ToyBots CEO Shervin Pishevar says of the device: It’ll be “bigger than Facebook.” It grows:
No real animals were hurt during the filming!
When I’m an old codger I expect a relational robot will watch over me; he’ll be my friend, bring me my pills, take my blood pressure and call 911 in an emergency.
Pishevar’s TechCrunch visit was in reaction to being dissed by Michael Arrington for not dreaming big enough:
In my humble opinion (which was shared by one of the TechCrunch50 judges I spoke with backstage), ToyBots shouldn’t be hitting for a single or a double, they should be swinging for the fences and launching their own superhit toy. If they fail they fail. Perhaps they could still pursue their technology licensing. But if they do it right, they’d win big. And I like companies that want to win it all. Even if they fail, they know they at least gave it a shot.
In addition to developing the platform, ToyBots should be hard at work on the first toy, for a release by the 2010 holiday season. Something significantly more cuddly and less please-don’t-kill-me-while-I-sleep than the functioning prototype they showed off at TechCrunch50. It talks. It walks. It has a virtual world and website remote-control. It’s always connected and downloading commands and content. It’s the must have toy of 2010. And it’s the first TechCrunch50 company to go public.
And once that hit is in place, everyone else will beg them to license the platform, too.
The platform he’s talking about announced at TechCrunch50 will bring toys to life with Internet connectivity:
Toybots Woozees, which launched at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco today, is a platform toy makers can use to build Internet connectivity and GPS tracking into their products. For example, an enabled teddy bear can use a built-in accelerometer to tell when you give it a hug, or a talking Elmo could be remotely updated with fresh sayings.
You can “tickle” a toy online and it will giggle in the real world. A grandmother can record a story that the toy can read to her grandchild hundreds of miles away. The toys can be connected to a social network, where you can learn what your friends are doing with other toys. The platform involves hardware that gives a toy GPS, a 3G connection and touch sensors on the head, neck and back.
Toybots says it’s not planning to manufacture toys — it’s a software platform for other toy makers. The company is trying to market it to the developer community to build all sorts of applications and to license the technology out to big brands like Mattel.
And I really expect an animatronic dog to be my pal when I’m old. And so, for a few fun moments, I was taken in by their ruse.