Boris Sofman, Co-Founder & CEO, ANKI : Consumer Robotics: Story and Lessons

Anki is a robotics and artificial intelligence company founded by 3 RI PhD students with the goal of bringing these technologies into mass-market consumer products (we now have 11 RI graduates at Anki). Anki's first product, Anki DRIVE, is the first game to combine the speed and excitement of scale model car racing with the gameplay, weapons, and characters of video games. Launched in October 2013 in partnership with Apple, each car in DRIVE understands it's position, can move incredibly precisely, and can think and drive for themselves with unique skills and personalities if not driven by humans. This creates an unprecedented level of interaction and intelligence in physical characters in a mass-market consumer product. In this talk I'll share a bit of the Anki story and some of the lessons learned in our journey: developing a consumer product from prototype to mass production (and how this deviates from PhD style research), aggressively balancing price and functionality, quickly reacting to new technologies and trends, fund-raising, growing a diverse team, and working with retail / marketing / PR.