By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal About iRobot iRobot designs and builds robots that make a difference. iRobot was founded in 1990 when Massachusetts Institute of Technology roboticists Colin Angle and Helen Greiner teamed up with their professor Dr. Rodney Brooks with the vision of making practical robots a reality.
By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal Sramana: Yes, you can’t have a baby crying at the top of its voice and be able to maintain a professional environment where you need to maybe be on phone and such. There are some issues. Frank: Right, and not everybody is in the
By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal Sramana Mitra: Whenever we see discontinuities in terms of technology in our industry, this opens up opportunities for entrepreneurship. It opens up what’s happening at the cusp. I would be curious to hear your thoughts on blue-sky opportunities that you see that playing to
By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal Sramana: And turn it all into products? Frank: Well, not so much turn it into anything in particular. I have a feeling that there is a lot of stuff that is either very old and not in sync with business, or of very limited
By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal Sramana: Let me ask you a question on that, although from a slightly different perspective. I recently had a conversation, last week actually with the CIO of Intel, Diane Bryant. Frank: Yes, I know Diane. Sramana: She talked about platform as a service at
By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal Sramana: This question of broadband is obviously an open question. I think it remains to be seen how that will play out. Where else do you see in the broad space of collaboration – we have touched on it from different perspectives – where
By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal Sramana: I think part of it is that, the idea that people have to be dressed for a call is a bit of a barrier to entry, but there is also something else. When you look at these video conferencing systems, they are not
By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal Sramana: What about the higher-end cutting edge collaboration functionalities? Let me go to the absolute other extreme, desktop tele-presence. How far are we from desktop tele-presence in the cloud? Frank: I don’t think we are that far, because a lot of the pieces are