MARCUS ROSENTHAL is the principal consultant at Innovative Impact Consulting. He is also co-founder and former CEO of Revolve Robotics – creator of the KUBI, a portable video teleconference device. As Marcus says: “Don’t underestimate how important the ability to move is – and how much of a jump in engagement there is when you have that movement.” Not surprisingly, he recommends using video regularly.
(https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcus-rosenthal/)
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Original transcript
Lisette: I think we’re live. So welcome everybody to this remote interview. My name is Lisette and I’m interviewing people and companies doing great things remotely. And I’m totally excited today because I saw this on a webinar last week. But I have with me today Marcus Rosenthal and Jeff Goldsmith. Jeff, you’re on the KUBI which is what we’re here to talk about. And we’re here to talk about KUBI which in Japanese means neck. And I have what is the world’s first portable video teleconference device. I welcome you guys. As people that know me know, I’m a huge fan of telepresence. So this is just another step down the rabbit hole of telepresence that I’m going down. But it’s pretty exciting because it’s very mobile, and that’s a key issue. And the price points, we’re going to get into that.
But maybe before we start, let’s start with the quick question of when you guys work remotely, what does your anywhere office look like? Give us a view of where you guys are working.
Marcus: Jeff, maybe you want to talk about where you’re working right now because he’s actually remote. I’m sitting in our office in San Francisco and he’s in Oakland.
Jeff: I’m in Oakland and I actually have a view of the Bay which is behind me. Not Bay, it’s Lake Merritt. So that’s where I am.
Lisette: I’m homesick already. I used to work on Lake Merritt.
Jeff: I’m just supposed to be getting my car running across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco. And I can look at Marcus and I can look around the office. And we have other KUBIs in the office. So if I need to meet with someone else, I can move to the other KUBI and meet with them.
Lisette: Okay, so you basically beam in and beam out, or I don’t know if you have another terminology that you use for it.
Jeff: Actually, we haven’t decided on the name of it yet, but we’re considering calling it teleporting because everyone understands what that means.
Lisette: Awesome. And everybody wants to teleport, right?
Marcus: Yeah, you can never be in enough places at once. And we’ll show you some teleporting, granted this will just be here around our office, but even that is very useful. Someone remote can now go and interact with everyone.
Jeff: There’s a restaurant owner in Japan who owns four or five restaurants – I can’t quite remember – and he teleports from restaurant to restaurant to check in on a daily basis with his cooks and so forth.
Lisette: Brilliant. So are people carrying him around or are you connected?
Jeff: It could be in each of the four locations. They’re in different cities.
Lisette: Right, but I mean the KUBI in the restaurant.
Jeff: That, in the kitchens.
Marcus: No, they leave it in one location and he’s in the kitchen and he can turn and interact with them around. So for the most part, people aren’t really moving KUBI around. They decide on a location for it and it stays there. We do have a KUBI cart that is a mobile cart. It’s not motorized. It’s really designed for telemedicine applications. So that one does make it easy to adjust where you put the KUBI, but it’s still not motorized, which most of our customers are finding actually to like that the simplicity and the low cost and just really concentrating on that interaction and the ability to look around.
Lisette: Right. I think that mobility is actually one of the key points of telepresence. If you don’t have any video, you’ve completely lost sight – which is one of the five senses. But when you have mobility, it’s almost like you have an extra sense. You’re adding just another layer of sense. And I think it makes a significant jump in engagement. It’s surprisingly significant, I would say.
Marcus: Yeah, and that’s what we’re hearing from all of our customers. Jeff and I have been talking to a lot of them recently. We see a lot of our early customers as beta testers that are giving us feedback as we reshape what our product offering is and the software. And they’re all telling us that’s what is really so great about KUBI is that it makes their meetings or any interactions more engaging, having that ability to look around. I know right now Jeff is looking toward you, so his attention is toward you. But if I’m going to have a conversation with Jeff, he can turn and look toward me, and I don’t have to worry about it. There’s not “oh, he’s just seeing what he wants to see. Do I need to make the adjustment?” And it’s not dizzying from somebody trying to hold an iPad.
