So Revolve built Kubi, a robot that swivels and tilts … but stays put wherever you place it.

“The whole moving avatar thing is pretty cool,” CEO Marcus Rosenthal admits. “But, not only is it a bit creepy — with people driving up behind you and looking over your shoulder — it’s pretty expensive.”

In fact, Rosenthal says, 80 percent of the value of a telepresence robot is in a specific room, not in moving around. And 90 percent of the cost is the ability to move. Sold on those two premises, the Revolve team built a, yes, revolving robot that neither walks nor rolls.

Simply attach your iPad to the Kubi base, and you’ve got instant telepresence capability.

I’ve seen a lot of these lately. Double Robotics has built a very elegant, beautiful system retailing in the $2,000-2,500 range. Suitable Technologies has built a Lamborghini that looks like a Chevette, selling for a considerably higher $16,000.

Kubi, on the other hand, will retail for $250, with introductory pricing at $199. (Of course, you will need an iPad.)

Which means, Rosenthal is at pains to emphasize, that a company can buy 10 Kubis for the price of one Double. Or 80 for the price a single Suitable Technologies robot. That’s significant, and it also means that people can buy Kubis for their homes.

“This is affordable for the consumer,” Rosenthal says. “You can bring it into your home – families with young children can use it to meet the grandparents. And it’s also very effective in a business meeting.”

To use Kubi, you download an iOS app — yes, Android is coming — and connect with a Kubi. Once authenticated, you can tilt, zoom, swivel … you’re in charge. That’s critical to the user experience, Rosenthal says. Alternatively, Kubi will allow login directly from the web — no mobile device required.

Revolve Robotics is largely self-funded, plus the team has $50,000 from Lemnos Labs,  hardware startup accelerator. The team is also planning to run an IndieGoGo campaign to raise more funds without diluting their ownership.

It’s a cool and cheap piece of hardware.

My question is whether users might not just go with the cute — and moveable — Romo personal robot, which is even cheaper, at $150, and only requires an old iPhone or iPod Touch, rather than an iPad.

Romotive, the “smartphone robot company” that is part of Zappo’s CEO Tony Hsieh’s downtown Las Vegas revitalization project, just launched its third-generation robot with — you guessed it — yet another KickStarter campaign.

This little guy is seriously cute. Check out the team’s video here:

Romo is controlled by an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch — or a modern web browser — and uses an iPod Touch or iPhone 4 or 4S as its brain and face. It has two-way audio and video, so could be used as an inexpensive telepresence unit as well — it retails for $150, and Kickstarter backers can reserve one by backing the project.

“Romo’s pretty amazing,” Hsieh says in the video. “It smiles at you, he’s happy to see you … it seems like it has a personality of its own.”

Source: Romotics

The third-generation Romo

The little personal robot can be used for spying, as the original Kickstarter campaign jokingly suggested, or telepresence, or even for mix-reality racing games. Little suggestion: don’t put your latest phone in Romo when you’re racing him.

In addition, there will be an API available so that hackers can create their own cool uses of the little robot.

As his creators said about the original robot, “Since Romo is a “true” robot, he’s infinitely programmable, and can be made to do just about anything.”

The new Romo is bigger, stronger, and faster, and will, if the Kickstarter campaign succeeds, add remote 2-way telepresence, computer vision, autonomous navigation, and facial recognition.

That would make one mighty capable mighty mite.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Suddenly, telepresence robots are the hottest gadgets that don’t fit in your hand.

Double Robotics blew the lid of the category just a month or so ago, I’ll be checking out a Vancouver startup’s new product next week, and a number of other pitches are hitting my inbox.

But none of them will will own the market for remote presence if Scott Hassan has his way. He’s the CEO of Suitable Technologies, which launched its competitor to the marketplace, the Beam RPD tonight.

RPD stands for Remote Presence Device, and that’s exactly what Suitable is aiming to provide. Focusing initially on the high-tech industry in the Bay area, Suitable intends to offer talent-starved leaders such as Google and Apple access to talent all across the country,  even the globe, while still giving them the ability to “be” on-site, remotely.

