Smart toy startup Elemental Path introduces the STEMosaur, a robot kids can put together
Elemental Path has come a long way since it debuted its first Cognitoy on the Hardware Battlefield stage at CES in 2016. The smart toy maker debuted on Kickstarter with an IBM Watson-powered toy dinosaur kids could talk to.
It’s now launching a whole new dino robot, the STEMosaur. The new dino looks similar to Elemental’s original smart toy but is now a translucent green and lets kids put it together and program it, too.
One other important update — the STEMosaur eschews Watson in favor of Elemental’s own proprietary software.
Why the switch? “Watson is built for enterprise businesses and pharma, not for kids,” founder Donald Coolidge told TechCrunch. “Watson helped us to get to market as fast as possible, but we’ve now collected that data and want to use it to build something centering around child interaction.”
The STEMosaur is currently up for pre-order on Indiegogo, but Coolidge assures us this is not one of those campaigns where the product never ships or you have to wait for three years after buying. In fact, he says the STEMosaur is already in production and will be ready to go this Christmas.
Coolidge’s previous dino toy also met with great success, hitting well past its initial Kickstarter campaign by five fold, and he was able to raise around $4 million in funding for it and develop several retail partnerships to sell the toy, including Toys “R” Us and Amazon.
He hopes to repeat that success with the STEMosaur and intends for the Indiegogo campaign to help build the fan base.
It looks like he’s getting what he wanted out of the platform already. There are still 15 days left in the campaign and it’s already blown 200 percent past its original $25,000 goal.
Those interested in getting this little dino bot for their kid should keep in mind it is most suitable for those ages seven and up. You can get the basic unit in time for Christmas for $119 for the next few days on Indiegogo, or wait to buy it in stores for $139.
0 comments:
Post a Comment