Lisette: That is actually a significant problem that I hear from a lot of remote teams. If you’re the only one in the office that’s not remote and you’re in the conference room, they’ve just got you on a laptop somewhere in the corner and you’re missing half of everything because people are moving around and drawing on the whiteboard.
Marcus: Yeah, that’s what we really want to make it so that that person has full control to interact just as if they would’ve been there because in reality, in most meetings, people aren’t actually exchanging… you’re not touching anything. It’s more about the conversation. People might be drawing on the whiteboard and those kinds of things. But now this remote person both has a presence and is able to interact with everyone else there.
Lisette: Right. I was thinking. The difference between the BeamPro or the Double Robotics – these ones that you can drive from your laptop – is you can drive it to a meeting, but most of the time, you’re just sitting there once you get to the meeting or once you’re at the conference anyway. And it’s a pain. When I went to a conference, I went to one that had stairs. So every time I had to go to a new conference room, I had to have somebody take me down the flight of stairs and push the elevator button for me [laughs].
Marcus: Yeah. Think about, okay, every once in a while, you’ll go on a walk with someone and have a conversation. But most of the time that you’re having meaningful interactions, especially on a business setting, medical, or education, you’re in one location. So the ability to move around isn’t the most obvious, that you want to be able to have that natural ability to turn and interact. And with the roaming robots, I believe that we can steer the camera a little bit. But if you want to turn to look at somebody, you actually have to turn the whole robot, so it’s a bit awkward. It’s being like this and it’s like.
Lisette: [laughs].
Marcus: It’s just a little weird and disruptive in a meeting, so this is much more natural for people.
Lisette: And now Jeff, do you state…
Jeff: But if you buy a whole suite of KUBIs and put them in every conference room at the conference you went to, and simply go from one KUBI to the next. Again, teleporting, we think it’s superior to roaming around and the time it takes to get to key locations. If the Wi-Fi drops out, your roaming robot is stuck.
Lisette: Totally. I asked a lot of people for help during that conference when I was with the BeamPro. There were stairs. The Wi-Fi wasn’t consistent. It’s a brilliant object but…
Marcus: We have some distance learning customers that have used some of the roaming robots. They said that they literally…well two things. First, they had to let the student leave the class 10 minutes early to have enough time to get to their next class. Second, they had to have another kid babysit it. So there had to be another kid leave early. And then it ended up that the kids just started carrying it because they’re like, oh, this thing is so slow. So now they had another kid carrying this thing and it was just awkward. So now those same ones, initially, they’re deploying it or they’ve stuck it onto a cart. They didn’t have the money for a KUBI cart, so they just screwed it onto a [crosstalk – 00:08:30]. They had a library cart around and they said it worked great. The other student can push it around, put their back on and everything.
Lisette: Brilliant. Did you guys start in the medical field? Because when I saw the KUBI cart and all of this, I though, oh, of course, telepresence and medicine seem like something that comes up as soon as you talk about telepresence at all. Education and medicine seem to be the two most popular. But how did you guys start?
Marcus: We started really trying to create something that was more for the remote worker, the telecommuter and that sort of thing. Then we had many customers in that space, but the ones that are really finding that we’re the best solution for it are the distance learning and telemedicine. For those two specifically, there aren’t other great solutions that solve that problem at the affordable price point because schools want to put this in every classroom. And if they need to go spend tens of thousands of dollars on a robot, they can’t afford it. They’re going to have one per school. It’s same thing with hospitals. They don’t want to have to have doctors spending time driving a robot from room to room if they could even deal with all the closed doors and things that might be in the way. They’d rather just have one in each room that they can have there. And with the cart, they can easily maneuver it around if they have different medical equipment. But it resides in that room with the patient.
