The latest exciting thing to come out of Chez Ryan, is codenamed Project Garlic but slowly peeping out from it’s cloak of secrecy.

Several years in the making, and the culmination of some smart design, smart thinking and smart manufacturing, YikeBike is the worlds smallest lightest electric folding bicycle at less than 10kg.

Still under wraps to all but a select few, the YikeBike is going to be launched to the world on Sept 2 at the EuroBike expo.

This is very cool on a number of levels;

• Anything that gets cars off the roads is a good thing
• It’s a great example of smart Kiwi design
• The Ryans could well be running their businesses from Silicon Valley – the fact that they’ve chosen to remain here in New Zealand is inspiring
• The teaser video has the sounds, and face, of New Zealand/Icelandic singer/songwriter Hera who is a very cool chick!
• I had a small part in the project – Cactus Climbing did some design and prototyping work for the YikeBike carrying solution

Good luck Grant – I’ll be watching on September 2nd!

Last week it was reported that the site was down. It is now back up with a blog post saying that all the “problems” of the past few days are over. In January a related company gave notice of their intention to cease business in New Zealand and the Eurekster website is still showing the management team as including both a VP Product and VP Engineering who, according to their LinkedIn profiles, are both previous employees of the business.

Regardless of its current status, the prognosis doesn’t look good for a company that has a business model that is marginal at best. RWW put it well when they aid that;

The company’s method of determining relevance in search was always a little unclear. Google Site Search is easy to install and its results are fairly predictable. Many users wanted search results in chronological order, but that’s not the first place Swicki searches took you. Finally, the Swicki usually lived in a blog sidebar. That’s a hard place to build a business.

Co-founder Steven Marden is still there but New Zealand based co-founder Grant Ryan has moved on, I’ve also heard from a good source that a number of New Zealand based engineering staff have moved to sister company SLI systems.

In March 2007 Tech Crunch reported that they’d got $5.5mil VC funding but as RWW reports, the site has now been down for two days and no one is answering calls.

No doubt all will be revealed in the next few days.