Remember 2007, when dinosaurs walked the earth? At least, that's what we said would happen in our article about the Pleo (issue 15.01). OK, we didn't promise anything, but we certainly implied that the robot dino was the future of not only toys but also companion bots like the ones that care for old folks and fight zombie aliens in Japan.
Yes. Well. About that: Pleo had a heck of a pedigree — its inventor, Caleb Chung, had created the Furby. And the little guy did look startlingly lifelike. But Ugobe, the company that sold Pleo, didn't quite work out. First it tried to charge $349 per bot. Then money problems forced a move from Emeryville, California (home of tech giants Pixar and Maxis), to the cheaper Eagle-Star Technology Corridor of Idaho. About 100,000 Pleos sold, far fewer than the million Ugobe had projected. The company filed for bankruptcy last spring.
All is not lost. Jetta, the Hong Kong company originally contracted to build Pleos, plans to make new ones. And an alpha version of the software developer kit is in the wild, giving rise to at least one YouTube video of a Pleo dancing for our amusement. But even if we get a Pleo-parkour meme going, it looks like the ubiquitous-robot future Wired keeps writing about has again been postponed.
