It was so close I could taste it. Two weeks ago we were ready to publicly launch the CrunchPad . The device was stable enough for a demo. It went hours without crashing. We could even let people play with the device themselves - the user interface was intuitive enough that people "got it" without any instructions. And the look of pure joy on the handful of outsiders who had used it made the nearly 1.5 year effort completely worth it. Our plan was to debut the CrunchPad on stage at the Real-Time Crunchup event on November 20, a little over a week ago. We even hoped to have devices hacked together with Google Chrome OS and Windows 7 to show people that you could hack this thing to run just about anything you want. We'd put 1,000 of the devices on pre-sale and take orders immediately. Larger scale production would begin early in 2010. And then the entire project self destructed over nothing more than greed, jealousy and miscommunication.