Jeff: But for home care, you want to send a telepresence device home with the outpatient so that you can check in with them. You can’t send this gigantic device home with them. We could even drop ship with FedEx to your home to make sure you’re doing your knee exercises so your knee surgery turns out okay.
Marcus: And you usually want to deploy it with a 4G tablet, so that you don’t have to worry about the quality of the patient’s Wi-Fi at home if they even have it.
Lisette: Right. I was thinking. When I moved to the Netherlands, I spoke to my grandmother every day. She lives in Utah. So I would call her on Skype every day because she worried. So if I called her, she wouldn’t worry and I thought that’s good. But when I learned about the roaming robots, I thought it would’ve been great to have a roaming robot to put into her house. Of course, it’d be a lot of money to do something like that. But with the KUBI, I wouldn’t have thought twice. I would’ve just put it in her house and bought an iPad and then I could talk to her. We could actually see each other. I think the KUBI wouldn’t be too weird, even for an older generation.
Marcus: Yeah.
Lisette: Whereas a robot would’ve freaked her out, I’m sure of it [laughs].
Marcus: Everybody has already used to having an iPad or a laptop and doing Skype, FaceTime, those sorts of interactions. Everybody is comfortable with that. So now, if there’s just that added ability that they can turn it and move it, the remote person can turn it and move it, that’s huge – especially for elderly parents. A lot of our customers they don’t want to put their parents into a full-time care home, nursing home. But they’re a little worried about whether they’re going to be safe and remember to take their medications and those sorts of things. Now both their kids or their doctor can just easily pop in and make sure everything is okay. And if for some reason it doesn’t look okay, then they can send someone out.
Lisette: Right. There are a lot of those in-between cases where you’re not sure that causes a lot of anxiety and travel that this would immediately solve.
Marcus: And at the price point, we’re hearing from our customers. There’s a student at a school that becomes home bound, like the one in Voluntown, Connecticut where they’ve deployed it. They had a student who became sick. And they really just go the next day and buy a KUBI and bring it in. They didn’t have to go through a six-month process of investigating whether it was going to make sense in the budget.
Lisette: Right. It’s a lean safe to fail. If it doesn’t work, then I think it’s $499 for a KUBI. Is that right?
Marcus: Yeah, it’s $499. We do have a 30-day satisfaction guarantee, and then we even offer a loaner program. Usually we never get our loaners back because they purchase them. That explains how it is. We want to make it easy for it to get into people’s hands.
Lisette: Right. It sounds pretty safe to fail. I’ve lost a lot more than $500 in my life. I’m sure that I’m not alone as an entrepreneur. I think there are lots of entrepreneurs that wouldn’t blink at $500, so interesting. So with remote working then, what is the main challenge that you’re solving? Is it really just the commuting, the distance workers? What are the challenges that you’re hearing about most that KUBI is solving for you?
Marcus: The remote working is actually really about giving that person a presence in the office. So everyone thinks that oh, KUBI is telepresence and we’re going to just put it in the conference room. It certainly works great there but where it’s really interesting is we have a number of customers. One is a lawyer at [inaudible – 00:14:30]. And he actually puts KUBI on his desk when he works remotely. So it’s on his desk in an office that he’s not in the office. And now he has a presence there. He actually mostly works from his home in New York and this is an office in Mountain View, California.
Lisette: But he’s still at his desk all day. So whether he’s in New York or with the KUBI, he would still be at his desk in California.
Marcus: Yeah, so that’s the thing. It’s really about now he has a presence there. So it’s not even necessarily moving the KUBI, interacting with people all day. Now people can come and check in on him. If they have a question, they walk in. He said he’s had people do interviews. He’s interviewed candidates. They came to his office in Mountain View and he was only there on a KUBI. And he’s now able to interact with them. He could turn and look right at them.
Jeff: I will do a blog post of that photograph and that story so that when this airs, it’ll be live on our website. So if anybody wants to see that photograph, it’ll be on our website.
Lisette: Brilliant. I think I saw during the webinar and I loved it.
