iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon
npr.org
This is what was read here when it was published. npr.org no longer carries it in what it publishes now.
Colin Angle didn’t start out trying to clean people’s floors.He started out trying to shape the future–with robots. In the early days of iRobot, there was no business model. No steady funding. No clear customer.Just a belief that robotic technology would one day make the world a better place. In the early days, the company built babbling toy dolls for Hasbro, and roving bomb-detectors for the military.But for more than a decade… nothing truly took off. Until one idea—a robot vacuum—finally did. With the Roomba, iRobot created a category from scratch, and a product that felt…