Source: Suitable Technologies

The Beam RPD

But Hassan has two big problems, price and style.

Where competitive devices like Double offer a telepresence solution starting at just $2000, the Beam is a $16,000 investment, plus another grand for the docking charge station. That not just a little more, it’s a lot more.

And despite the high cost, the Beam looks like a boring beige vacuum cleaner. I almost want to apologize for saying that. But design is a competitive advantage, as Apple has taught two entire industries, and where the Double is all sleek sexy modern, the Beam is a boring blob with stalks.

Hassan fights hard, however, to make the case that the Beam is fundamentally different than the Double product, or other products on the marketplace.

“It turns out that reliability is the most important feature,” says Hassan. “It has to be as reliable as a phone … when you use this to set up a meeting, it has to work.”

Where an iPad — which Double uses for its camera, screen, and speaker — is designed for a single person’s close up use, and has a camera field of view and speaker designed accordingly, Beam has two high-quality wide-angle lenses, both of which are $100 components.

And Beam offers a full 17″ screen, to show headshots full-size, an incredible six microphone audio pick-up system with noise cancellation and the ability to focus just on the speaker, and not one but four WiFi radios in the unit, just so that the Beam can negotiate access to a multiple wireless access points simultaneously, the better to never lose connection and interrupt a meeting.

So it’s definitely a well-engineered product.

The question remains: eight times better than than much cheaper competitors?

That, I think, is a hard sell indeed.

See Beam in action here:

Image credits: Suitable Technologies

The robot lets you be present at a meeting, class, museum or other venue without having to be there physically. Your face appears appears on the robot’s iPad screen, and you’re able to move around and see and talk through that screen.

If Grishin Robotics sounds familiar, that’s because it recently launched a $25 million fund for investment in robotics, and was started by Dmitry Grishin, the co-founder and chairman of Mail.ru, the largest Internet company in Russia.

Grishin praised Double, saying in a statement that “the team has a very good approach to design and is keen to build very user-friendly products — things which should not be underestimated while developing next-generation personal robotics companies.”

VentureBeat interviewed Double Robotics’ co-founder David Cann about the news.

VentureBeat: You’ve maxxed out the current production run. When will the next one start?

Cann: The first production run will ship in December. We are already taking pre-orders for the next run, which will ship in early 2013, and we’ll continue scaling production as more orders come in.

Source: Double Robotics

Saying “hi” to Double

VentureBeat: You’re manufacturing in the U.S., correct? Talk to me about why, and how that’s working.

Cann: Yeah, we have almost all of the custom parts made by manufacturers around the US. This is primarily to ramp up production very quickly and have greater reliability and faster shipping. We’re assembling and calibrating the robots in our facility in Silicon Valley for now. After we optimize the manufacturing process, we may contract assembly to a third-party manufacturer.

VentureBeat: Now you’ve validated that there is a market. What do you expect to be able to bring the price down to when you start full-time production?

Source: Double Robotics

A double-double, with no Tim Hortons in sight

Cann: We strive to continuously lower our costs and lower prices, but we don’t yet know when or how much we can reduce costs, so we can’t announce anything today. [Editor's note: The robots currently cost $1,999.]

VentureBeat: Who do you see as your toughest competition?

Cann: There are several other telepresence robots, such as Vgo, Texai, iRobot/InTouch, and AnyBots, but they’re all targeting higher priced and/or niche markets. Double is targeted at a very wide audience and is priced as such. There aren’t any competitors who have matched Double’s price, features, and beauty.

VentureBeat: Talk about design … it’s obviously critically important to you. What were some of the factors that influenced your design?

Cann: Our goal with the design process is to make the technology disappear so the user can focus on the conversation. We tried to simplify the visual sections and shapes. This method also applies to the internal mechanical sub-systems. Every major part in the base serves at least two purposes. For us, design is not simply a phase of the product development, it is the responsibility of every engineer working on each part throughout the entire product life cycle.

VentureBeat: Now you’ve got some serious capital. First priorities?

