GetRobo Blog English

Here comes Xachi - an iPhone controlled robotic toy

 GetRobo believes that the combination of smartphones and robots is going to be one of the biggest trends in 2011. (In Japan, some people call it the "Sumaho-robo" - short for "smart phone robots.") There's already the quadrotor helicopter AR.Drone on the market, and a robotic ball Sphero that was announced at this year's CES.

 Another product slated to come out later this year is Xachi (pronounced Zachi) Pet  which is being developed by Taptic Toys . This first product by the company targets the kids/tween market but the technology has a lot of potential for various types of products in the future.

 GetRobo interviewed Taptic Toys President David Cann (D) and Greg Munson (G) who's in charge of business development to learn about Xachi and their company. Also, although we did not talk about it in the interview below, they've just come out with a game for your iOS device called Xachi Command, which is a great marketing strategy that will lead to the launch of the furrier friend. 

 
     (Photo: Xachi Pets)
 
Q. Please tell us about your company, Taptic Toys. 
 
D) We started in 2009 after Apple announced that people could create third party hardware for the iPhone and iPod touch. Our other co-founder Romina (Espinosa) thought it would be great to have a toy that can connect to the iPhone. A Furby-type toy, but something that people could interact with. Every kid wants to have an iPhone or iPod touch for Christmas. So we thought if we could integrate and connect the cool games and abilities of the phone with the actual physical toy, we could have a unique product that kids would love.  
  So I brought in my other friends Marc (DeVidts) and Greg. Marc is a great hardware designer and I do software so we formed a company together and we’ve been working on it. We made a prototype in 6 months and went to the Toy Fair in New York in Feb. 2010. We’re now in the manufacturing stage.
 
Q. When is your product coming out?
 
D) Sometime in the first half of this year. 
 
Q. How does it work and what’s it going to do?
 

Gundam Christmas Tree

 A Christmas tree decorated with over 60 Gundam plastic models was set up in Akihabara to promote the new Gundam game for the Sony PSP.  From robot journalist Moriyama-san's new blog NODE.

  

Speecys and Sega Toys to come out with new communication robot

 The founder and CEO of Speecys, Tomoaki Kasuga, was in Silicon Valley to give a presentation at TiEcon 2009. He is seeking 10 million dollars in funding to expand his business of developing and selling communication robots.

 During his stay in California, he made public that his company has teamed up with toy maker Sega Toys to jointly commercialize a new robot by the beginning of 2010. It is not clear at this point whether the new robot will be a humanoid or not. But what is clear is that it will have the capability to hook up with the network to download all sorts of information using voice command. Speecys has come up with a system to enable that - watch the video below.   

 In the future, Speecy's cloud computing system will allow advertisers to send personalised ads to the robot users. "Think of it as a new friendly IT device. Friendlier than the PC." says Kasuga-san. The new robot is targeted to be in the 200-500 dollar price range. 

 Speecys had been working on the NNR-1, but according to Kasuga-san, they are now focusing on the project with Sega. 

 Below is a photo of Kasuga-san doing a demo at Tiecon.

Cell phone toy robots - $6.99 each

  Takara Tomy just announced a Mickey Mouse Transformer toy, but here is another cool toy from Tokyo but cheaper. I found these at our local Japanese supermarket for $6.99 each.

  

 I was surprised that the two-legged robots can actually stand. They will turn into cell phones as below.

 
 They are characters from a Japanese TV program called Keitai Sosakan 7 (or Cell Phone Agent 7) and sold by Bandai. It comes with a tiny piece of gum as you can see below. According to my friend who used to work at Bandai, this is a magnificent tactic they came up with a few years ago so that they - a toy maker - can legally put their products on (read "invade") the candy shelves.

 The instructions are in Japanese but even if you don't read the language it is simple enough to figure out and enjoy.

   

New robot dog from Sega Toys

Sega Toys announced a new robot toy called MIO. I would say that the concept is similar to the Tamagotchi but in a more idog form. The new MIO can show 17 different kinds of emotions by the shape of its pupil which can change into more than 100 variations. A bone-shaped pupil means that it is hungry and if you feed him the bone (which comes as an accessory) he will become happy or love you etc. You can pet it to make it happy and when happy it can start walking too.

MIO is specifically targeted toward "elementary school age girls." Price is 9,240 yen including tax - about $80 - and Sega Toys aims to sell 100,000 of these per year.