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The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Pleo
robotsrule writes "This article contains notes from a 1-hour phone call with Ugobe founder Derek Dotson, now CEO of Innvo Labs Corporation, the company that acquired the rights to Pleo at the recent bankruptcy auction. Dotson reveals the hidden story behind Pleo's rise, fall, and resurrection including intriguing facts about the money trail and what he feels caused Ugobe to fail, including how he had to save Pleo's future on more than one occasion. He also lays out in plain detail Innvo Labs's strategy to help owners of older Pleos and those whose units were swallowed up by Ugobe's bankruptcy." We've been following the Pleo saga for years.
Yeah yeah, slashdot editors suck, etc. - but expecting your readers to do your work for you is pushing it, and I'm a long-term reader.
Pleo: what is it? why should I care?
Else = Idle
When I read
Ugobe was a heavyweight company poised for explosive growth and burdened with all the associated expenses and overhead that implies, so they needed a huge explosion in sales. Derek still believes Ugobe would have survived and done well if they could have raised their last round of funds.
I was reminded of a .com that I worked for during the boom years that had a nice product that would support a small company. But of course, you couldn't get rich creating a small company, so instead they projected a sales curve that started out low and rose exponentially, and thus they could remain "on track" for that "explosion in sales". Ugobe sounds like deja vu all over again...
Bankruptcy sounds pretty vague to me. What did they spend all of their money on? Fighting the uprising of technologically advanced robot dinosaurs perhaps? Did they realize only too late that the chip they installed was capable of switching genders leading to an unforeseen ability to reproduce?
Hey wait, that would make a great movie...
I wonder, how does Pleo do around cats? Does he become food or a playmate?
I'd suspect that, in general, there are two basic reasons:
One is that you think that the other guy failed because he was doing it wrong, not because the idea is fundamentally doomed. You think that the product could have a life.
The second, and potentially more significant, is that the product was in fact doomed; but, because of the bankruptcy process, isn't doomed anymore. In a lot of cases, startup/R&D/tooling/whatever costs too much for the product to ever be economically sensible(nobody will buy at the price needed to pay per-unit costs and recoup your initial costs). However, if you go bankrupt, your creditors eat your startup costs and your assets get sold, typically for a fraction of what you paid to build them. If you don't have to recoup the startup costs, because you bought the infrastructure at a fire sale, you can actually make money.
The story of Iridium is probably the most dramatic example. The Iridium satellite constellation cost a fucking fortune to put into orbit. Even if execution had gone perfectly, prices would have been nutty. When the original outfit folded, the constellation was sold for peanuts, and was suddenly far more viable. Pleo isn't nearly that dramatic, I suspect; but it could easily be the case that, while Pleo would never be able to sell enough units at a high enough price to repay its development and tooling costs, it would be viable to keep pumping out units of the existing model.
While I appreciate the effort people went through to develop this thing, when I got a chance to interact with a Pleo I found it pretty much useless. It was slow and sluggish, and its behavior was light years away from usable or realistic or entertaining. It didn't behave in any engaging way, it didn't DO anything worth a darn. In direct comparison with a Cybie, which was way cheaper, the Cybie performed in more interesting ways yet was a less sophisticated device. I remember waving the Pleo's leaf toy in front of the Pleo, and the dino did not respond to the (simulated) food item. It was a prop and not good for anything at all. Pleo was dumber than a normal pet and was bland and offered no reason to interact with it past five minutes of experiments.
Well, you'd say, obviously! :-)
Disclaimer: I own a Pleo.
I know that it's not engaging as it could be a cat, but it can be engaging as it could be -say- a turtle.
Of course this is just an attempt at AI, with some life simulation; so there's nothing like neural-network-simulated-synapses-AI-supercomputer-MIT-experiment, you know.
What's nice is that there have been a couple firmware upgrades, with actually different 'global' behaviours, and there are a few 'SD' behaviours that can change the way Pleo reacts to external activities.
All in all, it is nice to have the thing moving around in the explore mode, and toy with it and make it purr or barf or stand on two legs
Ah, by the way, a link may be nice
Pumbaa! I don't wonder; I know.