Cann: Our first priority is to fill the pre-orders from our earliest supporters with a high-quality product. We’re hiring more engineers and software developers over the next few months. We’ll be talking to customers to learn about how they’re using Double and which markets are best served by our product.

In a word, sexy.

A Y Combinator startup, DoubleRobotics’ debut product is Double: basically a cylinder and a stick. Just like a Segway, Double balances on its wheels. Unlike a Segway, however, an iPad rides Double, not you. You control it from your own iPad … wherever you happen to be, you see what it sees, and anyone who sees Double, sees you.

Take a look:

The robot, if you can call it that, is only 15 pounds. It adjusts height so you can communicate naturally at either standing or sitting height, and moves forward, backward, and turns as you control it from your own iPad or iPhone at a remote location. When not in use, two kickstands ease down from the cylinder between wheels, allowing Double to conserve power and wait for the next rider.

If you’re shocked that hardware this polished and sophisticated could be created on a typical Y Combinator budget of $20,00-40,000, join the club. But while the company has not received any other funding, and the Y Combinator money has helped, co-founder Marc DeVidts told me that there’s been other sources of income.

“We’ve been working for about a year,” DeVidts said. “DoubleRobotics was bootstrapped from the beginning by building custom robots for Fortune 500 companies.”

The Double will be built in the USA: assembled in Miami, with components fabricated all over the U.S. in various factories. The cost is $2,500, but it can be pre-ordered for $2,000 today.

Image credit: DoubleRobotics

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But that’s not fast enough for Vidyo, the company that Google tapped for the technology behind Google+ Hangouts.

To accelerate growth of the videoconferencing industry — and grab share from market leaders like Cisco and Polycom – Vidyo is employing the traditional web nuclear weapon: free.

“We want to transform business-to-business video,” Vidyo senior vice-president Marty Hollander told VentureBeat. “Everything from high quality and high cost to free web-based services.”

In a complicated world that includes everything from six-figure telepresence systems that use dedicated hardlinked network connections to Internet-based services such as Blue Jeans Network (see our recent coverage) to a couple of colleagues hooking up via Skype, Vidyo wanted to build a system for connectivity that everyone can use, said Hollander.

Source: John Koetsier

Videoconferencing: my screenshot of Vidyo’s feed

A director of product led me through a demo of the new product, called VidyoWay: I connected via my Mac, and he jumped in via an iPad.

Then he pulled in colleagues on competing enterprise videoconferencing platforms: Microsoft  Lync, Logitech’s LifeSize, a Polycom system, and perhaps another.

The system auto-detected my crappy Wi-Fi, and sent me a feed my feeble access point could handle. Still, I received a pretty good-looking 720P picture: baby HD, maybe, but still HD.

But others received a better experience, and that’s due to what Vidyo thinks is one of its major competitive advantages: no transcoding.

“Everyone gets the best experience their network can deliver,” Hollander told me. “All those people who are using legacy clients are transcoding.”

Transcoding is a four-letter word in the video industry. It degrades video quality and adds latency as CPUs struggle to decode video in one format, re-encode in another format, and re-send out to participants … all in real-time.

“It’s not a good experience,” Hollander opines. “Vidyo is multi-stream capable, so there’s no transcoding.”

That’s interesting enough in and of itself. But Vidyo wants to grow, and to grow fast. So the company upped the ante, and decided to offer the service to end users for free. Users — such as myself — don’t need a Vidyo service plan or system. Instead, it’s as free to join as any audio-conferencing service … which was exactly the company’s inspiration.

“We’re offering the free 1-800 dial tone for video for anyone to connect,” says Hollander.

The company expects people to fall in love with the quality and the ease-of-use, which is a significant upgrade on legacy systems. (The press release says Vidyo has an “executive-friendly” user interface, which I am, perhaps uncharitably, interpreting as code for technically deficient. I’m sure Videoconferencing for Dummies is coming soon.)

