Abstraction

I’ve recently given notice at a great job, with fantastic colleagues and great products. I was only at this job for a little over eight months, so it’s a risky move — a brief tenure on a resume can make you look unreliable and flaky. Nevertheless, I find myself looking at opportunity that (I feel certain) fits squarely in the “once in a lifetime” bucket.

Next week I begin my tenure leading developer relations and evangelism at Ugobe, a robotics and artificial intelligence company. Ugobe’s first product is the Pleo, a baby dinosaur that autonomously interacts with its environment, learns and evolves a personality based on how it is treated, and (most importantly) . From a combined software/hardware/potential perspective, Pleo is the most sophisticated consumer robotic product in the world; If you’re of a mind, you can learn all about it at www.pleoworld.com.

Ugobe is an amazing company because its products represent an integration of so many disciplines — robotics, artificial intelligence, industrial design, entertainment, human psychology. Most interesting to me is that Ugobe has opened its products up to the public, enabling anyone with a interest to expand and deepen its personality. In this sense, Ugobe products provide a development platform designed specifically to invoke an emotional response in users. To my knowledge (which at this stage is admittedly fairly shallow) this is absolutely unique.

I’m very excited to be part of the cutting edge of human/computer relationships.