Ugobe bankrupt

[Markus Waibel]

Ugobe's bankruptcy

Robots-Sad-Ugobe-Pleo-Bankrupt.jpg (38.89 KiB) Viewed 11942 times

Robot toymaker Ugobe, inventor of the amazing Pleo dinosaur robot, has filed for bankruptcy.

The company is being liquidated, all employees have already been let go. In spite of 100'000 Pleos sold, the company has failed to raise additional funding. This is truly sad news for all robot fans - let's hope Caleb Chung, creator of Pleo and the highly successful Furby, will give consumer robotics another shot! We promise we'll buy!


Links:
Ugobe (no more - formerly found at http://www.ugobe.com)
Announcement on the Idaho Statesman
robots.net

[epokh]

The market of high end robotic for entartainment is quite taugh.
After the sony Aibo here another victim.
They should have released the SDK for the developers to sutatin the business a little bit more.
I guess they didn't because they knew they were going in bankrupt ....

[Johnny 5]

Wonder what went wrong there - selling so many robots and still going bankrupt. Gee!

You think the tech is still too expensive to make consumer products viable? Or did they simply overreach?

[epokh]

BusinessMode=On
Well you need to see it in the business way: the markup price was not enough to cover the costs.
As simple as that. They expected to have a burst of sales at the very beginning to cover the company's costs but they didn't.
On the buying decision of the consumer a minor influence was due to some glitches in the implementation: skin peeling off, slow servos and so on.
I still think it was a good idea but not in the right price's segment.
BusinessMode=Off

[epokh]

Just an update, the unexpected happened!
Jetta the manufacturer of Ugobe just bought the Intellectual Property of Ugobe and is willing to re-lunch pleo.
Let's see what happen.
News from here:
http://www.robotsrule.com/pleo/2009/06/ ... mited.html

[boby]

Like so many companies that have recently gone under, it's always interesting to read comments on what should lighting have been done instead that would have made the company and/or the product soar, instead of crash and burn like it did.As if it wasn't obvious (and I hope it's obvious to the rest of the public), when Circuit City decided to hatchet all the smart, possibly well-compensated A/V geeks with demotivated teenagers with a salary just above lamps the position that operates the fryer at McDonald's, we all did a collective slap to the forehead.Personally, the Pleo looked cool, but was too expensive for the mainstream public. Looking at it closer when it finally hit the shelves at the equally dying Sharper Image, it didn't appear to be a revolutionary product that would have warranted my money, full price, or even at closeout when it was as low as 70% off before it disappeared off the shelves.

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