Marcus: Yeah, we said that one. It’s really about just bringing back their presence. And even a supervisor, they’re no longer concerned. That’s often a concern when you’re allowing your employee to work remotely. Are they really working? Well, now they’re there. If they’re sitting on KUBI and even if you see him cranking away at their computer, if you walk by, you know they’re working. So it’s not only for the executive that wants to be traveling, but it certainly works well for those remote workers that are becoming more and more common.
Lisette: It probably opens up a whole new form of office humor too. I mean you could put wigs and hats and bow ties [laughs].
Marcus: Yeah. We had our customer at [inaudible – 00:16:39]. They dressed up their KUBI like a doll.
Jeff: I’ve tried to think about what you get when you put a KUBI in a blah, blah, blah. But I can’t think of a joke for that.
Lisette: If anybody has ideas, they can put it in the show notes, in the comments. That’ll be hilarious.
Jeff: [inaudible] jokes.
Lisette: So then what are the challenges that people are facing when they’re using the KUBI? It all sounds really great. Why wouldn’t somebody do this?
Marcus: I would say that there are a lot of people holding back right now. We’re working to create more awareness of it. And we’re just about to launch KUBI Video 2.0 which is all-in-one videoconferencing. And we’re enabling the ability to connect into different contacts. The reasons why people aren’t adopting it today is they say, oh, our company already has Cisco and we’ve already adopted these expensive systems. I can’t bring it in. But in reality, often what’s happening is the person who wants to use it is just going to buy it themselves and then they show the company that hey, look how easy this is. And we think that it’s really about augmenting the systems. Okay, there’s a time and a place, dedicated telepresence room. But in reality, those are in less than 5 percent of conference rooms. So all those other ones where something like this conference room size, which is designed for eight people, most companies can’t afford to put in traditional videoconferencing. Now with this, you can. We’re seeing companies putting it in. So they have, like Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals. What do they put into their conference room, Jeff? Was it four or five KUBIs?
Jeff: They put four or five into their conference room. There’s a hospital that’s using it. Where’s that children’s hospital?
Marcus: That one is in Jacksonville.
Jeff: Yeah. So they put a bunch. A bunch of people can attend their meetings because they have 50 or something remote workers. So when they have a big meeting, any number of people can come to that conference. I can only say from a prospect, someone who has not bought KUBI yet but they probably will, when you talk about why aren’t more people doing this, it’s not quite part of the workflow yet. Remember when fax machines were new and you would ask them do you have a fax machine. And they’d be like “no. What’s a fax machine?” And suddenly, then there were fax machines everywhere and it became part of the natural work flow, where you would just fax things to people. And then email. Do you have email? What’s email? I guess this was in the 90s. And suddenly, everyone had email. It became part of the workflow. And video calls will become part of the workflow. It’s slowly growing. FaceTime on the phone, a friend of mine regularly talks to his brother on FaceTime. I don’t do it very much, but I feel like it’s becoming part of the workflow. As it does, this kind of thing will soon become commonplace.
Lisette: Yeah, I agree. It seems to me that there’s some sort of a tipping point coming soon where people realize exactly – especially with more remote working – how important it is to be able to see each other and to interact with each other. And I think one of the things that maybe people don’t adopt this so quickly is because I would think a lot of people underestimate how important the ability to move is and how much of a jump that is in engagement when you have that movement. I think that’s critical. You wouldn’t notice it necessarily unless you experience it. So then you have the trouble of how do you get more people to experience this.
Marcus: Yeah, certainly getting them to understanding the motion and why its need is important. But I think most people can very easily understand that. If I just show them that, okay, here’s your typical laptop webcam view. And now we’re having a conversation, I want to write something on the whiteboard and all these things, it becomes very clear why you would need or want that.
Lisette: Right. Anybody that’s been a remote worker who’s attending a meeting where everybody else is in the conference room and you’re trying to hear who’s next to you or what’s being written on the whiteboard, this is big for them.
