For a bright, shining moment, Bill Gross was the kingpin of creativity. He founded the incubator idealab!, brainstormed dozens of promising dotcoms, scored billions in venture capital, and earned a rep as the bubble era's greatest business visionary. Then the bottom dropped out. His boatload of startups - eToys, Eve.com, FirstLook.com, ideaMarket, MyBiz.com, NetZero, Paythrough.com, Refer.com, Sameday.com, Utility.com, WeddingChannel.com, Zelerate.com - hit rough seas. Bereft investors and stockholders called in the lawyers; idealab! withered to a handful of employees. Was Gross chastened? Apparently not. He's back with a new venture, Evolution Robotics. There he was on the convention floor of May's E3 videogame expo in Los Angeles, demonstrating the beer-fetching capabilities of his latest product alongside a bevy of booth babes. A few days later, Gross took a break from his honeymoon to resume the pitch.
WIRED: Most outfits hire a professional spokesperson. Why did you do the demo yourself?
BILL GROSS: We wanted to show that even a developer could do it; it didn't have to be a trained promoter. If you can get a beer, think of the other things you'd be able to do. Imagine how you'd be able to get medication for an elderly person, or go check up on someone. In that sense, it didn't matter if we had a professional announcer.
Why are robots the next big thing?
When I got my first gigahertz PC, I looked in the Windows task bar at my CPU usage, and I was sitting there at about 3 percent, basically using Word, PowerPoint, Outlook. Moore's law was continuing, but there was no New Thing. So what is the next area where we can use processing power to augment our senses? Let's have the thing move around and interact with us for more minutes of our life.
You really believe bots have hit critical mass?
This one is going to be a 5-, 10-, 20-year seismic shift. Having a robot can improve people's quality of life, improve their safety, radically affect their health, everything. It's going to be as big as the PC. Being at the beginning of a revolution like that is very exciting for me, and that's why I'm putting so much personal time into it.
The brain of your $499 robot is actually just the user's laptop, right?
We are building the first robots that are truly autonomous. They can sense and respond to their environments. They can do this because of the vision and sensing algorithms we have written, but also because we're using the full power of a PC. By using a PC we can get all that power to do real-time sensing.
At E3, the robot arm was having problems.
Yeah, well, we lifted and carried about 500 beers each day. There was only one problem we had on the third day, when the beers were put in the freezer. They were condensing so much - it was a humid day - and they were slipping a little bit. All we had to do was put a little absorber gripper on the hand of the robot, which we'll now put on all of them.
Are there other promising developments coming out of idealab! companies?
Let's see. No, I don't have anything particular to announce right now, but the companies are doing some very interesting things.
So idealab! isn't exactly ready to take the market by storm with a flurry of IPOs?
No, the market is very tough for IPOs right now. Our focus is on building the company. If an IPO is the right thing, then that will happen. If not, it wouldn't matter, because it's a sustainable company in its own right, even without an IPO.
What do you think now about the idealab! incubator business model?
We're focusing much more on industries that have a high barrier to entry. Robots are a perfect example. It's not trivial to start up a robot company. It's not like opening up an ecommerce site.
START
signal : noise
The Bugs in the Machine
Diagnosed in 60 Seconds
Who's the Sucker Now?
Science Centerfolds
The Peacemaker
Crude Awakening
A New Spin on the Wireless Web
Souped Up
Jargon Watch
Humans vs. Computers
A Business Model With Legs
Bill Gross, Pitchman
Wired | Tired | Expired
Capture the Wind
