First thing I thought about after reading this was the robot waiter in Rocky IV.
While this is certainly very cool (and I would totally buy one just to play with if money was no object), I'm rather skeptical about how many of these things they're going to manage to sell - $15k is pretty steep for iChat on wheels.
Cisco's telepresence system is $300k for a full room, and $50k for a 56" screen. Skype on the bottom end of the stack is free. I'd say that $15k for a robotic telepresence system is really, really cheap.
I agree that this is way too expensive. I bet, just like the Segway, a lot of the money goes to keeping it on two wheels when a 4 wheel device would do just fine. I'd like to hear the economical justification that a company uses to buy this.
I don't think it's that expensive -- seems like it would be pretty useful in a warehouse to check up on things. Still cheaper than flying an engineer in San Fran to the UPS warehouse in Kentucky.
I think people are assuming it will be used in the way Arrington used it -- remote presence. It's more useful as a way to survey places that you normally don't want to hang around in due to danger or noise, such as noisy server rooms, giant inventory/shipping warehouses, buildings that are in the middle of construction, outsourced manufacturing facilities in china, chemical plants, water/sewage sanitation facilities, chip manufacturing clean rooms, etc.
When my dad worked for Monsanto, he had to drive 60 miles out of his way to the chemical plant just to look at pipes, knobs, and dials to ensure that the manufacturing process was properly replicated -- that would seem like a perfect fit.
I know something like this is useful but there are other devices that cost < $1000 that do the same thing.
For example: If you put the head/camera of the Rovio on a stick you essentially have the same thing, except this device costs only $300. What is the extra $14,700 for? It just doesn't make sense to spend so much on a simple device.
http://www.slashgear.com/wowwee-rovio-videos-wifi-remote-web...
I don't know how much longer I can hold out before
clicking the buy button.
[Edit:] After reading the product reviews, the Rovio appears to have a number of issues (i.e. poor battery life, poor video) Does anyone on HN have one of these?
Probably can do for cheaper. But if you're a company that owns a warehouse in Kentucky, you'll probably spend a few million in equipment at the warehouse where the $15,000 will feel like a drop in the sea. It cost Zappos $20M to outfit their first warehouse -- they didn't even have the Kiva robots at the time.
Yeah, that's nice, but telemetry isn't used in most of the situations listed above -- partially built buildings, inventory warehouses, server rooms, clean rooms. Sometimes it's just easier to discover a problem by having someone there to see what's wrong.
While this is certainly very cool (and I would totally buy one just to play with if money was no object), I'm rather skeptical about how many of these things they're going to manage to sell - $15k is pretty steep for iChat on wheels.