Nice meeting you at the office today - thanks for stopping by. The AnkiDrive cars look like a lot of fun!

Adding the ez-robot camera to the AnkiDrive Car will be an interesting challenge. Although, i'm way more excited to see you modify your Hero HeathKit robot! Put an EZ-B v4/2 Developer Kit in it!

Anki is first then you betcha Hero-1 gets lovin!

Any ideas on miniaturizing the material for the Corax Car appreciated, he kinda feels the brain is a bit heavy!

Well it's a toy sized car right? I really don't think you'll be able to fit an ezb on the chassis of that toy. If you did I don't believe it would be as fast. I think you would be better using a different chassis to hold the ezb.

Getting closer! Some ideas for mobile mice by artist Jeff deBoer too.

If I'm gonna run this rig at demos I should get a sticker on it advertising EZRobot. Can't very well advertise oil companies like at the Grand Prix!

I guess a lot of you saw Anki is no longer.  Burnt through $200M in funding and produced some cars and a cute bot but sadly another company that moved the ball forward but couldn't complete the mission.   https://www.vox.com/2019/4/29/18522966/anki-robot-cozmo-staff-layoffs-robotics-toys-boris-sofman

Not sad... predictable. I see conversations where people say it’s sad or what would they make next given the chance

the answer to both is in what happened. And the answer is nothing. If they had something, they would have continued to be funded. If consumers cared about the products, they would have continued to be funded. If there was enough profit on revenue, they would have continued to be funded. If there was a forecast model demonstrating a return on $200m investment, they would have been funded.

The company had no vision, outside of fake AI in children’s toys. There isn’t much difference between Anki and Wowee, except woweee diversified by making a ton of cheap high profit toys amongst the odd high tech toy.  The bankruptcy of Jibo, baxtor, jibo, Anki, etc... are amazing validation for the direction I set this company forth a number of years ago. By providing a software platform for companies to build robots. Companies like Anki and Baxter were casualties due to a few reasons - mostly being that their development required full-stack. So a tiny little robot toy sold at Best Buy required a HUGE team of developers and engineers to make, even though it was super basic and didn’t actually do much more than a toy.

Jibo suffered the same fate. Having a HUGE team build something that could never have returned on investment. It cost too much to build.

Other more mature industries have already experienced this stage of their evolution. For example the computing industry... remember Commodore? Tandy? Coleco? Atari? Sinclair? Timex?

how about compaq? Packard bell? Gateway?

i can go on...

its the dark side of industry economics.

Anki and the other bankruptcy's validate initiatives like ours - at a price of bankruptcy.

While you can tell that we’ve been onto something for a long while... and it’s been an interesting observation from your perspective, there’s a lot of reasoning behind my initiatives. However, timing is the absolutely most important property of success

$200 million. Really?

If you think $200 million is a lot, then check out crunchbase.com and search for other robot product companies. Like makeblock, wonder workshop, littlebits, Jibo, Baxter, ubtech, etc

they raised a lot of capital on hype - which is dangerous if you aren’t able to follow through. Specifically hype is like catnip to investors and they forget about vision and start writing checks like lemmings. The demonstration of a successful entrepreneur is taking money when it’s needed, not when it’s available.

The trouble with taking money when it’s available is exactly what happened to Anki and the others. They didn’t have a vision, and if they did, it was poorly timed. For Anki, I’d guess their vision required a reality check. A successful $200m funded TOY company would need to operate like wowee instead of Apple. Woweee balances their profit across super cheap toys to higher end toys. Think of all those little dollar store style toys that wowee makes. They’re cheap to make and cheap to sell with huge profit margins. That’s how they are able to subsidize their higher end toys.

Anki got big headed when Apple used them for a month and put them on stage. Apple quickly uses and drops companies to benefit themselves. Anki thought it meant they were special, but they were merely the toy company that fit apple’s PR need at the time.

From that, Anki made some revenue and investors got hard-ons for the hype without modeling their finances.

What did people think was gonna happen with Anki? A toy company return a few billion revenue with a r/c bulldozer?

I’m sad for the staff and sympathetic that they’re out of work. But Im happy to have seen Anki bankrupt because it validates our initiative. They’re merely a casualty of industry economics that’s taught at high school level.

This wouldn’t have happened to Anki if more robot companies weren’t lead by big-headed engineers that want to own the entire tech in their product. The question arises, why care about the tech when you should care about sales? If you make a floor cleaning robot, who cares what tech it uses... care about how many you sell!

Tesla is an example of this discussion. See, they’re attempting to disrupt a market with a fuel/energy source that doesn’t exist yet. If Tesla makes it through this crisis, they have a real good chance of disrupting the market. But to make it through means convincing counties to change their electrical production, have oil companies invest more in electricity production AND subsidize manufacturing cost with a distribution of product suppliers. Having suppliers vs making the product/parts yourself creates competition. And competition is what balances pricing. Making the entire tech and product yourself creates a ton of risk that you’re responsible for as well, rather than distributing the risk across multiple suppliers.

Anki took too much risk. They invented the tech, which is useless outside of a toy. They owned the supply chain. At the end, they even owned the sales channel being direct to consumer.

They thought they were Apple lol