“‘Beam’ me up, Scotty” Remote Presence Technology

“‘Beam’ me up, Scotty” Remote Presence Technology

At Bloomberg Link Next Big Thing Summit, the were two products that caught the eye of this reporter. One semi-old, the other new.

Beam is a mobile, remote video-conferencing platform, a newcomer born out of robotics of Willow Garage. The other is a high profile, high-flying winged-man that sparked attention by jetting over the Swiss Alps a few years ago. In the latter, Cory Johnson interviewed Yves Rossy, CEO and the “pilot” of Jetman in a one-on-one discussion, Adventures in Aviation (see separate article for Jetman). 

What is ‘Beam?’

Experiencing Beam demoed live, I connected with the PR rep from Suitabletech, Inc., the company that invented Beam.

Sitting in the press area at the Apella Theater on the east side of Manhattan, I looked up and saw this tall, slender, mobile robot zoom over to me, very Jetson-like. But it was a robot with out arms or legs. Beam’s twin poles rise up from what looks like a hose-less vacuum cleaner with big wheels on the bottom and a beautiful tablet interface on top. And like a laptop, it has a large camera lens that can zoom in and out.

What does that do? It allows for a seamless communication between the person on screen in her office and anopther sitting at a different location. The best part of Beam is its easy navigation. Beam’s joystick is actually the page arrows on the laptop keyboard. So moving Beam requires little training, is intuitive, and works off of WiFi signals on both ends of the live interface conversation—or what Scott Hassan, CEO and President of Suitabletech calls “remote presence.”

Better than Skype, more personal with better video quality than a Web-stream, Beam is durable on top of being easy to use. In test-driving the 100-lb Beam, I drove it through Suitabletech’s Palo Alto, CA, office, 3,000 miles away, down a hall to the supply room in the back where a fleet of Beams are fine-tuned and tested, and have a brief conversation with a technician.

Scott Hassan, together with his PR rep on Beam, discussed his past as founder of Willow Garage, eGroups (now Yahoo! Groups), and as the “key software architect and developer of Google, Alexa Internet, and Stanford University Digital Library,” his alma mater.

Personable, warm, with realistic expectations that Beam will catch on to vastly improve meetings for enterprises and their vendors, Hassan explained that Beam was born out of frustration. “In 2011, we were developing autonomous robotics, automated cars, solar-power autonomous boats, and then switched to personal robotics,” he said.

“We called out first prototype PR2, for Personal Robot 2,” he said. “In order to get traction, I had to look outside the Bay Area for talent. I hired an onshore engineer in Indiana to work for us. But between the phone, emails and Skype, no one knew who the engineer was… until he decided to do something about it.”

Building a single, 450-lb PR2 robot cost “$400,000, with a huge team of sixty engineers. But it was that one electrical engineer from Indiana, who had to talk over the phone, who knew no one and know one of knew him. Well, he cobbled together a pre-Beam running on Skype… and he went from the least known employee to the most known,” Hassan explained. “He had a presence. A distraction became a pivot… We stopped making PR2s. We will ship the last one in October, after making 60 of them.”

Mr. Hassan never really saw mass-producing PR2. But Beam is a different matter: “At $16,000 with an annual maintenance fee of $2,400, which includes support, software upgrades, and customer service,” Beam seems affordable for the enterprise.

Today, IBM, HP, Microsoft, and Intel use Beam with their division heads and their clients and vendors around the world, whether in the intimate setting of the office or in the conference room with many people live on many Beams.”

In his view, Beam is a personal, natural way to communicate. It also doesn’t record as a matter of policy, so it doesn’t leave a digital footprint. So if people argue on Beam, it’s the same as they do it in person. When it’s over, nothing is recorded that can be used against any person.

“It’s bi-directional. If I can see you, you can see me… If one user disconnects one side of Beam, then the conversation turns off on both sides. The idea is to make people feel comfortable,” he said.

Now Scott Hassan and his team are building Beam for outdoor use.

“Beam me up, Scotty!” Not quite. But Beam is taking us a step into the Jetson Age, pre Star Trek.