A little less than three years ago, Misty Robotics emerged from the skunkworks lab at Sphero, became a separate entity, and started pursuing its own unique vision of a robotic future. We outlined that future in one of our very first blog posts, The 10 Year Plan. Now, we’re six months into our commercial journey. […]
Misty Gets a Lift
One of the great advantages of being a working robotics company with a shipping product and hundreds of active customers is that we get to listen to the marketplace. We have attended Microsoft Build for three years, DeveloperWeek (Austin/SF/NY) for two, and Twilio SIGNAL for one. We’ve been the number one (or among the top […]
The Flight Plan Effect
We had to disappoint our backers recently — we let them know that Misty II robots would not be shipping on our crowdfunding target date of December 4th, as planned. This acknowledgment was a clear disappointment for our backers and for us, as it’s a promise broken. Companies lose the opportunity to build trust and relationships every […]
Why Facebook and Smartphones Have Clouded the Economics of Developer Platforms
If you’re a maker of semiconductors you inherently get the platform economics of a “design win” business. You create a platform (your chip), and you seek thousands of “design wins”, where other companies do all the work to sell your chip, because it’s designed into their product. A relatively low number of those designs may […]
Farewell Jibo and Kuri
In the past two months, Mayfield Robotics, makers of Kuri the robot, has shut down sales and operations and Jibo, which has run through more than $70M of venture funding (according to CrunchBase), announced a significant downsizing of the company. This marks a sad time for the personal/social robot market. There were amazingly talented and […]
Bring On the Competition!
“Hey little startup, aren’t you quaking in your boots at this recent big-company announcement?” As the CEO of a robot startup (and, in the past, a smart home/energy startup), I’ve heard these words frequently whenever news breaks about this or that large company making plays in our segment. After all, the whole point of a […]