Source: Flickr

Another mode of telepresence

Hollander says that providing the service for free is cheaper marketing than Google AdWords, with the added benefit that the company will get to see who the heavy users are. Essentially, its another freemium model in which the company will upsell a fraction of the users to even better and richer products.

The one question in my mind: Blue Jeans Network. I tried that service just recently, connecting via just a web browser with others on a variety of systems. No downloads, no installs.

For Vidyo, I had to install a local client. There’s no question, the quality was better. But for a freemium service, a no-install signup is definitely preferable.

(Note: if you already have an enterprise video conferencing solution, VidyoWay does not require any client download or installation.)

The answer, I suppose, lies in the target market. Vidyo’s aiming squarely at the enterprise market with a high-quality experience for everyone on different platforms that’s orders of magnitude easier than existing interoperability solutions.

In that market, the company has a good chance of shaking up market leaders Cisco and Polycom with a cheaper and — just as or more importantly — platform-agnostic business model.

Check out the system in this video:

Image credits: Vala Vella/Flickr, MightyOhm/Flickr, HolBox/ShutterStock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cisco announced new features to its WebEx web meeting client and Jabber messenger today, in an attempt to compete with increasingly popular cloud storage companies such as Dropbox and Box.net.

“People who are using web conferencing have a challenge…the first ten minutes is [spent] figuring out who has what,”said Cisco’s Michael Smith.

That is to say, many meetings start with an agenda, there may be some files you want to share, a presentation to give, or a new manual to pass around. That requires finding the files, sharing the files with everyone at the meeting and re-sharing when someone at the meeting doesn’t have them. Not exactly arduous, but annoying enough to create a solution around it. Indeed, companies have found an easy was to share and find these files in solutions such as Dropbox and Box.net. Through these cloud services, you can place a file in a folder kept on a remote server, and give coworkers access to that folder. From there, PC users can grab the files whenever they want — whether connected to the internet or not through sync features — and mobile users can view them while connected to the web.

Cisco wanted its WebEx users to have similar integrations and created WebEx Spaces. The spaces allow meeting-goers early access to the meeting to share and grab files off of WebEx’s new cloud storage service. Anyone joining the meeting can take whatever documents they need straight from their PC or mobile device. Participants can collaborate and change the doc in the cloud as well. As with previous WebEx versions, you can also chat with participants, but the new pre-meeting feature has an activity stream, which allows you to send updates to meeting participants if necessary. The activity stream is particularly useful on mobile, as they translate into notifications or alerts leading up to the meeting.

The video quality has changed, as well, up to high definition, with the capability to connect to Cisco’s TelePresence meeting rooms. TelePresence is a high-tech conference room, which Cisco outfits with a number of screens set up to emulate physical presence. When you use the room for meetings, it seems as if the people are actually there, when in fact, they are sitting in a mirrored room somewhere else in the world.

WebEx has also changed its payments structure, and could be reeling in some smaller sized companies. Cisco is now offering a low level of WebEx for free. Up to three participants can hold a meeting without charge, with access to video, instant messaging, 250MG of storage and more.

The company has also made changes to its Jabber messaging and voice client, allowing users to access it over the web, as well as embed it directly into Gmail accounts. A software developer kit (SDK) for using Jabber in various web applications will be available in January.

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The system could help disrupt existing telepresence rooms that make it seem like you’re in the same room with the person you’re talking to. Companies have bought those systems in order to save on the costs, hassles and risks that come with airline travel.

Ofer Shapiro, chief executive of Hackensack, N.J.-based Vidyo, said during a video conference interview that the company can provide the telepresence solution at about 10 percent of the cost of current telepresence solutions from rivals such as Cisco. Shapiro showed how nine people could use the system at once with crystal clear voice and picture quality. The video runs at 60 frames per second in the 1080p HD video format.

And users can log into a wide variety of platforms, including 1080p 60 frames per second multi-screen telepresence rooms, video conferencing rooms, desktops, iOS and Android-based smartphones and tablets, (including the iPhone, iPad 2, Xoom, Galaxy, Nexus S and others).

Shapiro said the support for more platforms allows enterprises to deal with the communications needs of a distributed and mobile workforce that is increasingly common in corporate America.

