Actually, the more I think about it, I do not think cash is the issue. They have plenty of cash to do the things they are doing. I think they are walking a tightrope of balancing obtaining funding to prototype with managing expectations. They do not want to create a stampede but do need the right amount of cashflow to move forward. It is a difficult feat to hype something slowly while keeping people in the dark and expectations in check. Slow playing the reservation numbers and totals builds hype and excitement with the believer while keeping enough people out until it is 100 percent certain this will get off the ground. They will only have one shot to get everything right and there are a lot of moving pieces to juggle. I am impressed. Crowdsourcing is fascinating. I am moving my confidence number up to a 6...The previous post is why I should not post before coffee.
Having been a former reservation clerk for 30 multi-use rooms in an institution of 50,000 employees, I can tell you that everybody and their mother thinks they know how to do everyone else's job. It's always just a simple matter of this or that. I can't tell you how many Kings-of-the-Kindergarten would come sailing into my office on a tirade, not understanding anything at all about how a system or a procedure functions. I'm sure this is a problem that all people in various occupations experience, especially when dealing with a customer. I used a date-time stamp system for my reservations which was on a first-come-first-served basis, with SOME factors that required manually bumping and rearranging. When a person, and not a machine, needs to input things manually, they generally don't spit out an instantaneous confirmation. I'm sure Elio will generate my number within a batch of numbers.
I joke about being impatient, but really I'm quite positive that there is a person at a computer somewhere whose job includes running these confirmations. I'm sure there are policies and procedures with mitigating factors that go into making my place in line. Some day soon, they will run the report with my number in it and make it public.
It really never crossed my mind that the waiting time would be a publicity stunt to generate interest.
Believe me, they had me at $6800/84mpg.