Veteran journalist J.D. Lasica caught up with Thomas J. Burick, CEO of White Box Robotics of Youngwood, Penn., at the RoboNexus trade show in Santa Clara, Calif., last month. As robots whirled by on the floor, Burick talked about robots coming down in price to the consumer level, battling PCs for supremacy in the home, and why he didn’t care for “I, Robot.”

Before we get into White Box Robotics, tell me about the field. Robotics has come a long way in the past few years.

It really has. I’ve been working on the 9-series robot for the past five years. Quite honestly I started out by thinking about applying computer parts to robotics in some way because computer boards are so cheap and plentiful, I thought, If we could take them and apply that to personal robots and mobile robots, oh boy. I actually started doing mockups of the robot’s body in 3D and then graduated into several laser-type chassis. That took five years of refinement and then working with our production partner. We’ve come a long way.
A new U.N. report says that 607,000 automated domestic helps were in use at the end of 2003. It seems that the most popular robots purchased by consumers perform manual tasks like yardwork or vacuuming the floors as well as educate or entertain.

Actually, our robots are suitable for any of those applications. There are many commercial applications for our platform, especially security. Commercial security, homeland security, and home security on a consumer level, including facial recognition. With service robots, you could program the robot to run errands. We’re not producing the robot for one specific application, we’re a producer of mobile robotic platforms. We turn them over to customers and other companies and they take it from there, adding their own special electronics and software.

Give me a quick backgrounder on White Box Robotics.

Sure. I started the company five years ago. We’ve been a formal company for about two years. We have six employees. I have a 1,500-square-foot lab and an office facility at the University of Pittsburgh Applied Research Center.

Tell me about some of the robots in your exhibit today.

The basic robot is the 912 (pictured above), the silver one that’s been running around on the floor. You can see some wild, over-the-top concepts in our booth, demonstrating that if you get one of these robots, these are very real things that you can do. Our 912 Apache military concept has the robot sitting in the back of a giant ATV [a Suzuki 500 Vinson provided by Bike World Motor Sports of Sunnyvale, Calif., pictured below]. I actually gave one of my robots to my friends at TransEffects, a Hollywood movie prop studio that does concept cars for General Motors and other manufacturers, and I said, “Guys, here’s a 912, this is what I want. I want tank treads, I want military, I want a lot of weapons.” I didn’t know what to expect, and this showed up the morning before the show. They did an incredible job.

Then there’s the 912 MP3 robot (pictured at right). It’s a multimedia robot that’s a mobile DJ of sorts. You can download MP3s off the Internet, and the robot can roll around at your next party and play MP3s through its built-in satellite subwoofer system. It’s got a DVD movie screen on the back and a PC-based graphic equalizer. You can burn CDs. It’s all off-the-shelf computer parts.

That’s coming out in the first quarter of 2005?

Yes. We’re in the home stretch after five years of development.

What’s it cost?

The bare-bones platform is gonna come in right around $799. For that you get the differential drive system, you get the IO card that controls the motors and the sensors, you get the full chassis and the body panels. From there, you add the motherboard of your choice. You can add a laptop hard drive, a CD-ROM drive and CD burner, and cheap Webcams, and you have a fully functioning robot. We chose to do it that way because the PC and robotics enthusiasts really expressed the idea that maybe I don’t want a 20-gig drive, maybe I want a 120-gig drive, or half a gig of RAM instead of 128.

The DIY platform as an initial platform made a lot of sense because we can get it in the hands of enthusiasts and they can get it out however they want. It’s important to note that we designed the platform to let people cut, drill, paint — it’s a far larger blank canvas than a PC, especially for the mod crowd. It’s DIY, do-it-yourself. At all costs, I want to avoid the word “kit,” because it sounds like a toy or model and these are very serious, real robots.

Are there functionalities that all the DIY robots have in common?

On a basic level, you can still do a lot with the robot. Right out of the box, the robot can pretty effectively guard your house, with object recognition. Telepresence is a big one, too: connect the robot into your wireless network at home and you can access the robot while you’re away. You can check on the house, check on your parents, check on your child or dog. Did you leave the iron on? Send the robot into the room to find out. It has speech synthesis and speech recognition as well.

I didn’t think we were at a point where facial recognition really worked.

It works reasonably well. I was actually surprised. We use the Evolution Robotics RCC software, the application program to control the robot, and I took several shots of my face, and the robot caught me from the side and it was still able to recognize me. In all fairness, it’s not perfect, but it’s fairly accurate, more than you might think.

As far as commercial applications, I could see these robots used in a warehouse. A company might be tempted to replace its security guards, in theory.

Absolutely. They make very inexpensive, almost disposable security guards. A lot of the robots on the market, you’re talking a $40,000 to $60,000 price tag. But with the 912 series, you can build one of these things for a few thousand dollars. A security robotics company could approach us and purchase our platform to do inexpensive security robots, and you’ve got a couple of thousand dollars tied up in one. So what if one of them falls down a flight of stairs or someone cracks a chair over its head? It’s not a major loss on investment.

