Expper Technologies: Smiling Robots Alleviate Human Anxieties

The great lyric poet Billy Idol once sung “Eyes without a face, got no human grace, you’re eyes without a face.” This profound statement has been ringing loudly during this period of social distancing and masked encounters. As I professed on several webinars to understand the mechanics of reopening with … Read More

It Takes A Village To Deploy A Tactile Telerobot

Observing MLK Day, I followed in the footsteps of Katherine Johnson at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Her memory still looms large over the Mission Control room that launched Apollo 11’s successful lunar landing fifty years ago. This historic milestone could not have been achieved without the mathematical genius … Read More

The PropTech Report: An Open Frontier For Hardware Entrepreneurs

Two constants have guided my professional life: venture capital and real estate. Every year, I eagerly await to see which portfolio will produce greater returns. Today, in the  words of the great (fictional) New Yorker George Louis Costanza, “Worlds are colliding!”  Enertiv, a New York Angels investment, keeps growing with … Read More

Conquering The Home, One Shirt At A Time

Last week, attending the Our Crowd Summit, I felt engulfed by the breadth of innovation and minds gathered in Jerusalem’s International Convention Center. Jonathan Medved’s billion dollar crowd-funding platform has launched some of Israel’s most promising mechatronic startups, including: ReWalk, Intuition Robotics, Airobotics and Argus Cyber Security. Medved’s success is … Read More

Get Ready For Humanoids

Memphis at 1am is quite possibly the busiest airport without passengers on the globe. Touring the 880 acre FedEx facility, I marveled at the speed and efficiency of the automation technologies that can process close to a half a million shipments an hour and 250 flights a day. The cargo hub … Read More

Singapore: An Autonomous Innovation Center

Jim Robinson of RRE Ventures said it best last month at the Silicon Dragon Conference when comparing Silicon Valley to New York, “There are two kinds of centers that have a lot of startups and technology, there are technology centers and commerce centers.” New York falls into the later category, … Read More

What Has Twenty Years Of RoboCup Taught Us?

In 1985, a twenty-two year old Garry Kasparov became the youngest World Chess Champion. Twelve years later, he was defeated by the only player capable of challenging the grandmaster, IBM’s Deep Blue. That same year, RoboCup was formed to take on the world’s most popular game, soccer, with robots. Twenty years … Read More