During the summer of 2000, while I was working with Deniz and John and Kevin on the Amanda project, I had a feeling that things were not going well.  At the same time, my own ramaining brain cells starting talking to each other, and a stop at Taco Bell sparked an idea.

I ordered something at the Taco Bell and I was completely unable to understand the response through the failing PA speaker near the outside menu kiosk, and when I arrived at home (a mere mile away) I discovered that they had also not heard me during the ordering process.  I was not amused, but I was also too disinterested to return and correct the situation.

My question was, why are we still yelling in to a post outside the restaurant and reading menu items and pricing off of a static board as the next century was just unfolding upon us ?  At the time I was sporting a Nokia 8290 cell phone that did not support any sort of bluetooth connectivity, but I still had that display cloud hanging over me from Philips.  "Surely," I thought, "cars will have displays in them in the near term.  Wouldn't it be cool if I could use that display to interact with drive-thru retail establishments?"

I began to talk to my friend from college, Andy Francke, since he was savvy in the area of network communications, and he wasn't associated with the work I was doing with Deniz and Kevin (or I probably would have talked to them about all of this).  The idea was that cellular technology was fine for long-range communications, but that a short-distance, high-speed wireless connection that would enable a car to communicate with other wirelessly-enabled cars would be ideal.  The goal would be to enable wireless car-to-car communications and car-to-base communications.  With 802.11b rolling out in force from Apple and their AirPort device, conventional wisdom was that we would have to come up with the value proposition to make this attractive.

I began talking to my other friends, Tony Bojorquez and David Hadani, both of them on the marketing side of things. Dave had actually worked for Allied Signal in the part of the company that made turbocharger components, so he actually had some connections in the automotive industry.  The challenge would be to draw a value picture of this concept that would make inclusion of wireless transceivers in cars attractive to car builders or to aftermarket accessory providers.  What we needed to do-- in hindsight-- was make the case for OnStar but at shorter distances.

Andy and I were trying to come up with some cool applications, and we started talking about source-routing packets on ad-hoc networks that could get built up between cars as they were traveling.  Combine this with the ability of a given car to alert other cars that it is changing speed (due to traffic, obstructions, a collision, etc) and one might begin to see that cars communicating with each other at a low level would have certain safety aspects as well as certain communcations aspects that would make the whole notion into a platform for other applications.

In other words, we were focusing on a system whereby an arbitrary car could communicate with another, and any car on the network would be able to direct packets of information to some destination based on whatever cars and whatever shaped network of those cars was available.  As far as we were concerned, the data could be a more robust turn signal, traffic information passed back to cars further back in the traffic stream, emergency information, Taco Bell orders at a fixed base station, car-to-car email or voice chat, or anything else we could think of.

We composed a lengthy business plan with plenty of data and ideas about how we could turn these lofty ideas into a functional technology.  Granted, some of it was part of what Mesh Networks was doing around the same time, but our application had some new ideas that even I would thought were worthy of patents (and I'm no fan of patents, to be perfectly honest).

What killed us?

First off all, the fundamental question that a business plan has to answer went un-answered in ours.  Unfortunately, we also couldn't really answer the question when it was put to us in casual conversation.  "How wil this make money?"  To engineers and people with a silicon valley gadgetry mindset, there was a tacit understanding that making money on a new technology could sometimes happen as a virtue of the usefulness of that technology.  Surely car-to-car communications would enable a host of other applications just like web browsers and dsl and cable modems had.  Unfortunately, this sort of answer doesn't lead to much in the way of check-writing, or even in the way of active interest.  From what I could tell, we got some complments on the idea, but spanked for not having a legitimate business plan built around it.

Dave would eventually be tapped to head some OLED efforts at Philips, and he also got married, and he would eventually move to Hong Kong for a while for that Philips undertaking, so he was not in a position to dive in to CarComms.  Andy and his fiancee were having their own business plan issues [they would get married later, not to worry], and Tony was rapidly losing interest in technology in general as he went on a personal tech hiatus for a while.  With the Amanda board being the source of more frustration than riches, I was facing the need to find alternate income..

CarComms was dead.

Soon after this, Motive Power was also dead for all practical purposes, but I did manage to get a nice consulting gig just in time.