Marcus: It’s interesting that a lot of larger, more established corporations just have not adopted video really at all, except for those very few board meetings where they have the videoconference. And these companies they do often have a lot of remote workers, but they just haven’t brought in video. We want to show them that it’s easy and accessible to use, but it’s just the culture that people are like, “Oh, I work from home. I like to be in my pajamas.” A lot of technology companies, people come to work in whatever you’re wearing, however you’re dressed. So those types of companies are more of the early adopter, they’re like, fine, okay, you’re in your pajamas. Your dog is jumping on you. It’s okay. I understand that you’re working from home. As long as you get your work done, It’s okay to do that.
Lisette: It also solves two big issues that I see. One is there are a lot of extroverts who when they work from home, they feel very isolated and away from people. I’ve used tools like Squiggle or just leaving Hangouts on sometimes when I’m having a collaborative session so that I can see the people that I’m working with. Even if we’re not talking, it’s nice to just have the video there so that I’m not totally alone while I’m working. It solves some of that extrovert craving that I have to just be around people, even when I can’t be around people because I’m working from my office.
Marcus: Along those lines, I would like to show you the demo of KUBI video and how we can do this teleporting so that you can see what the experience would be like within an office, so that you can quickly jump from location to location. You’ve seen it from the other end of okay, I’m in the room with the KUBI. But now I can show you what controls that Jeff has and the way that you can just easily jump from location to location.
Lisette: Are we able to do that if I give you the ability to… or if you share your screen?
Marcus: Yeah. So just go ahead, window, okay. So this is our KUBI video dashboard, and what it does is it actually has a list of different available KUBIs over here on the right side. So Jeff is actually on this Marcus KUBI that I brought in the office and that’s mine. That’s why it’s showing up as red because it’s already been occupied. But I can now go and jump into or teleport to any other one that’s on this list. So I have three different ones set up. You click just so that you know you’re about to enter a video meeting. And it’s running WebRTC. So it’s just in a browser. And I click Allow. And now boom, I can see that Oliver is not on his desk, but I’m able to go there. Maybe he’s talking to Elliot. No, he’s not there either. But then I can go jump to another location. Okay, there was Oliver’s desk. This is a different one. This is the one we have from our website where anyone can log into it actually at any time. I log into live KUBI now. It starts looking out the window and it has some fun little instructions, and you can go ahead and even see yourself on a KUBI. There’s us seeing ourselves.
Lisette: That’s so meta. It’s blowing my brains a little [laughs].
Marcus: That’s a little demo of what’s going on there. That was a mirror.
Jeff: There’s a joke. How do I look as a robot? I don’t know. Look in the mirror.
Lisette: [laughs]
Marcus: It’s easy. It’s basically two clicks. One, you click on the specific device. And the next one, you just allow the camera and microphone. And now you’re actually interacting with someone remotely. It doesn’t start till 10:00, our time, usually, so they’re not in here yet.
Lisette: They’re all getting the cup of coffee. So it looks like it’s controlled through the browser and that it’s a click and drag through the browser. Is that right?
Marcus: Yeah. So actually what it is it’s a click to center. So if I want to center on this coffee cup, I just click on that and it makes it my new center of view. And why that’s great as opposed to having arrow keys is that you know that it’s going to move to that absolute position. So if there’s a Wi-Fi latency, say if I get a freeze in my video, then I’m going to think, oh, maybe it didn’t get that input. I want to keep clicking on it.
Lisette: And suddenly, you’re moving, spinning around.
Marcus: Yeah. You’re overshooting and you’re not going to where you want to. But this way, I click, then it moves there, and I know that there’s not another motion inputted until it’s completely done the move. We’ve done some interesting things where you can save a view. So here we have the Save View button and then it populates this little number 1 here. And let’s come to another view. We’ll check out our electronics bench there. And then I click another Save View. And then I can just go back and click 1 and it goes back to that last view. We’ll go back to the bench. And you can even access this, so now I’m going to press 1 on my keyboard. So you can just have a bunch of different 1s and then just easily control with your keyboard.
