"For McCabe, being in Vegas felt like being on a spiritual journey." Perhaps not the right person to get into prototype manufacturing. There's no indication in the article that anybody associated with the project had any manufacturing experience. Or prototyping experience. Or even basic machine shop skills.<p>"With the funding closed, Factorli is setting out to buy a whole bunch of equipment, and also to build software that helps all the systems talk to each other and work at full capacity." That's a hard, but mostly solved, problem. There are commercial solutions from most of the CAD vendors. The ones that do the whole job almost automatically are not cheap. (Here's what you get at the high end, for $22,000 per seat, using a $700K 5-axis mill: "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knuz38oT2kc"" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knuz38oT2kc"</a>) If you're prototyping electronics, there are already services that do that. That's mostly a remote business; you send in files in standard formats and get electronics back.<p>Similar services are available for machined parts. See "emachineshop.com". They have a cute little free CAD program which understands what they can make, and will price the job for you, giving advice on how to cut the manufacturing cost.<p>There's a serious effort at Octopart to standardize the parts and process for building little computer-interfaced devices, so the "Internet of Things" crowd doesn't have to do so much original engineering for each new product. They might have gotten on board with that.<p>Another solution would have been to buy a TechShop franchise. Then, alongside that, set up some services which make prototypes using TechShop facilities. Such things have grown up around other TechShop locations, although with only modest success.<p>It's disappointing that this outfit produced nothing.