podcast interviews Articles and Reports

Tjin Van Der Zant helped found "Robocup at Home" in 2006, and since then the organization has spread to include a number of new locations everywhere from Brazil to Thailand. As a professor at the University of Groningen in the Cognitive Robotics Lab, and founder of a Robotics startup and machine learning startup - he's pretty "involved" when it comes to robots - and it made me eager to pick his brain about the future of home robotics.

RockPaperRobot just sounds fun, even when you have no idea what it's all about.

When you do learn what this startup company is about, things only get more interesting, not less. The company is driven by it's founder Jessica Banks, MIT roboticist by training, now the designer of some of the world's coolest furniture and fixtures. I found Jessica's work by keeping an eye on startups out of MIT, and seeing the name RockPaperRobot, I had to check it out.

When Dr. Eduardo Torre-Jara talks about "sensitive robotics," he's not talking about robots that cry when you yell at them.

The term "Makerspace" didn't really leave the startup inner circle until later this year, and - upon studying Google Trends - I realized that 2011 is when the term actually got it's legs.

"Fitting in" isn't often what entrepreneurs do best. However, when it comes to finding an in-group of like-minded, ambitious, intelligent people, we all need some kind of crowd to help us learn, find new partners or employees, or at least have some kind of "life" amidst the hustle and bustle of startup-ness.

With a burning desire to combine his passions for digital fabrication, biology and computer science, Charles Fracchia came to MIT and Harvard eager to learn. Going to "bio to bits" (gleaning meaningful information from biological data) is something that Charles had never had an opportunity to do at such a high level, and he had high expectations. "I though: Oh, surely, I'm coming to these awesome labs here in Boston... I'm sure I'll come in and have an awesome dashboard to work with, like the movie Iron Man. I'll have my cell growth rate here, heart rate here... you know... something fantastic."