Hi Tom,
I think you will find there is always an underlying 'need' or 'latent need'
(to use Solution Selling terminology). A 'latent need' is a prior need that
has not yet been fulfilled, but through clear demonstration of the downside
pain-point and upside benefits, could motivate someone to buy a product or
service.
For your iPhone example, the needs are as follows:
1) The need to have a mobile phone so you are contactable when not in a
fixed location
2) The need to have something to entertain you whilst commuting or
travelling (e.g. a MP3 player)
3) The need to feel accepted by others - i.e. I have a iPhone, so I'm part
of the 'Apple fan-boi club' or I have something that you don't
4) The ability to fulfil other specific needs in the future ("I can
download and install custom applications on demand")
Your motivation to purchase an iPhone is more compelling because it fulfils
multiple specific needs. Otherwise, you would buy a dumb Nokia phone + a
MP3 player but it would more complicated, more costly and not as convenient.
Typically, early adopters grab at stuff that seems 'cool' often because it
fulfils different kinds of needs - like the need to show off to their
friends, or to fill their time with something interesting to do that aligns
with a passion that they have.
I think if you are planning to create a product that does not clearly
endeavour to fulfil a specific need *then its asking for trouble*.
Ultimately, you will need to sell and market your product, and if there is
no 'pain' then you need to have a very clear 'pleasure' (and potentially a
low price point) as a drawcard. From NLP theory, motivation is either
'towards something' or 'away from something'.
I say this, because I've looked at doing projects that involve doing some
sort of charitable good... this completely skews the incentives when
compared to non-charitable projects, because people like to do something
good (*i.e. the need to feel like they are contributing to society or others
*), but its completely optional and not a 'significant-enough' factor on
its own to motivate someone to do something.
I highly recommend you read "Reality is Broken" by Jane McGonigal - it
takes about happiness, incentives and gamification in detail... relating
the positive experience of playing (addictive, fulfilling) computer games
to the real world.
Cheers,
Nigel
On Sun, Apr 8, 2012 at 12:54 PM, Tom Allen <t...@jugglethis.net> wrote:
> Hi Andra, and thanks to Rob for joining these dots. I'm definitely keen to
> participate in events like this in Sydney, and was planning to hold a
> mini-hackathon with some of my students and colleagues to prototype parts
> of this robot anyway. There's a large number of students at the Australian
> Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR) where I work who would be keen to be
> involved too, and I'd be happy to be a point of contact there for you.
>
> I take a bit of an issue with the need finding approach as described in
> Pantofaru *et al.*'s paper. Not all products fulfil needs. I don't *need* an
> iPhone - I could use a normal phone, plus an MP3 player, and only check my
> email when I'm home or work. But the combination of technologies available
> in that one device make it a compelling purchase. The app store model is
> brilliant because it lets the iDevice become a platform which gets better
> over time without Apple having anything to do with it except taking their
> 30% cut. I don't know that I could put a finger on what part of the iPhone
> was the killer app (the ipod bit?) because to me it was always about the
> overall platform.
>
> I'm not suggesting that the approach or the paper is bad (I actually
> thought the paper was quite good), just that its likely not always
> appropriate. I think the fact that I'm struggling to come up with pain
> points I could solve for the average consumer indicates that it might be a
> non need fulfilling product. (Or it could just be a *bad* product idea...
> That is unfortunately the other possible take-away from this! ;-) And
> that's what a lot of the advice of people like Geoff in this thread has
> been about; that it's easier to start a company by solving a particular
> problem, rather than dreaming big about the platform that people could use
> to solve their problems. That leaves me with two options; get better at
> convincing people that my platform approach is viable, or find a suitable
> problem to solve with the platform, and do that first.
>
> There's some other interesting points raised by the paper, such as how to
> deal with catastrophic failure, and using humans as supervisory
> controllers. MIT has some good work in this area too, in particular what
> they call "human-ON-the-loop". They use this to imply that an autonomous
> system should be capable of operating without human interaction, but can be
> reconfigured or redirected by a human.
