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Comment by tikhonj | Hacker News Reader

There's something very refreshing to read about a startup that isn't in software. Not to say there's anything wrong with software, but I--like a lot of HN readers, especially in the Bay Area--tend to hear orders of magnitude more news about web apps than robots.

The really exciting thing, of course, is that there are CS techniques and ideas that can be applied to both: machine learning springs to mind immediately. Robotics and web programming aren't entirely dissimilar which is exciting--if I get bored of what I'm doing now, I could reasonably go into robotics or several other seemingly unrelated fields.

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I 100% agree. We read about so many Crowd-Sourced-Cloud-Based Social Location-aware ridiculous web apps that spring up every day that allow you to "throw a sheep" at your friends that it's getting a little ridiculous. That's why people keep shouting "bubble!!!" -- because we aren't really solving any true problems.

If these droids were upgraded to water, move, feed, and monitor plant health, it would be a huge revolution to the industry and actually _increase the efficiency_ of a necessary industry.

It makes me a little sick to see Color getting 41 million, Shaker getting 15 million, and this great startup gets 5. Priorities people...

The great thing, and also the terrible thing, about web apps is that they're universal. Make an app somewhere and anybody with a computer can get at it, usually without paying very much. It's a great opportunity for people to make things. It's also a shame, because most web apps encourage people to spend more time in front of a computer (instead of helping them take care of business more quickly than they would otherwise, so they can close the computer and get back to everything else), and because as wonderful as computers are, they're limited in their impact on the physical world.

Further complicating the matter are advertisers, who are still desperately seeking the next frontier once print and television ads die. Advertisers like web apps, because web apps have lots of users, and that means lots of potential targets. Robots? Not much advertising potential.

Actually there is a lot of software in that robot.

That is what I meant to say in my second paragraph, but I wasn't very clear. Basically, the startup in question is different from the normal Bay Area/Hacker News fare, but still close enough that I could imagine working for them if I got bored of what I'm doing now.

I would have been much less excited to read about a company that did not have any software at all.

I predict the world will undergo an enormous robot revolution at some point. Things like highway maintenance, garden cultivation, cutting trees that leer over powerlines, self-driving cars, painting, home assistants (mixed with Siri technology)... it will certainly outshine things like the hippest Twitter clients.

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