And companies can recoup their costs fairly fast.

That’s exactly it. Robots don’t show up drunk, they never call in sick.

Do you have any robots at home?

More than you could ever imagine. They’re all through my entire house. All through my office. I always tell people the story of how all the other kids in kindergarten were making clay ashtrays, I was making clay robots. I’ve got a collection from kindergarten on up, so they’re in every cupboard and corner of the house.

Functioning ones, too?

Yes. I have one of our robots guarding the house. I use the robot vacuum on a routine basis in my house and in the lab. Plus, there are the toys I always play with, from a voice-activated R2D2 to robots from “Lost in Space.”

Do you see robots replacing home PCs for some tasks?

Pretty effectively. Our robot will do anything your home computer will do: Internet access, word processing, PC gaming, plus it’s a real robot besides. I think the PC has already been replaced.

In what sense?

Why would you buy a PC when you could have one of these robots that would do all the functions of a PC? I can check my email, I can do all those office applications. But I can also program it to wake me up in the morning. I can program it to guard my house. In that sense, the PC’s already been replaced.

Have you licensed your technology to anyone?

We’ve had considerable interest, but because we’re releasing our first product in the first quarter of 2005, we’re in the middle of that. A number of companies have talked with us about doing an OEM.

This seems like a pretty big trade show for such a young industry. This is the largest one. There have been smaller ones around the country. The shows are bigger in Japan, but there has never been a trade show for robotics on this scale in the United States. It shows the interest is there.

Where do you see the field heading five years down the road?

I think within the next five years you’re going to see just an explosion of robotic products entering the marketplace. In the early to mid-1980s, there was a robotics revolution, but the technology just wasn’t there yet. The manufacturers made promises they couldn’t keep, and the whole market did a crash and burn. I think we’re at a point where there are real technologies we’ve been working on for the past 20 years, and there are real viable technologies going into these robotics. And so I think our second time around — our second revolution — will have real staying power.

Did you see “I, Robot”?

No, I didn’t see it, and I’ll tell you why. Robots really have gotten a bad rap from Hollywood, and it just reinforces the fears people have from the 1950s movies, where the robot breaks in and kills a whole crowd of people. That remains an underlying fear: that robots are going to harm us or take over. So that was my way to rebel, by not seeing the movie.

So robots are our friends.

They’re absolutely our friends. That’s how I see it.

Veteran journalist J.D. Lasica interviews Skype co-founder and CEO Niklas Zennström about the future of voice communication, using Skype through wi-fi handhelds, and the coming death of the telecom dinosaurs:

Please give me a quick backgrounder on Skype.

We were founded on Aug. 29, 2003, and now have 70 employees, about half in London and half in Tallinn, Estonia, and some in Luxembourg. With our work at Kazaa, we began seeing growing broadband connections and more powerful computers and more streaming multimedia, and we saw that the traditional way of communicating by phone no longer made a lot of sense. If you could utilize the resources of the end users’ computers, you could do things much more efficiently.

So what is Skype all about, and what’s the difference between Skype to Skype and SkypeOut?

Skype to Skype lets you call anyone else in the world who has downloaded the Skype application on their computer or PDA [personal digital assistant], for free. You just download the free software from our site. With SkypeOut you can call anyone anywhere in the world at cheap local rates, often two or three cents a minute.
How many Skype users are there, and how fast is it growing?

We have 2 million users in the U.S. and about 13 million worldwide in more than 200 countries. We’re getting 80,000 new users each day. And more than half a million people are connected via Skype at any given moment. In fact, we just surpassed our first 1 million simultaneous users online. The average call time is over 6 minutes – longer than traditional phone calls.

What platforms does Skype work on?

Windows, Linux, Mac OS 10 and Pocket PC, and we’re now working on some other mobile platforms.

What is SkypeIn and what are the plans for it?

SkypeIn will allow phone calls from the traditional phone network in to Skype. We don’t have a specific launch date yet, but hope to offer it sometime this winter.

Who’s using Skype? Who’s your typical customer?

Skype is for any individual who has a broadband Internet connection. Our early adopters were primarily male, 18 to 38 years old, but we have users now from across every demographic, from young children using it to keep in touch with a parent who may be traveling on business to great grandparents using it to keep in touch with family living all over the world. Skype is easy enough to use so that people don’t need to be tech savvy – a lot of users just want to communicate with their friends and family, and they find this is the easiest, cheapest way. If you can use a Web browser, you can use Skype.

Do you still use a land-line phone?

At home, I still have a regular phone line because I sometimes need to send faxes. At the office, we actually don’t have a land phone line. We use Skype mostly, and mobile phones to receive calls from people not on Skype.