Jeff: That restaurant in Japan, you can imagine these KUBIs are in that restaurant. It’s five restaurants in Japan, in Kobe, Osaka, Nara, and Tokyo. You just teleport from restaurant to restaurant rather than getting on the bullet train.
Lisette: Right. This has got to save so much time and so much…I mean the commute anywhere…this is brilliant. The other thing that I can imagine that this really solves for business…in every interview that I do – and I’ve done a lot of interviews now – one thing that comes up every time is the issue of trust with remote workers. How do we know people are working? I work with a number of different clients. It’s not like I’m necessarily online with one person all day. But if I were working on a team and you wanted to know if that person was working, having just the video stream there seems like it would be a no-brainer.
Marcus: Right.
Lisette: So that solves the issue of trust. If that’s a major issue in a company, if people do really need to see you, then this is really a great way to do that.
Marcus: Yeah, that’s just like what I said earlier how bosses…you always wonder. I let my employees work from home very often as well. And if they’re not on the KUBI, then it’s like what are they doing right now? Are they really working?
Jeff: I’m working.
Lisette: But it’s good to know. Maybe you want to go jogging or something and you say I’m going to sign off for now and at least somebody knows, okay, they’re out jogging, or whatever it is the agreed upon schedule that employees want to have with each other.
Marcus: Yeah, you don’t want to be micromanaging them but you want to just know that you’re paying them and you’re getting your money’s worth, that they’re working as you’re expecting them to.
Jeff: Yes
Marcus: [laughs]
Lisette: [laughs]
Marcus: Get to work [laughs].
Lisette: Interesting. So then I guess we can wrap it up a little bit here. Maybe the last question I should ask is if people want to know more, if they want to buy these, what’s the process and where do they go? Where can they find you? What’s the best place?
Marcus: Our website is revolverobotics.com. You do have the ability to purchase from there. We have a number of resellers and distributors that are also listed on our website so that they can buy through. So many companies want to buy through the dealers that are already buying their IT equipment from.
Lisette: And do you have global resellers also, for example people in Europe?
Marcus: Right now, we have one set up in Japan. We will ship internationally. We’re actually actively looking for some resellers and distributors in Europe because we have a lot of interest there, but we just haven’t yet got them set up.
Lisette: Okay, yeah, I can imagine. That won’t be hard to find. So this will be fun because a lot of my audience is European. So at least you’ll reach that market out.
Marcus: Maybe we’ll find a distributor through this.
Lisette: Yeah, great. All right. Is there anything else? Is there something that I didn’t ask that I should have asked that we need to know about the KUBI?
Marcus: Jeff, anything else that you can think of?
Jeff: Nothing I can think of. I think that was pretty thorough. We gave you two great case studies.
Marcus: I guess the only other thing I could share about it is the connectivity with accessories like speakerphone, and we have a KUBI Secure. So KUBI is actually designed as a modular system. Here I’ll just show you. It’s got a conformable tablet mount. You can put the tablet on, virtually any tablet, in portrait or landscape. That’s nice if you’re using the tablet also for other things. We have a version that’s called the KUBI Secure, and that actually locks down both the tablet and the KUBI with a Kensington lock. So if you want to leave it in a more public space, whether it’s a public conference room or reception area, you can do that.
Lisette: I didn’t even think of that. But that would be an important issue, actually, if you have all these iPads and expensive equipment lying around.
Marcus: Yeah. We made it so that all the charging ports stay accessible. We explicitly didn’t design it for one specific device where you have a charging dock in it because then probably by the time you get the device, you’re going to already have a new iPad or a new tablet. So it’s not going to be compatible with it anymore. Since it connects over Bluetooth 4.0, which is a connectivity that we expect to be in all future tablets and devices, it will continue to work as you get new ones.
Lisette: And it also looks as if it’s wireless. That’s awesome.
