Pleo

Today I had an amazing 1-hour conversation with Derek Dotson, one of the original founders of Ugobe and is now the COO of Innvo Labs and Innvo Labs Limited, a subsidiary of Jetta Company, Ltd. Jetta is the company that acquired the rights to all things Pleo at the June bankruptcy proceedings this year and has relaunched Pleo under the Innvo Labs Corporation name. In the interview you will see Innvo Lab’s aggressive commitment to taking care of Ugobe’s original customers, and learn about their plans for the Pleo line and beyond. But first, a rare peek behind the scenes of the rise, fall, and resurrection of the baby robot dinosaur that took the world by storm, and was almost lost forever; a story that includes the trials and tribulations of Pleo's unsung guardian angel, Derek Dotson.

Derek and Caleb Chung met a year before Ugobe even announced plans for Pleo. Derek and Caleb had worked on Mattel Miracle Moves Baby, which is how they met. The Takara Corporation out of Japan wanted a robot dinosaur built and they approached Caleb about the project. When Derek talked to him about the project, Caleb said he didn’t want to make just another toy dinosaur and instead wanted to build something that felt almost real. The Takara representative was to return in 3 days, and during that period of Derek and Caleb met and discussed the possibility of making Pleo. (Interesting side note. Originally Pleo was going to be only 3 ½ inches tall and 7 ½ inches long with a head the size of a walnut).

The Takara representative loved the concept and gave them seed money to build a proof of concept model. With that money they built robot walkers that were about the size they wanted Pleo to be. The walkers were servo driven proto-robots that had a torso, shoulders, legs and knees. They built their own telemetry suit to teach the walker how to move. They didn’t use a standard motion capture suit because they needed a suit that had the same movement limitations as the walker. This would force the suit’s operator, the talented and acrobatic Caleb Chung, not to make moves the walker’s geometry and mechanics could not support. The walkers were attached to a computer that had learning algorithms. They analyzed Caleb’s movements via the suit’s sensors, and learned how to move the walker’s servos in a manner that mimicked Caleb’s movements, giving the walkers a realistic animal gait.

Takara loved the walkers and financed the embryonic stage of the project. Derek and Caleb worked furiously for 6 weeks and managed to turn out some prototype walkers that worked. Unfortunately Takara’s parent company forced them to drop the project and the rights to Pleo returned to Derek and Caleb. At this point, Caleb told Derek that if he could raise some money, he could “have half of Pleo”. According to Derek, Caleb was ready to drop the project and told him to try and raise some money, so he spent about a year showing the walkers to people in pursuit of extra financing and they eventually ended up with equal ownership packages in Ugobe when the company was created.

About this time, Bob Christopher, who later became Ugobe’s first CEO, entered the stage since he had been working with them on another project to create a new kind of PDA. He helped raise funding from several angel investors in chunks as small as $25k to $50k per investor. By the time the prototype were being built they were out of money and were about to go under. During this time he bankrolled the project using his own funds, a decision that was not popular at home, and kept the project alive until the first round of venture capital appeared. Derek went to China and had the first full body prototype of Pleo built, which is when CTO John Sosoka and the other groups arrived. (Note: The PDA project was later dropped when Apple’s iPhone came out and they could see the handwriting on the wall.)

Around November of 2008, Derek went back to Boise to help in the effort to save Ugobe. Doug Swanson was brought in as CEO to try and save the company. Doug did a terrific job trying to save Ugobe but despite his Herculean efforts, it became obvious to him that the company could not be saved or as Derek put it “it was like arranging chairs on the Titanic”. There was too much overhead and too much bad debt. There was no way an investor would put any more money into them since the company just didn’t make sense on paper any longer.

Ugobe did sell a huge chunk of Pleos, grossing about 20 million dollars in sales, but the company that had grown up around Pleo was just too expensive to keep going. Had it been a better economy then it is possible they could have achieved the sales growth they needed to continue. But the reality was that the current economic climate required a company a lot leaner to survive it. Ugobe was a heavyweight company poised for explosive growth and burdened with all the associated expenses and overhead that implies, so they needed a huge explosion in sales. Derek still believes Ugobe would have survived and done well if they could have raised their last round of funds. Despite Pleo's admirable sales it was not enough for Ugobe to stay operational and bankruptcy soon followed.

