INTERVIEW: Ugobe’s Steve Bannerman Talks About The Future For Pleo Robot Dinosaur
When it comes to cutesy robotic creatures with advanced AI, it’s hard to top the Pleo dinosaur. Steve Bannerman moved to Ugobe recently to head up the global marketing push to get the cute Pleo dinosaur robot into homes around the world. Bannerman was a key figure at Apple, working on Quicktime TV and responsible for launching Apple’s online media streaming business. On a recent whirlwind trip to the UK, Gizmodo caught up with him to find out how Pleo - and Ugobe - plan to rule the world. Or at least a little robotic bit of it.-Martin Lynch Why Ugobe? SB: One of the things I loved about working Apple is the focus on the relationship between people and machines. It’s a similar type of exercise here at Ugobe - a wonderfully creative place to work What are your immediate plans for Pleo? SB: The thing we need to be able to do is to broaden what we have. One of the things we know about Pleo is that the users are very passionate - as a marketer I need to find a way to distil that optimism into a creative marketing message. Any price cuts planned - there was one recently, yes? SB: The recent price cut was a one-off thing to celebrate the first birthday only, but it was very successful. Our Web payments system hasn’t been great at dealing with other currencies though so we’re fixing that, in order to improve our ability to sell to anyone in the world. How’s Pleo doing right now? SB: It’s not the most robust time of the year - but so far we have shipped 55,000 units, which is a lot for such a specialist product. Our goals going forward are much higher than that. What’s the UK response been? SB: I don’t have specific numbers for here but I can measure it from our distribution partners like Amazon, and it’s positive. Argos is now carrying it and we have a robust forecast from them for the Christmas period. Is there a way for the Pleo community to interact? SB: The primary way they interact today is the Pleoworld forum. We have around 15,000 people interacting on the forum now, with a lot of interesting conversations. Can people develop their own applications? SB: Absolutely - one of the new apps is Dino-Mite [plug Pleo into a USB port and you get detailed look at the internal state of Pleo, from servo positions to camera positioning]. We are in the process of creating a formal developer programme, which will give them access to some of the Ugobe tools. User community is critical to the future success of Pleo. The more applications out there, the more interest there will be in Pleo. What’s new for Pleo? SB: The newest thing is the Reincarnation service. For instance, if your laptop breaks the first thing you want to do is get a new laptop in exchange. When Pleo breaks though, people freak out and they want to send their personalised Pleo to the hospital, so to speak, and fix them. We can extract the Pleo personality from a damaged model and download it into a new Pleo, which they can buy at a discount. Obviously, they only have to pay if their Pleo warranty has expired. New life-forms? SB: We have some new things coming in October. We need to get more and more software out there for Pleo. Next year we will bring out additional life-forms. I can’t say which right now but the new lifeforms don’t necessarily have to be for purely entertainment purposes. Are we going to see a large T-Rex version that will terrorise pets and eat small children? SB: [laughs] Maybe not. If you go and look at the latest downloads though , you now have an angry Pleo, which is somewhat more formidable. It won’t be eating children though. We’ll have more details on what’s coming for Pleo in October and with any luck, we’ll get first dibs on some of those other life-forms when they land.-Martin Lynch [Pleoworld] robot robots toy
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Original post by Rico