VenturePORT Series - Could You Fall in Love with a $300 Robotic Dinosaur?

A decade ago, Caleb Chung helped create Furby, the six-inch-tall robot whose personality evolved as its owner interacted with it. Now he's about to launch his latest creation, Pleo, a $300 robotic dinosaur engineered to relate to an owner on a more personal level.

"Pleo is the first technology aiming its focus on human emotional interactions and relationships," Chung told the Washington Post last year.

Pleo stands for "Personal Life Enhancing Organism." It's modeled after a one-week-old camarasaurus, a Jurassic-era dinosaur.

The eight-inch-high Pleo has a toothy grin, big eyes and pudgy legs. It also has a "nose cam" and 30 sensors that let it see, smell, and touch. Fourteen motors and six processors allow Pleo to move realistically. (Furby had one motor and one processor.)

In a June 2007 article, Business 2.0 magazine said Pleo makes Furby "look like a sock puppet."

As Pleo explores its environment, it learns. Eventually, each Pleo develops a unique personality, including reactions like joy, sorrow, anger and annoyance.

While Furby's $1.2 billion in sales helped fill Hasbro's coffers (and earned Chung a cool $10 million in royalties), this time Chung is doing things entrepreneur-style. He formed his own 35-person startup called Ugobe, based in Emeryville, Calif., and financed for $11 million.

The driving force behind Pleo is Chung's long-time desire to build a robot so life-like that people treat it like a household pet. Prior to his Furby days, he pitched a sophisticated robot to his then-employer, Mattel. Mattel balked at the cost and killed the project.

With a $300 price tag, Pleo isn't aimed at kids, or even the mass market. Chung is after the techies.

These are the early adopters—young professionals with enough disposable income to buy the latest tech gadgets. It's a group worth paying attention to, because its ranks have grown from 5 million in the 1990s to 20 million today, Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies, a San Jose market research firm, told Business 2.0.

To woo such a tech-savvy audience, Ugobe's engineers spent two years fine-tuning Pleo's performance to make it as life-like as possible. The polymer skin is on its fourth incarnation. Metal gears were changed to plastic to allow Pleo to move more quietly. The tail and neck wag with the same force, giving Pleo a puppy-like quality.

Originally, Pleo was scheduled for a late 2006 launch. Chung delayed its introduction to perfect the technology.

"If we were Mattel, we would have shipped this last Christmas," he told Business 2.0. "But that's not how you start a world-changing company."

Since Pleo isn't a toy, Chung isn't distributing the product through toy stores. Instead, Pleo will be sold through Ugobe's website and upscale retailers like Sharper Image.

Ugobe , the parent company of Pleo, recently announced that it would start delivering Pleo in early December of 2007.  Chung and Ugobe will soon find out whether the gamble will pay off or not. But it's looking good so far. The national media is gobbling up the robotic dinosaur, with mentions in Wired, Robot Magazine, Popular Science, Fortune, USA Today and more. Pleo has already won a Nuremburg Toy Fair Innovations award and Chung has been named one of Fortune magazine's Top 24 Innovators.

Chung's recipe for success, in short?

1. If your employer doesn't buy into an idea you think has real potential, pursue it yourself.
2. Create something your target demographic will want on an emotional level.
3. Distribute through channels that are right for your product.
4. Don't be afraid to delay a launch until the product is perfect.
5. Keep your profits within your own company so you can create more cool stuff. (Ugobe is currently raising another $10 million to develop other Chung designs.)

Kristin Stankewicz is an entrepreneur and writer based in northeast Wisconsin. Her company, The Liquid Phrase Writing & Editing Services, helps businesses enhance their images and get results through clear, concise, compelling copywriting. www.liquidphrase.com.

[ Return to Top ]