This story appears in the July 14, 2013 issue of Forbes. Subscribe
I'm exploring the headquarters of Suitable Technologies in Palo Alto, Calif., passing leather couches, paintings and large indoor plants. Only I'm not really here; I'm on a laptop at my desk in downtown San Francisco, roughly 30 miles away. Using some lightweight software, I'm controlling a Beam, a motorized stand with a 17-inch flat screen that displays my face.
The screen sits at a 5-foot-2-inch median between a standing and sitting human, or what Suitable calls "locals." Suitable CEO Scott Hassan walks up to me to say hello, fist-bumps the screen, then invites me on a walk-and-talk around his office and onto a large assembly room floor. The wide-angle lens helps me avoid crashing into walls and doors on this, my first robot-mediated interview. (Watch the video here.)
Hassan and a handful of competitors in Silicon Valley believe this is how knowledge workers will communicate in the future, avoiding the energy-sapping inefficiencies of air travel and freeway commutes. Tell that to
It's this ability to move around and facilitate impromptu meetings that sets telepresence bots apart from the fixed-desktop videoconferencing offered by the likes of Skype,
The early customers, as one would expect, run geeky. Magic Leap, a digital entertainment firm in Hollywood, Fla., bought a Beam at the beginning of 2013 and intends to buy at least three to five more. CEO Rony Abovitz thinks the Beam could halve the firm's cost of flights and accommodations, and it took the staff only a few days to adjust. "The only problem is the lack of arms. To come into my office they bang the Beam against my door," Abovitz adds. "I have to open it, and they come rolling in."
Auris Surgical in Redwood City, Calif. has a dozen employees sharing one Beam. Eric Anderson, cochairman of asteroid miner Planetary Resources, bought three Beams a month ago and plans to get several more, primarily so visitors can attend meetings in his offices in Seattle and California.
Other early customers include Microsoft, Mars, Splunk and Xtreme Labs, which has one Beam used by CTO and cofounder Sundeep Madra. He uses it to meet new hires, though since the firm is on four floors a staffer has to help the so-called Sunny-bot onto elevators.
Suitable's own employees often work from home and use the Beams parked on either of its floors to hold meetings. The Beams even have a designated desk space in the office where other employees can find them. One employee has been traveling internationally for the last year, skiing in the morning and then coming into the office for the rest of the day through a Beam. If he and other remote workers catch snippets of conversation in the open-plan office, they'll drive over and join in.
There are no reliable industry data for sales of mobile telepresence, but the growing field extends from $35,000-range service robots such as MetraLabs' Scitos and the RP-VITA health care unit from iRobot down to the $200 smartphone-toting Botiful.
Use cases abound, such as trade shows, retailing, weddings and home health monitoring. Suitable's big challenge is from midtier rivals such as Double Robotics, which makes a $2,000 sticklike iPad stand on wheels that is quite a bit sleeker than Beam's 100-pound units. The company has just started shipping units and already booked $1.2 million in sales.
Another competitor is the $9,700, smaller-screened Anybots, which Evernote CEO Phil Libin uses to drive around the office when he can't get there. Beams are costly by comparison: $16,950 for the main unit and the battery-charging station, plus $3,200 a year for the service contract. Some customers must also upgrade their Wi-Fi network to handle a 2 Mbps connection speed.
When asked how he justifies Beams higher price, Hassan says they come with more reliable video, audio and network connections: "You could say that a bicycle and a Ferrari do the same thing, but one will get you places faster." Hassan is targeting business accounts, which can take one to two years to test a product before they decide to fully deploy it, which means his team needs patience and capital.
It claims to have both. Hassan funded the 25-employee Suitable Technologies entirely out of his pocket thanks to early Google shares granted during his days at Stanford, where he helped Sergey Brin and Larry Page write Google's original search software. He then started eGroups, an e-mail-list-management site that Yahoo bought in 2000 for $450 million. All he'll say about how much he has put into Suitable Technologies: "Enough to last many years."
Hassan started a robotics research company called Willow Garage prior to Suitable Technologies, and in May 2010 around 300 Silicon Valley executives and Google millionaires showed up to watch him unveil an open source robot called the PR2. The Beam was born when a few Willow Garage engineers who'd worked on the PR2 built the Texai, a custom-built rig that carried a screen running Skype. It even had a cameo as Sheldon's "Shelbot" on The Big Bang Theory.
Hassan has an "unconventional way of using technology very well," said Brewster Kahle, who cofounded and worked with Hassan on the Web-traffic analyzer Alexa. Kahle adds that "the tech sector is probably the best one to push on this," and so it helps that Hassan has a wide, wealthy network in Silicon Valley.
Hassan shrugs off rumors that Suitable is working on a cheaper "Mini-Beam" but says there are public plans to interface with iPads and Android tablets. At least two early adopters said they were considering personal purchases, including a Beam to check up on elderly parents thousands of miles away who couldn't do Skype. When it's already a tough call between a Beam or a nurse's aide, the technology probably has a future.
Watch my telebot-enabled interview with Scott Hassan below:
Follow me on Twitter: @Parmy
