Heartland Robotics Ramps Up, Rejiggers Management as Co-founder Departs and IntelliVid Founder Arrives
Robert Buderi11/7/08Leave a CommentFollow @bbuderi
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the opportunity came, when Rod gave me the call, it was just too exciting,” he says. “This is the seventh startup I’ve been involved in, and it’s the third one I’ve led.” IntelliVid, of course, is one of those. The other is Trenza, a Second Life-like startup that folded when the dotcom bubbled popped in 2001.
“I think it’s a revolutionary concept,” Sobalvarro says of Brooks’ idea of providing affordable robotics that can enable even Mom-and-Pop operations to improve productivity. “The opportunity here is to reduce integration cost and really make it possible for people to apply robotics to areas where robotics has never been applied before,” he says. “And that’s really the key–making robotics something workers can work with the same way as a tradesman works with a drill.”
One other heartening detail from Heartland, at least for us at Xconomy. The company’s office is almost directly across the street from the Middle East Restaurant, home to Xconomy’s annual Battle of the Tech Bands, which we just announced will be held on January 22, 2009—an announcement that didn’t escape the attention of Brooks. “We’re just waiting for the next Battle of the Bands,” he says. “But we don’t have a band.”
Bob is Xconomy's founder and editor in chief. You can e-mail him at bbuderi@xconomy.com, call him at 617.500.5926, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/bbuderi.