>
> Cheers,
> Tom
>
> On 8 April 2012 07:44, Andra Keay < <andrak...@gmail.com>
> andrak...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Thanks for sharing the discussion with us, Rob!
>>
>> By way of introduction: I'm a human-robot culture researcher who is
>> exploring the evolution of robot startups while I'm in Silicon Valley. My
>> partner Michael Harries is running a global technology accelerator, Citrix
>> Startup Accelerator. I've founded a community "The Robot Launch
>> Pad<http://robotlaunch.com>",
>> with a few other roboticists and startup geeks, like Erin Rapacki and Ahmed
>> Siddiqui, which looks like becoming the sort of useful resource that
>> Silicon Beach is for Aust startups, but it's still early days and we're
>> bootstrapping. We kicked off with a global cloud robotics
>> hackathon<http://roboticshackathon.com>,
>> we're about run the Silicon Valley Robot Block Party at Stanford (huge!)
>> and we go straight into running Robots as the vertical at
>> MegaStartupWeekend <http://mega.startupweekend.org> at Microsoft.
>>
>> .... (skip the rest of my intro if robot cheerleading not req'd) We think
>> that startup methodology, particularly the lean startup and customer
>> development ideas of Eric Ries and Steve Blank, offer robotics the methods
>> to launch a raft of agile pushes in to existing markets. We need the
>> increasing affordability of actuators and sensors and consumer robotics to
>> continue in conjunction with the cloud and outsourcing computation to smart
>> phones and web services and other existing products. We will see an
>> explosion in modular robotics platform approaches. But we won't see a robot
>> slave in every home until these building blocks exist. We will see a robot
>> car on the streets... actually we already do. We will see robot cars in the
>> shops in the next year or two. The app and extension market for robots that
>> we will use for ordinary things could be the way the next 'new' robots are
>> developed. Or not.
>>
>> ... back to point. Tom made some interesting proposals for a robot that
>> generated some thoughtful responses. Some have already pointed out that a
>> robot is not yet a robot business and suggested that the way forward is to
>> select a market segment and observe, then pick a problem that you can
>> solve. MVP, test, iterate, repeat. Leave the building.
>>
>> Willow Garage are involved in a lot of observations to find the problem
>> that consumers want solved (ie. urban white collar families who buy
>> appliances). Caroline Pantofaru's recent paper is an excellent description
>> of how to solve the question Tom posed. [1]
>>
>> There are a lot of companies selecting a segment of the market and
>> developing for it, even if the robots haven't been showcased publicly.
>> Tandy Trower's company Hoaloha Robotics <http://hoaloharobotics.com> is
>> another good example. Tandy started Microsoft's first usability lab, then
>> founded their Robotics Developer Studio and has recently left to build a
>> socially assistive home robotics platform using affordable and available
>> technology.
>>
>> But there's a lot of space for fast moving startups to piggy back on
>> phone and cloud, to provide interfaces and extensions to existing
>> technologies. etc. Maybe to augment the senses as Rob suggested. (and
>> something's in the pipe for Aust for sure, Rob - let's start a new thread
>> soon)
>>
>> Great to meet you all, Andra
>>
>>
>> [1] *Exploring the Role of Robots in Home
>> Organization*<http://www.willowgarage.com/sites/default/files/hri254-pantofaru.pdf>
>> Pantofaru, Caroline <http://www.willowgarage.com/publications/author/23>
>> ., Takayama, Leila <http://www.willowgarage.com/publications/author/4>.,
>> Foote,
>> Tully <http://www.willowgarage.com/publications/author/95>., and Soto,
>> Bianca <http://www.willowgarage.com/publications/author/496>
>> Proc. of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Boston, MA, p.327-334, (2012)
>>
>>
>>
>> On Friday, April 6, 2012 11:59:41 PM UTC-7, Tom Allen wrote:
>>>
>>> Geoff,
>>> Thanks for your comments - seriously. Despite your negative tone, this
>>> is actually the kind of feedback I'm after, because it forces me to better
>>> articulate my rebuttals.
