Quote:

If you think $200 million is a lot, then check out crunchbase.com and search for other robot product companies....

Quote:

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...

Timing, a clear path to growth and customer demand = maybe longevity and success.

You got it, Will

the advice I can give all of you who want to build products in robotics industry are:

1. use as much outside tech as you can because their costs will lower with competition (and so will yours). So don’t worry about owning the tech, which also makes you a competitor against other tech providers that would easily do the same thing as yours. You already will have enough competition with your product, don’t make your BOM technology also a risk. Use someone else’s tech for your product and focus on selling the cr4p out of it

2. research the absolutely heck out of the early consumer computing industry (1976-1990). Research the history of the automotive industry. And, research telecommunication industry. These three industries demonstrate the same economical pattern at different rates. The rates are correlated with the maturity of technologies they’re built on. Identify your company’s message with a similar alignment of a successful company in those example industries. They are industries which can be used to demonstrate the economic rollercoaster, so you want to ensure your company aligns with one of the successful ones that made it through. Be truthful and don’t lie to yourself about if there isn’t a relatable alignment. Because your truths will find a solution to the problem. AKA constantly course correct

3. Practice and become an expert at delivering your company’s message. Make it so you have nightmare about it haha . Also, ensure every conversation you have leaves the person knowing your business’ message. Because if they’re not the right partner, they might know someone who is and repeating your message will help with that

Here, read this recent interview: https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/24/robotics-vcs-on-whats-real-whats-coming-and-what-to-keep-in-mind/

All great advice.

What are your thought about 3rd party software part of the product. We were bombarded by software guys after CES trying to get us to incorporate their software. As an example  eye gaze / tracking software, when openCv is open source and does the same thing?

Read the article. It’s interesting. It really highlights the wild west we are on with robotics. VCs will continue to dump money on robotics with the hope the 10 year return will be the product they have invested in.

Products highlighted in the article like Cassie from agility robots, makes me wonder how realistically those robots would enter society as a functional robot serving purpose.  Same goes for robot dogs. And yet they are fully funded.

I was approached over and over at CES by investors repeating the same mantra, B2B . Alan and Alena replacing employees, like in check out kiosks where a presence is missing, hotel, airlines. Over and over. We ended up going full circle back to b2b instead of a consumer model.

I get it. The pizza deliver robot, the windows washing robots... all save corporations short and long term. That’s a true robot function. When you think about it, consumer models are usually just fads with passing interest over time. But with the right Product that fad can also be financially sucessful.

B2B for your application is smart, today. I state today because consumers don’t have a need for it yet.

Consumers purchase two types of products. Necessities and luxury

necessities are things like food and shelter and clothes

luxury are having a choice of food, shelter and clothing style. In addition, luxury also has a smaller component of gimmicks, hobbies and nicknacks

place your product in there and you’ll instantly know where’s it fits.

Now companies are a bit more complicated. Because companies purchase things for a lot of different reasons - long as the reasons make or save money. A company doesn’t follow the same rules because they’re providers, not consumers.

so even if a robot didn’t save on jobs, it might have made great marketing with increased revenue. So your product has a strong case for b2b applications... Today

As for 3rd party software. That’s where the platform discussion in that article applies. The software is useless if it’s not easily accessible and distributed to developers in a platform.

Thats where Synthiam comes in. With the things that are happening behind the scenes over here, I highly recommend investing your time building robots with ARC or creating skill control plugins

Well that’s already a given. I stepped over into the EZ world many years ago because I come from a world of animatronics and knew right away what you had built with the EZB 3. EZB 4 is a planet away and ARC has matured along with it. The videos of Alan are years old now and yet I can display it at CES 4 years later and people look at it as though it was built on today’s technology. Little do they know it’s been around for so long.

Still ahead of its time. I look forward to where Synthiam will go.

Really good insight DJ and I understand your position and where you believe Synthiam can play. The early computers are a good analogy.  Take the IBM PC. An industry standard open platform that allowed anyone to make peripherals for or replicate from scratch (The birth of the clones, compaq etc) and an operating system to run on it (DOS).

Just like we created open standards for PC's with a common software platform we need a similar solution for Robotics.  An open platform that is backed by a company with enough robotics hardware knowledge, money, clout and experience in standards development, working with IEEE, ISO etc on driving, developing and improving open standards for robotics ( ISO 10218-2 is under development now )  to define a common platform that can be built on.

What we need is a base platform. one that is open and extensible.  A platform that is low cost that any company can buy. The platform needs to be upgradable to meet a specific need.  This could be add a tray to work as a waiter in a restaurant, add arms to restock shelves in a grocery store. The same robot could exchange parts to now clean and polish the floors at night.  I think this was similar to your original idea behind EZ-Robot from a hardware and software perspective but it was aimed at education market and not industrial or consumer personal robots.

By creating this open standard for Software and Hardware everyone could focus on their specific niche market that is relevant to their robot, be it manufacturing, retail, agriculture, restaurants, shipping, personal assistants etc.  This will create a rapid expansion in the robotics industry as we are not all starting from scratch like Anki or Jibo or insert your next bankrupt robotics company here.