio experiment with a pressing need to get a particular product concept built.  It was a cool product too.  I am still a big believer in the design, but I am not sure there is the right kind of capital ready to be put to work in a fashion I am willing to move forward.  Honestly speaking, there was such a temptation to build a product concept based on technologies that I knew intimately, but now I am finding that a lot of that desire came from the safety of it.  I was also spending an awful lot of time and mental energy trying to move too many partners who did not share my urgency or risk assessment of the opportunity.  Therefore it was a challenging nut to crack.  Top it all off, and my largest competitive advantage was first-mover advantage… not terribly robust in the CE market.

Another confounding issue was that within the next month or so, the likelihood of getting an early 2010 product built and placed is prohibitively slim.  Making this an even more weighty condition is the fact that there has been an incredible amount of movement and progress in enabling technologies for a competitive architecture that will be hard to compete against.  I will talk more about this later.  I am actually leaning towards documenting exactly what I believe the initial product concept should be based on these evermore market-ready technologies.  It won’t seem groundbreaking to those who are familiar with the technologies, but it may prove to be a unique perspective on a set of technologies that are currently targeted at a totally different set of consumer use cases.

My recent learnings and acceptance of some harsh economic realities will weigh on what kind of marketing strategy and partnerships will need to exist to pull it off.