Tuesday, September 18, 2007

The first successful consumer robot is getting an upgrade – generated directly from customer evangelists

It was five years ago. A great innovation of something that had once been a tedious chore. Vacuuming would never be the same again, or so I thought when I purchased a first generation Roomba.

The designers, iRobot Corp., found out early that these cute little robots were becoming more than an appliance to the owners. Roombas were treated like family pets, given custom paint jobs and other modifications.

So the company ran with it. They introduced the iRobot Create – a stripped down version of the Roomba that had its programmatic interface opened to developers – and a website that shows off customer inventions.

That is the power of customer evangelists!

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