Vidyo Panorama works with off-the-shelf hardware and allows users to create their own applications on top of the video conferencing system. The upfront investment is 90 percent lower than the usual telepresence system and ongoing expenses are also dramatically lower, Shapiro said. At the same time, the system offers much better quality and multi-person connectivity than low-cost alternatives such as Skype. The system works better than others because, rather than transcode video from one form to another, Vidyo adapts to the video format at hand.

Shapiro noted that high-end systems have their own problems, like when the number of remote cameras exceeds the number of screens. If someone coughs, they may disappear from the screen.

The system works with nine people at HD quality now and will work with 20 screens in the future. The solution consists of a primary control unit for the room, a decoder per screen, an executive tablet, an off-the-shelf high-definition camera and an audio system.

Vidyo says it can lower costs because its solution uses less bandwidth than other systems, delivering HD video at 500 kilobits per second per screen. The company foresees customers using it for supply chain management, command centers for disaster recovery or military uses, patient monitoring, distance learning, financial services apps and others.

The cost ranges from under $40,000 for four screens at 720p HD quality and 60 frames per second. And it goes up to $60,000 for nine screens at 1080p quality and 60 frames per second. The cost is around $6,000 per screen for nine screens and $4,500 per screen for 20 screens. The systems will be in beta tests with customers in August and will debut in the fourth quarter. Shapiro says the cost comes out to around 2 cents per minute compared to $6 per minute with other systems.

The company was founded in 2005 and has 150 employees. It has raised $75 million in venture funding from SevinRosen, Rho Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Star Ventures and Four Rivers. Shapiro said the company has eight granted patents and 28 pending. Vidyo’s partners include Google, Hewlett-Packard, Teliris, and Ricoh. Rivals include Microsoft-Skype and Cisco.

The new tech, pronounced “you-me”, allows consumers to directly connect a video conferencing application to their televisions and streamlines video conferencing for the every day user.  Users plug the device into their high-definition television, setting up a camera that sits on the television and a box that can connect to the Internet wirelessly or over a wired broadband connection. The service will cost $600 for the device and $24.99 a month for unlimited calling, video recording and video messaging.

The user interface on televisions is the Umi Clover, which “shows up when you need it” on the top right of the television’s screen, said Gina Clark, vice president and general manager of Umi Telepresence. When users want to make a call, they select the picture of the person they want to call by scrolling through pictures in the clover. There’s also a privacy shutter on the camera that closes, for all the security junkies that want to prevent others from snooping. Umi users can also record video greetings and get mobile alerts when they receive a call while they aren’t able to respond.  Cisco is working with Google to use Google video chat to contact Umi users, and vice versa.

“This product was not built by an enterprise team,” said Marthin De Beer, senior vice president of emerging business technology for Cisco. “We went out and created a new startup where the members of that team came from the best consumer companies in the world.”

Cisco has been a huge name in the enterprise business for a majority of its life, including video-conferencing technology. Cisco has also been a presence in home networking with its wireless routers, a market it entered by acquiring Linksys in 2003 and expanded its presence in by acquiring set-top maker Scientific Atlanta in 2005.

The enterprise giant’s push into the consumer space just goes to show how large the consumer market is. Cisco spent more than two years going into peoples’ homes and designing the technology based on changing lighting conditions, size and other elements that vary drastically from home to home, Clark said.

“This market transition will be about the pervasive use of video,” De Beer said. “More than 15 billion video-capable networked devices will be connected in the next few years.”

The new move brings Cisco up to speed with other consumer-oriented video communication companies like Skype and Apple’s iChat in its OS X operating system. Cisco is sparing no expense in its marketing for Umi, partnering with the Oprah Winfrey show to use Umi Telepresence for remote guests. Their traditional advertising campaigns including Ellen Page will also now include Umi, and Cisco is rolling out demo products in malls across the country.

Umi will be sold at Best Buy with an official launch set for November 14. Cisco will also launch Umi for Verizon Fiber Optics customers next year.