
#Multiple profiles anki app software#
He graduated from Penn, moved to Silicon Valley and started Copera, a company that developed software for handheld PCs and early smartphones. “By the time I was 6, I started learning BASIC, and by the time I was 10 years old, my aunt bought me my first robotics kit.” That kit, and others he assembled, are on his desk at Anki 25 years later.

“I immediately fell in love with it,” he says.

Mark Palatucci was just 5 years old when his dad brought an IBM PCjr-the family’s first personal computer-into their Philadelphia home. “As an undergrad, I got to participate in a couple of projects at the Field Robotics Center where people were working on autonomous navigation, with robots that could sense and avoid obstacles, and as I was applying to grad schools, I realized the kind of robotics I wanted to study was being done best at CMU.” “The idea of making things in the physical world was very exciting to me,” Sofman says. He came to CMU to earn degrees in both engineering and computer science. His earliest computing experience was programming in Logo, the educational language that allowed users to program either an on-screen turtle or a real-world robot. It never really worked! Later, I took up building things in Lego and hooked my creations up to really, really early versions of microcontrollers.”īy the time Tappeiner completed his undergraduate work at Austria’s Technical University of Vienna, he’d been doing robotics “for a very long time,” both as a hobby and as a field of study.īoris Sofman was born in Russia and immigrated to the United States as a child. “One time, I tried to build a machine that could steal candy out of a candy jar. “As a kid, I was always interested in making things that could interact with the real world,” says Hanns Tappeiner, who was born in Germany and raised in northern Italy. All of them grew up with an interest in technology-especially robotics. Netscape co-founder and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who serves on the Anki board of directors, calls it “the best robotics startup I have ever seen.”Īnki’s three co-founders met at Carnegie Mellon in 2005. It’s the first game where real, moving objects simultaneously interact with a virtual environment, their physical surroundings and one another. made its high-profile debut on the world stage June 10 when the company’s first product, Anki Drive, was demonstrated during the keynote at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference.Īnki Drive runs on Apple’s iOS and allows users to control toy racecars from their iOS devices. We’ve interviewed, together, the three co-founders of San Francisco-based Anki Inc.)Īnki Inc. (Editor’s Note: We’re trying something different with the “Alumni Snapshots” in this issue. Inf., Technische Universität Wien, Austria, 2004
