[daedalus]

stewi: they got their investment due to having a strong brand, market awareness and a popular product. I highly doubt Foundry Group are interested in the technology per se. In a sense their web address had more to do with their investment opportunities then their physical one. That said im sure California has some advantages in terms of networking.

The benefits of the OS approach is you can get your ideas out there, and recruit people to help with the design / testing effort, in the hopes of getting enough critical mass to attract investors. The downside is you end up loosing some control of the idea, and you loose the commercial routes (patent, licence) but from your previous posts I got the impression you weren't too keen on them from past experience.

There are also the likes of kickstarter and other social investment schemes which might be useful for early-days funding.

for a good example of what distributed teams can achieve, check these guys out: http://www.wikispeed.com/

[stewi]

Can I make a quick poll, who would be interested in a Wikipick&place site?