Archives for November 2004

The Engadget Interview: Tom Burick, CEO of White Box Robotics

For this week’s Engadget Interview, 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.”

Tom_Burrick

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.
[Read more…] about The Engadget Interview: Tom Burick, CEO of White Box Robotics

The Engadget Interview: Niklas Zennstrom of Skype

For this week’s Engadget Interview, 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.

Niklas_ZennstromPlease 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. [Read more…] about The Engadget Interview: Niklas Zennstrom of Skype

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