I was waiting on another "deal," babysitting another $50 Million Dollar Idea. Babysitting a deal leaves you with a lot of spare time. It's a large development loop consisting of propose, stay persistent, tweak the proposition, wait for email feedback. Repeat these steps till the deal is made. It's the way some people make their living.
In the Military they called it, "Hurry up and wait."
During my last round of hurry up and wait, I killed the time building robots. Just started out buying a couple of ten dollar "walkers." Cuz I wanted to see how far the hardware had come while I had spent the last twenty years in various loop-cycles investments for Motorola.
The state of AI in the days when I got first exposure to the field was a disappointment. The more I learned the more I could see that processing power would not be able to keep pace with software demands. Really meaty AI, the stuff of robots pets and android kitchen helpers, was the territory of new kinds of computational architectures. That would take a while.
In the earliest years AI flipped and flopped eventually morphed into one of its sub-units, Knowledge Based AI. That was great for all the call centers of the world, but it wasn't the stuff of my dreams.
I guess that's what eventually steered me do go into AI, messing around with Artificial Neural Networks and Fuzzy Logic. I had gone so far as to stick my neck out 30 years ago and declare that someday we would have Microprocessor driven pets published in my book on Personal Computing. And, as opportunity would have it, eventually I came to land in Motorola's Semiconductor Division.
But where did CwhatIcanDo come from? The robots!
Killing the time building robots allowed me to understand the robotic "state of the art." What I discovered was a sizeable number of sites dedicated to robots, often homemade and held together with tape. That is, for every professional robotics site there were probably two to three amateur robot sites. The quality of the amateur sites ranged from super-professional looking, yet homemade "bots" to the aforementioned tape and wire with everything imaginable between. There were a lot of bots, a lot of bot websites, yet there didn't seem to be anyone tying all of it together. I started a blog and used everyone else's software pictures on picasweb, blog on google, videos on google video and you tube.
By experimenting with the blog and you tube and it's associated search engines I started to get position on interesting search words and played around with that for a while. I was able to optimize my approach. But a blog format wasn't the best for creating a step-by-step project or experiment with robot pieces. Thus was born the concept for a website oriented toward building projects which people could look at by scanning through projects until they found something interesting. If I built the website correctly, then when you looked around at finished projects and the steps leading up to them, you could become not just inspired to build your own or another, version of something that inspired you, you could instantly sign up and begin to document your project.
In addition, I thought my fellow homebrew robot friends would like to make a little money and show off their projects all at the same time. So we integrated the parts list into the project in such a way that when a person clicked on the parts list, they could click and easily order the part online, without leaving their project. Since it was clear the click for purchase came from CwhatIcanDo, so we made deals with distributors. Now when someone is inspired to build a wall-climbing bot inspired by your dancing flower pot project, CwhatIcanDo makes money on the sales commission. Then the website splits the income with the person who created the dancing flower pot project that inspired the purchase.
Not only that, if the project resulted in creation of a complete kit of parts, the creator could link to and sell his or her (or it: allowing for androids) directly on CwhatIcanDo. In addition, we encourage our creators to publish (and sell) their own robot books, parts, anything and everything by granting a commission to CwhatIcanDo. Yes, it is possible to double-dip. That is, you can sell your book on Amazon, then you not only get your royalty check, you get your cut of the commission from CwhatIcanDo!
Robotic amateur creators need to be free to create not only fun widgets, but also a have a way to monetize their interest in robots and robotic experimentation.
But there are other creators out there as well. It's not just about Robots... It's about how to do just about anything you can think of. And our creators will no doubt think of things we hadn't envisioned. We are thinking maybe Home projects, automotive, electronic, we allow you to categorize your project where you think it's best. Eventually, those categories will populate with projects and the popularity of getting a chance to CwhatOTHERScanDo ...
Checkout CwhatIcanDo.com (Opening for Beta in the Fall of 2008.)
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