The opening of Apple's App Store marked a seminal moment of the smart-phone age
The opening of Apple's App Store marked a seminal moment of the smart-phone age, unleashing a wave of creativity and innovation that no single company could have ever thought up or pulled off.
It spawned the development of hundreds of thousands of new uses for the devices, apps for consuming media, playing games, making music, navigating cities and much more. In turn, it compelled millions of additional customers to make a new piece of technology a central part of their lives.
Elad Inbar hopes the same could be true for robots. Late last year, the industry veteran launched RobotsAppStore.com, a robotics software marketplace modeled on mobile app stores. He opened a San Francisco office in November, began hiring staff and is in the midst of raising funding.
My first impression on hearing about a robot app store was: It's an idea ahead of its time. That was also my second and third impression.
Outside of my tech industry contacts, I don't know a single person who owns a robot, and I live in the tech-savvy Bay Area. Even robot optimists I speak to think we're five to 10 years away, at least, from personal robots becoming a common presence in our lives. They're still too expensive and too limited in capability for mainstream adoption.
But Inbar argues his case well, noting that the market is already bigger than I would have guessed.
He said there are roughly 14 million personal and service robots worldwide, a leap of 66 percent in the past two years, based on data from the International Federation of Robotics. ABI Research estimates that the personal robot market will expand to more than $19 billion by 2017.
"It might be early, but I prefer to be early than late in this game," Inbar said.
Not his first compay
He previously founded another robotics company in his native Israel and served as chief technology officer of mobile advertising company MassiveImpact.com.
Popular personal robots today span the price range. There's the Keepon toy now on sale for $20 at Toys "R" Us or the roughly $16,000 talking android known as Nao. Incidentally, Nao also performs a pretty slick dance to Michael Jackson's "Thriller," as Inbar demonstrated on a recent visit to The Chronicle.
If money is truly no object, you could also consider one of Willow Garage's $400,000 PR2s. They can bake cookies, fold laundry and fetch beer, so you're getting a little something extra for that premium. Landing in the middle of the price spectrum are iRobot's Roomba vacuums ($299 to $599) or the several-thousand-dollar AIBO robot dogs.
The AIBO is actually a prime example of the potential demand for a robot app store. A few years ago, owners took to trading around homegrown software that cracked the source code to teach the dog new tricks, like dancing and talking, without the benefit of any official marketplace.
Cease and desist
Naturally, Sony responded to this customer enthusiasm for its product by filing a cease-and-desist order, prompting a boycott in the process. The company eventually saw the error of its ways, backtracking so far as to offer up a software development kit to encourage users to come up with inventive new uses.
Learning from Sony's expensive lesson, pretty much all personal robot manufacturers provide these sorts of kits today. That invites third parties to develop apps for the hardware, in much the way Apple has, and creates the opening for a central marketplace.
RobotsAppStore.com is currently open only to beta testers, but Inbar expects to launch to the full public early in the year. He hopes to have around 500 apps in the marketplace at that time. Prices will vary but are likely to average around $10.
The company plans to take a 30 percent cut of app sales while securing additional revenue from manufacturers for which it sets up individual markets.
Robot safety
Its other major task right now is scanning and testing the apps to ensure they're safe and perform only their stated purpose, adopting more of the Apple than Android app store philosophy. That's a critical stance: Just imagine the damage that could be inflicted by a corrupted robot equipped with cameras and hands.
In 2009, researchers at the University of Washington managed to hack commercially available robots and warned that they could be used to spy on people, swipe keys, vandalize homes, terrorize children or trip the elderly. It kind of makes a phishing scheme sound quaint.
But perhaps now we're really getting ahead of ourselves.
For now, Inbar just hopes that an app store can begin to spark the sort of excitement around robots that they did for smart phones, winding up a virtuous cycle of more users, more apps and more robots.
"When you can get more software, the robots become more alive," he said.
It spawned the development of hundreds of thousands of new uses for the devices, apps for consuming media, playing games, making music, navigating cities and much more. In turn, it compelled millions of additional customers to make a new piece of technology a central part of their lives.
Elad Inbar hopes the same could be true for robots. Late last year, the industry veteran launched RobotsAppStore.com, a robotics software marketplace modeled on mobile app stores. He opened a San Francisco office in November, began hiring staff and is in the midst of raising funding.
My first impression on hearing about a robot app store was: It's an idea ahead of its time. That was also my second and third impression.
Outside of my tech industry contacts, I don't know a single person who owns a robot, and I live in the tech-savvy Bay Area. Even robot optimists I speak to think we're five to 10 years away, at least, from personal robots becoming a common presence in our lives. They're still too expensive and too limited in capability for mainstream adoption.
But Inbar argues his case well, noting that the market is already bigger than I would have guessed.
He said there are roughly 14 million personal and service robots worldwide, a leap of 66 percent in the past two years, based on data from the International Federation of Robotics. ABI Research estimates that the personal robot market will expand to more than $19 billion by 2017.
"It might be early, but I prefer to be early than late in this game," Inbar said.
Not his first compay
He previously founded another robotics company in his native Israel and served as chief technology officer of mobile advertising company MassiveImpact.com.
Popular personal robots today span the price range. There's the Keepon toy now on sale for $20 at Toys "R" Us or the roughly $16,000 talking android known as Nao. Incidentally, Nao also performs a pretty slick dance to Michael Jackson's "Thriller," as Inbar demonstrated on a recent visit to The Chronicle.
If money is truly no object, you could also consider one of Willow Garage's $400,000 PR2s. They can bake cookies, fold laundry and fetch beer, so you're getting a little something extra for that premium. Landing in the middle of the price spectrum are iRobot's Roomba vacuums ($299 to $599) or the several-thousand-dollar AIBO robot dogs.
The AIBO is actually a prime example of the potential demand for a robot app store. A few years ago, owners took to trading around homegrown software that cracked the source code to teach the dog new tricks, like dancing and talking, without the benefit of any official marketplace.
Cease and desist
Naturally, Sony responded to this customer enthusiasm for its product by filing a cease-and-desist order, prompting a boycott in the process. The company eventually saw the error of its ways, backtracking so far as to offer up a software development kit to encourage users to come up with inventive new uses.
Learning from Sony's expensive lesson, pretty much all personal robot manufacturers provide these sorts of kits today. That invites third parties to develop apps for the hardware, in much the way Apple has, and creates the opening for a central marketplace.
RobotsAppStore.com is currently open only to beta testers, but Inbar expects to launch to the full public early in the year. He hopes to have around 500 apps in the marketplace at that time. Prices will vary but are likely to average around $10.
The company plans to take a 30 percent cut of app sales while securing additional revenue from manufacturers for which it sets up individual markets.
Robot safety
Its other major task right now is scanning and testing the apps to ensure they're safe and perform only their stated purpose, adopting more of the Apple than Android app store philosophy. That's a critical stance: Just imagine the damage that could be inflicted by a corrupted robot equipped with cameras and hands.
In 2009, researchers at the University of Washington managed to hack commercially available robots and warned that they could be used to spy on people, swipe keys, vandalize homes, terrorize children or trip the elderly. It kind of makes a phishing scheme sound quaint.
But perhaps now we're really getting ahead of ourselves.
For now, Inbar just hopes that an app store can begin to spark the sort of excitement around robots that they did for smart phones, winding up a virtuous cycle of more users, more apps and more robots.
"When you can get more software, the robots become more alive," he said.
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