>>>
>>> I agree that none of the items on that list solve any particularly acute
>>> pain points for the average person. I disagree that this means the concept
>>> is intrinsically a bad one. Collectively it provides utility in a number of
>>> areas - possibly any one of these areas could be solved by a piece of fixed
>>> infrastructure, perhaps even better solved, but I argue that nothing out
>>> there can do all this and more. If you want (for example) to track people's
>>> movement throughout your home, would you rather purchase one if not more
>>> sensors per room and corridor, and have the hassle of wiring them up and
>>> calibrating them, or have one robot that does it all? (Ok, one robot per
>>> floor of the home - unless you are prepared to add infrastructure to your
>>> home, in which case I'd still prefer to install one robot chair lift on the
>>> stairs, than sensors throughout the home. A chair lift is going to be
>>> faster and safer than a legged or hybrid platform, and doesn't require
>>> complex algorithms, increased payload weight and power requirements, etc.)
>>>
>>> You're forcing me to get to the underlying assumptions behind this
>>> product, which is good, because I don't think it's too hard to imagine what
>>> the MVP that validates them would look like. Assumption one is "it should
>>> cost less to do a house-wide task with a robot than to solve the same task
>>> with fixed infrastructure." Assumption two is "even if the costs are
>>> similar, people would prefer a robot to the hassle of installing
>>> infrastructure." Assumption three is "a robot can provide a platform
>>> technology which can be reconfigured to solve multiple problems, whereas
>>> fixed infrastructure is less amenable to reconfiguration."
>>>
>>> I've spent quite a lot of time researching existing home automation
>>> systems, and the history of the many, many companies that went bust trying
>>> to create that market. The general opinion seems to be that customers
>>> didn't want to install sensors and actuators throughout the home, and that
>>> doing so in bulk was expensive. In most cases, the successful
>>> (comparatively) companies focussed on automating homes being built from
>>> scratch. I believe a robot can solve both these points - no infrastructure,
>>> and lower cost. That it can also do a bunch of gimmicky, somewhat useful,
>>> or just generally entertaining things is a bonus. That its applications can
>>> be extended over time is a double bonus.
>>>
>>> Finally, you said; "What you're saying is that when you ask people what
>>> they want from a robot, they ask for something useful which can't be
>>> delivered and won't settle for a strange gimmicky platform that doesn't
>>> do _anything_ particularly compelling."
>>>
>>> Yes and no. They ask for something that can't be delivered, so I offer
>>> an alternative, and as yet I've not been very good at stating its value
>>> proposition effectively. This whole thread is me working on that... :-)
>>>
>>> Thanks for your feedback,
>>> Tom
>>>
>>> On 7 April 2012 13:45, Geoff Langdale < <geoff.langd...@gmail.com>
>>> geoff.langd...@gmail.com> wrote
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> What you're saying is that when you ask people what they want from a
>>>> robot, they ask for something useful which can't be delivered and
>>>> won't settle for a strange gimmicky platform that doesn't do
>>>> _anything_ particularly compelling. Not one item on your list of 10
>>>> (or perhaps 9, assuming the Death Star plans wasn't entirely serious)
>>>> (a) solves an urgent need of anyone's and/or (b) is well solved by a
>>>> single mobile robotic platform rather than a wired-up house.
>>>>
>>>> Frankly, you need a manipulator of some kind or the mobility of
>>>> trundling around the house (minus stairs - you wouldn't be able to
>>>> cover more than 30% of our single-story dwelling without the ability
>>>> to get up and down at least 1-2 steps) is pointless and easily
>>>> replaced by fixed infrastructure.
>>>>
>>>> Geoff.
>>>>
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