Robotics startup Anki is shutting down

Their burn rate on cash was too high. They had a ton of overhead costs in the R&D stages.

I loved Anki, but I'm guess it's good I never exercised my options.

I feel for all the employees.

It could have been worse. One of my coworkers worked at a BigCo back in the day, and those layoffs didn’t give you anything.

Don't forget the 2 days notice.

As a device for freeing up my time to do other things, I would really welcome robotics into my household. I have a robovac and that give me a glimpse of what is possible. Unfortunately, its intelligence is not quite there yet and its maintenance is quite high, but we are getting there.

I don't think so. I know folks in education where there is huge money and demand for such toys. You still have to prepare great program, tools and have right connection but if you can do it then you get a sell of thousands of robots in one sweep. Virtually every public school (in well off areas) is dying to introduce robotics. Almost every district has some sort of robotics competition going on. When I drive to work, I see about half dozen street signs for robotics/stem summer camps. I might be biased living in tech heavy crowd but I hear its same in districts which have decent amount of money. Besides education, robotics toys is high in demand for kids. Consistently many top 10 Christmas toys have been toys that were claimed to be robots but unfortunately they are just scams with few pre-programmed things. Cosmo is one of the best robot built for kids besides Lego Boost and Mindstorm for older kids. It was definitely bit expensive and lacking good marketing outside of tech crowd but it was a real robotic toy and deserved better outcome.

They never considered themselves a toy maker. The first 3 products were considered toys and a means to an end. Their 4th product was them trying to transition to their long-term goal of being a Robotics and AI tech company. The 5th product that was in R&D was certainly not a toy.

That's what they were attempting to do. They failed and the result is shutting down with 2 days notice.

It'll be interesting to see what happens.

Vector relies heavily on cloud services to operate. That being said, it's a full fledged stand-alone device from a base computing POV. It could be operated without cloud services. You just lose things like voice-to-text processing and any advanced functionality they moved off the device into a service.

How is that name squatting?