When s*** begins to get (or at least look) real

A very solid 8 out of 10. A James Milner of a week.

The most social I’ve been in weeks. Lots of meetings has meant lots of opportunities to deliver and hone my pitch. And do you know what? It’s gone down pretty well — even with people who aren’t cyclists.

Not too much progress with the app. The best news is probably the fact that after rigorous weekend testing, I was able to establish that the audio problems seen last week were largely down to the fact my old iPhone’s internal mic was still recording when headphones were plugged in. Phew. I’ve got my son’s old iPhone set up as a replacement and it’s working great.

Michael has added some notifications to alert users when there’s no network connection available. It’ll be interesting to see if these become irritating in areas where connections area patchy. Besides that, he also got a beta app past Apple’s testers, which will enable us to test with groups. I’ve received a shipment of extra buttons and some additional mounts to use for that purpose. We start on a small scale on Sunday with my bro, Andrew and friend, Paul.

It’s hard for an ugly app to compete with a beautiful 3D render. The latest work from Matthew is stunning (in my humble opinion). I’m absolutely thrilled with it and seeing it look like a real product definitely helps imagine the whole thing actually happening.

Admittedly, we’ve gone a little over budget, but hey. Next week we’ll produce a nice animation of the product rotating and then we can turn attention to the packaging.

I had a great meeting with a digital UI designer who I worked with recently on one of my consulting engagements. He was so enthused about the product and the opportunity to create some really slick, Dieter Rams-inspired interface work. The only disappointment was he’s unable to start work for another two to three weeks, but I need to focus on the testing anyway.

Another meeting, with my accountants, made me think about investigating what IP protection may be possible. As I’m essentially knitting existing technologies together, I came into this slightly skeptical about what might be protectable, but having read a little more into it, it may be worth exploring the potential to trademark the name and claim some rights to the design. We also talked about selling internationally and the corporate structure and tax implications.

And one final meeting, with a very very old friend, who was a money broker in Hong Kong and Tokyo, and now runs his own film production company. After we’d caught up on the last twenty years, we talked about how we might approach the filming of a video to support the crowdfunding campaign (should that happen). I’m not sure I’m looking forward to seeing myself on camera, but such is the life of a would-be tech tycoon.

Over and out.