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Comment by notintokyo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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