Marcus: Yes. So it does charge through a mini USB, but it is completely wireless. So now it’s completely unplugged and Jeff is still able to control and move the device.
Lisette: And what’s the battery life?
Marcus: It has four hours of battery life. That’s the standard battery life. In the future, we are looking to actually roll out accessories that would be a base that will have a battery pack within it. And that would be something that would work with the existing KUBI that you have. It’s a standard tripod mount base. So you can see it’s just got a tripod screw there. We have many customers that don’t want to use the standard base. They can put it on a tripod so that you can easily adjust it to whatever height you want or any tripod mount clamp. And as far as audio, the audio on tablets, it works pretty good if you have maybe two or three people around within five to six feet of KUBI. But once you go beyond that, you often want to have enhanced audio. You can either tie it into your existing speakerphone system that you have – say you use zoom and zoom has a dial inline. You can use that, which is a little more difficult to set up. Or you can use a variety of Bluetooth and wired speakerphones that are out there. We have some different ones on our website that we recommend, that we’ve tried that work well. That way, like the Phoenix ones, you can have people up to 20 feet away from the speakerphone and you could still be hearing just like they were in the same room with you.
Lisette: Yeah, and I think those technologies are increasingly important with the distributed workforce because now we have them. There’s no reason to not implement something where everybody can hear well and see well and we can actually start really collaborating together, which is fun.
Marcus: Since KUBI is all based on apps, we’re able to continually improve the product. We originally launched this a year ago. We did not have this KUBI video that we’re showing here today. So we rolled that out. And we’re planning to implement within KUBI video another application, more like auto tracking features in the future, which many people had asked about us like, oh, can we follow who is speaking or follow a face, that sort of thing. Those all of the same KUBI product can just be rolled out as app updates [inaudible – 00:36:59] what we have.
Lisette: Brilliant. So it’s not going to be like the iPad where you have to buy a new one every few years.
Marcus: Yeah. But I’ll still go buy a new iPad because you have cameras or connectivity or who knows what. But you’ll be wanting to buy more KUBIs, but you won’t have to replace the ones that you already have.
Lisette: Brilliant. I totally love it. I hope this is very successful. It seems to me like it’s a no-brainer for remote working. Especially when I hear about the challenges people are facing, when the challenge is trust and lack of engagement, well, then there’s a solution.
Marcus: That’s just super easy to set up. To set up the KUBI, you just launch the app and it automatically connects and it’s ready to go. And then you just send an invite or the person adds you to their contact list and they can just click right on there. One click and they’re logged into a KUBI as well.
Lisette: Also, it’s less scary than a robot. I’ve got to say, I think that that’s going to be a big deal. I mean for me, telepresence robots, when I first heard about it, I signed up immediately. I had to try it. But it turns out I’m the most enthusiastic person I know about it. I offered free robot demos to people and nobody took me up on it, nobody at all. And I thought, oh, I’m just mad at my time [laughs]. But this is less intimidating.
Marcus: Yeah. And I think that at the right time, the roaming robots will exist in certain applications.
Lisette: For sure.
Marcus: Right now, with the Wi-Fi connectivity and people just have a fear. If you have a roaming video camera in your office, that’s a kind of a security risk. A wrong person logs into it. Whereas this, it’s in one location, more control. It doesn’t have its own [inaudible – 00:39:08]. I think there was even a press article about how one of the roaming robots broke out where it’s supposed to be.
Lisette: Oh man! The robots are coming.
Marcus: A lot of people are like, “Wait, that’s not a robot. It doesn’t have wheels.”
Lisette: Right. It’s just an iPad. It’s not so weird.
Marcus: So it’s like trying to make it not intimidating.
Lisette: Right. Well, I love it. I’m very excited to have the chance to talk with you guys. I appreciate you taking the time. I hope that this video will help you get more resellers in Europe. We’ll see. You have to let me know. All right, so I’ll sign off and I’ll stop the recording shortly. But until next time, everybody, be powerful.