Derek spoke to Jetta, the company that did the actual manufacturing for Ugobe, about trying to acquire the rights to Pleo at the bankruptcy auction. Jetta agreed that they should participate and joined the bidding. They never thought they would win since there was talk of another company that was bidding richly at the auction. As fate and possibly luck would have it, that company was unreachable near the end of the auction and they won, bringing Pleo back home to Derek. After analyzing all of Pleo’s weaknesses, they came up with an improved design that fixed them and relaunched Pleo under the Innvo Labs name. (read the interview for the details).

Existing and new customers will want to pay special attention to the questions regarding service and warranty on Pleos old and new, and what the differences are in hardware and software between the old Ugobe Pleos and the new Innvo Labs ones. In conclusion, I came away from the interview extremely encouraged about Pleo's bright new future, both for my fellow owners and myself. Derek said repeatedly during the interview that they have the financial resources to weather the current tough economic times, and I look forward to seeing them execute their 10-year plan for Pleo and the other new robot pets that they will create in the future.

DD: Jetta Company Limited does robotics manufacturing in a wide range of industries. Innvo Labs Corporation and Innvo Labs Limited were created by Jetta specifically to support Pleo and its descendants.

DD: Innvo Labs has the financial resources to survive the dips and valleys of the global economy. When Innvo Labs first met to talk about Pleo after the action we were told to work on a 10-year plan. Ugobe grossed $20 million in sales of Pleo but the company was too large to be profitable, they were preparing to be a big company and their expenses were very high. In contrast Innvo Labs has adopted a factory-to-web distribution model that allows them to deliver and support Pleo with significantly less overhead, giving the company staying power. Innvo Labs intends to be conservative in their company plans to make sure they will be around for the long term. However, we are committed to continually updating and making improvements to Pleo.

DD: The fixes in the new Pleos now sold online at the Pleoworld online store are:

As for hardware improvements, due to a change in the hearing system Pleo responds better to your voice when it comes to figuring out where you are (left or right of him).

I would also like to point out that we have done a complete redesign of the Pleoworld web site. The site navigation has been improved and the customer experience with the online store is much better.

DD: We will definitely support all Pleos that are still under warranty, whether they were bought from the Pleoworld online store or through other retailers such as Amazon, etc. People that bought their Pleos (new in box) through auction sites like eBay will need to provide proof of purchase so they should get the original invoice/paperwork from the seller. In these cases, the warranty will begin when the buyer receives their Pleo so they don’t have to worry about the seller sitting on a unit for a long time. We are processing Ugobe Pleo RMA’s even now. Note, it is important that people understand that if they have a Ugobe Pleo, as opposed to one of the new Innvo Labs Pleos, they will receive another brand new Ugobe Pleo as a replacement and not one of the new upgraded ones.

DD: All they need is their RMA number and we will send them a replacement (Ugobe) Pleo. Rafael is processing RMA’s even now. He used to be in customer service at Ugobe. He has joined Innvo Labs and is doing a terrific job taking care of people.

DD: Absolutely. We have the Reincarnation program. You send in an old Ugobe Pleo and you get one of the new upgraded Innvo Labs Pleos. The cost is $245 USD.

DD: That’s under investigation at the moment and currently we are not doing that. We will try to do that in the future if we can.

DD: Absolutely. You can download it off the Pleo World web site.

RO: How long is the warranty offered on Pleo World Pleos?

DD: 90 days which is the same as it was before.

RO: Will Pleo work with the existing 3rd party software tools like MySkit?

DD: We have not done any testing ourselves but if they worked with the old Pleos, they should work with the new ones since the computing architecture is the same.

DD: I can talk about the 2010 Pleo model. That model will look the same as Pleo does now except it will have a new paint job and eye color to differentiate it from the current Pleos. Over the coming year we intend to give Pleo more depth to his personality and utilize the sensors better. For example, Pleo doesn’t do a whole lot with the camera in his nose right now. It’s not the hardware since the camera is a good quality camera. However there’s a lot of room for improvement in the software. An example of a specific feature people want badly is getting Pleo to come to you. The 2010 model will do that. Also, Pleo uses power more efficiently which will lead to longer play times. To make Pleo more realistic, Pleo will develop certain character biases at birth so that everyone’s Pleo will be different. As for the sensors, the reason why they are currently underutilized is due to a bottleneck in the serial bus that connects them to Pleo’s processor resources. That’s something we can fix without drastically altering Pleo’s architecture. Once that happens, we can do more with them when it comes to Pleo’s hearing, vision, etc. Beyond 2010 there will certainly be new creatures other than baby robot dinosaurs.

DD: You’re welcome.