As the sole stockholder, president, CEO and employee of itMoves Design Limited, I couldn't help but LOL at the comic strip.

It brought back memories of the months I spent last year endlessly working on the P&L, Use of Cash, Revenue Model, Headcount & Labor Costs and other financial charts seemingly indispensable when going out the door looking for funding (a job I actually found enjoyable, to my surprise).

It also reminded me of how weird it felt, as a beginner, the first time one has to write down his own Exorbitant Annual Salary... ahahah, good times.

This one just for fun.

While preparing a 3D environment for a client and friend, I couldn't resist the temptation to drop the ME geometry into this early fall Pasadena environment I photographed yesterday. Although Autodesk Showcase is a better tool for static renderings, there is still something magic about watching a design one knows slowly rotate inside a street composed of nothing more than 140 individual images.

It's not 100 percent perfect, but it's not too bad for just a few hours of work.

• first the bad news: itMoves, at least the itMoves I have been taking on the road for the past twelve months, is officially dead. I gave myself one year to get to a certain development point, an undefined point, with or without funding from which I could justify to continue. One year has gone by and I can not say I arrived to that point. As you can imagine there are many explanations/excuses, but at the end of the day, an entrepreneur is someone who makes something out of nothing, and although I did managed to produce quite a lot of work, that something was not enough to get funding or a strongly commited team. Time to move on.
• on the other hand, the fundamental reason why I decided to start itMoves has not changed: I still believe there is a profound mismatch between how cars are developed, produced and ultimately consumed and the rational approach to mobility (specially in cities) that we would take today if we were starting a transportation grid from scratch. This mismatch, born out of one hundred years of almost free and unlimited resources, places an increasingly unsustainable burden not only on the environment but in many families and individuals who would prefer to spend their money elsewhere.

When there is a mismatch, there is inefficiency in the system, and when there is inefficiency there is a business opportunity for entrepreneurs to take advantage off. Unlike other areas of the economy though, the auto industry is a very harsh environment for the entrepreneur, with very powerful incumbents, an almost unlimited need for capital, and yes, that Coppola movie to fight against. But fundamental laws like supply-and-demand (increasingly tested by China's raise) always win the race in the long run. Opportunities to improve the system (and to do the right thing for our kids' future) are not going away.

We (itMoves), in our own modest way, failed this time, but failure does not invalidate the original assumptions. Maybe the timing, the aim or the pilot were wrong, but the target was (and still is) correct.

(PS. The image above is the ultra sophisticated itMoves' countdown clock, the official reminder at the entrance of my home office of how many days I had left before turning into a pumpkin. It is two days off...)

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Next steps, SLA suspension (so the wheels are easier to position) and maybe (maybe) paint.

We had a good meeting with Rustic Canyon Partners yesterday morning. Politeness doesn't mean commitment, of course, but we went one hour over our allocated time, which is always a good sign.

The original plan was to present yesterday to half the team, see how much progress Mark and I had made together, and then return later in May for a presentation to all the partners at the firm. We should hear from them in the next couple of days, and then we will take it from there.

More to come.

Everybody is curious about how can we get in and out of the vehicle, how does it work. I have to admit that I haven' t done a good job at explaining it, since nothing short of peaking at the computer while zooming and rotating seems to show it properly (at least until the seating buck is finished).

Here is an attempt at showing how it works.

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I went down to Torrance today to check on the 1:4 scale model that our friend Paul is milling at Viperteck. As you can see, the SLA wheels are finished, and they look like they are from a different planet (!). The two foam parts have been hollowed out to save some weight, and tomorrow they will start milling them, a process that could take a couple of days. More info soon.

One of the programs included in the $60k Autodesk Clean Tech Partner package was Showcase, a rendering software that neatly integrates with Alias and some of their other programs. Like its rival RTT, Showcase is designed to produce fantastic results right out of the box, taking you 80% there very quickly. Also like RTT, it becomes increasingly frustrating if you are highly picky and want to extract the last 20%, like I always do. Countless hours can be wasted tweaking an infinite amount of light, reflexion and refraction characteristics that you didn't even know existed...

This little clip is a quickie, even thought I spent several hours getting everything ready. It shows the level of quality that can be achieved real time, opening the possibility of using it during funding meetings. Whether VCs would even care is another matter.