I hear that Skype has higher penetration in some countries than in the United States. Why is that?

We have a much higher penetration in countries like Brazil and Poland, where phone rates are high and service is hit or miss in some places. In Poland, for example, an awful lot of families have relatives in Chicago and other U.S. cities, and so they place a lot of international calls. A lot of people in China, Taiwan, Japan and Germany are using Skype, too. There are different drivers in different countries.

How does Skype differ from Vonage, 8×8, and VoIP offerings from Verizon or AT&T or the other telecoms?

Vonage is much more similar to Verizon and AT&T than to us. With Vonage, you’re using a regular telephone, dialing a number, and its services have rates similar to the telecoms. What we are doing is taking advantage of the broadband Internet to provide basically unlimited free calls to anyone at a higher voice quality than they can with the phone lines.

Another differentiator is that Skype is free and simple to set up, and it costs us virtually nothing for a new user to join the Skype network, which is why we can offer the service for free.

The telephone is a 100-year-old technology. It’s time for a change. Charging for phone calls is something you did last century.

I imagine this also appeals to multi-taskers. You can text-message someone at the same time you’re talking with them.

Right. They also can combine voice with instant messaging and online file sharing. You can also instant message with others whle you’re talking to someone else, which makes the whole communication experience much richer and more efficient for businesses, too. We also have a conference call feature where up to five people can talk on one Skype call.

How do you plan to make money?

We’re making money right now by selling value-added services like SkypeOut, which brings in revenue. We don’t need to make as much money per user as the traditional phone companies because our marginal costs are so low. We’re also working on new paid-for features to offer users. But let me stress that Skype to Skype calls and all the features that you see today – except for SkypeOut – will remain free.

You recently unveiled Skype WiFi. How does that take your company in new directions?

We decided to make Skype available on multiple platforms and independent of the PC. People need to access Skype wirelessly, no matter where they are, and what happens is that we’ll be taking advantage of the rollout of Internet everywhere – WiFi and WiMax in particular.

We started with Pocket PC, and now we’re looking at other mobile platforms like Windows SmartPhone, Symbian and Palm. We don’t have any launch dates yet for any of those platforms. It’s going to be wonderful to be able to make a Skype call from cell phones or PDAs.

So the idea is that anyone in a WiFi cloud can make a free Internet voice call to other Skype users using their Pocket PC.

Right. At no charge, if they both have the software installed. Or by using SkypeOut if they need to call a land line or mobile at low rates.

Several users have told me Skype to Skype typically sounds much better than SkypeOut to a land phone. Why is that?

That’s correct. Skype to Skype uses our broadband technology and we’re not limited to the phone network. The phone network imposes certain technological limitations on what we’re able to do with SkypeOut, unfortunately.

What equipment do you recommend to Skype users? Using a headset improves sound quality markedly, doesn’t it?

We do recommend headsets, and Plantronics is our headset partner. It’s good for your neck and frees up your hands, and it can improve sound better than some built-in computer microphones.

Have you considered incorporating Skype into other applications? For example, wouldn’t it be cool to integrate it with your Outlook contacts?

Exactly. We’re talking with third-party developers to integrate their applications with Skype.

And people can use Skype for other things, like sending documents to colleagues or downloading photos.

Yeah. What we want to do is remove the barriers in modern communications. If I have a Word document or digital pictures, it’s easy to do and we don’t have the limitations you get with e-mail.

What other kinds of gadgets will we be seeing Skype on in the future?

There are several manufacturers that you’ll see turning out cordless phones that you can connect to the computer via a USB dongle. We’re working with Siemens on that.

Will the wide deployment of WiMax affect the marketplace for Skype?

Sure. The more broadband wireless connections there are, the more you’ll see Skype proliferate.

Should the FCC regulate the VoIP market as it does traditional telephony?

The phone market was regulated so that customers get good service and also to enable fair competition in a monopolistic arena. Voice over IP should not be regulated because there is no monopoly. Today, millions of people and teenagers in particular aren’t getting land lines, they’re getting mobile phones and Internet connections. The phone companies are clinging to old business models rather than transforming themselves into services companies and reducing operational expenses by using the Internet. Soon, most of us will be using the Internet for voice communication, and the idea of charging for that makes as much sense as charging for email or for using a Web browser.

A lot of people associate peer-to-peer with piracy. Will Skype change people’s attitudes toward P2P?

Definitely. First of all, the Internet has been a P2P network from the very beginning. There are plenty of uses of today’s P2P networks that have nothing to do with music file sharing or piracy.

Any trouble with your traveling to the States because of your role with Kazaa? We have some fairly onerous copyright laws here.

Well, that’s not a problem. We have a number of investors from the United States. The entertainment industry is still spending a lot of money on lawyers, even though they don’t have a case anymore. They’re still trying to drag me into things. I’m free to travel there whenever I wish.