Lasers Engaged: Anybots Are Now Shipping | Hacker News Reader

Lasers Engaged: Anybots Are Now Shipping

techcrunch.com

11 pointsthankuz11 comments

i find it demeaning and Big-Brother like. Imagine your boss' robot going up and down the corridor checking to see whether you're working. I think there have been plenty of discussions here about how looking busy doesn't mean that you're necessarily productive. If my boss really cares about taking to me, s/he can either speak to me face to face, or on the phone. I'd appreciate it a lot more if I got a phone call to my desk asking me how I was doing or if there are any problem on the project he can help with (besides, is the boss expected to remote control the thing the whole day? Doesn't s/he have other stuff to do than play with the joystick all day?) At most, I think it's a nice gadget to have for pranks at companies that can afford the $15K price tag (Google?)

(edit: sp)

The 'Undercover Boss' approach would work a lot better in my opinion (but, the exec still has to show up). Maybe some type of secret EXEC program, kinda like secret shoppers. I know, no cool gadgets, just people. Which is a good thing.

I was considering putting up a kickstarter project to get one, let it roll around outside and allocate usage time among the participants. But at $15000 it would be quite costly for the contributors, around $6 to get a weekly control minute allocated to you.

Yes, at $15000 I am afraid the market for it will be quite small. I had to read that a few times to make sure there wasn't an extra zero.

They're marketing it to businesses as a replacement for traveling somewhere -- $15,000 isn't a lot to pay for that. If it lets one executive skip one trip, it's paid for itself.

I'll gladly attach a tripod to a roomba if you're willing to pay me $15k to do it.

But for you, special price! $10k!

$15k to avoid travelling places isn't a bad price... unless there's another option in which you use computers, webcams, headsets and phones.

I just figured that if I babysat the bot full time for two months, I could offer control of it at $1 / minute as the kickstarter project reward. Does that seem like a steep price though?

I'm in Japan so that might make it a bit more interesting. I'm concerned that the most interesting places wouldn't have a WiFi connection though, so I couldn't take the bot around temples or gardens. It needs 600kB/s upstream to work, I wonder if there's a way to get a mobile connection like that and share it to the anybot as a hotspot.

Update: Oh, it's US only for now.

It would be like mobile chat roulette with a lot less dicks... well depending on which part of town you roll to.

It sounds great, but I'm not sure how pricing would affect subscriptions?

What does this thing do that makes it worth as much as a mid-range Ford Fiesta?

Did you buy a computer back in the 1960's?

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