Ugobe has officially filed bankruptcy. This is bad news for Pleo. That lovable little dino bot is no longer being produced. If you’ve got one you might want to refrain from hacking, just in case it’s worth something one day. As the point out at Engadget, another toy company might buy up the rights, but we doubt it. At roughly $250 per unit, these things probably weren’t flying off the shelves.
maybe cyberdyne will buy them out???:
Posted at 11:20 am on Apr 21st, 2009 by momotarosan
i eat green berets for breakfast, and right now i’m very hungry
Posted at 11:36 am on Apr 21st, 2009 by commando
they should have scaled back the design of the internals to the point it could have been sold for less than $100. for a childs toy it was overkill and way too complicated mechanically.
I’m sure their bankruptcy comes as a shock to no one. $250 for a child’s toy was a risky bet. especially one that quite frankly, looked stupid. the skin needed some design work.
Posted at 11:39 am on Apr 21st, 2009 by fyrebug
predictable end to an expensive toy
Posted at 11:42 am on Apr 21st, 2009 by BigD145
“you might want to refrain from hacking”
Wait…what is going on here? This is Hack a Day.
Posted at 12:14 pm on Apr 21st, 2009 by amishx64
nice picture littlefoot…
Posted at 12:51 pm on Apr 21st, 2009 by Gabriel
fyrebug, there are some videos of the prototypes of Pleo on YouTube, the skin looks much more realistic, I dislike the cartoonish paint job that they eventually settled on – it makes it look more like a young child’s toy than a miniature replica dinosaur.
I’d like to get a Pleo for $100 here in the UK but the prices are still too high and the exchange rate sucks so importing wouldn’t save much with the import tax they’re much more likely to tag on what with the ‘credit crunch’
Bloody rip-off Britain.
Posted at 3:21 pm on Apr 21st, 2009 by Haku
ya just ordered one on amazon for 100$ after seeing the xbee hack linked in the article
collectible or not, think of how much fun you’ll have hacking it vs. how much fun you’d have with the money you wont get with it sitting on a shelf :]
Posted at 4:48 pm on Apr 21st, 2009 by tr0nk
fyrebug, from what I recall of a Wired article on Ugobe, the Pleo’s internals were pretty much scaled to a minimum that stilled allowed realistic movement. Any less and they may as well have just produced the Dino-Chi.
Pleo made few compromises, and unfortunately priced itself into a spot with few customers.
Posted at 7:38 pm on Apr 21st, 2009 by bort
I swear I saw these for $99 on Amazon earlier today when I first read this article at the office, Now that I’m home they are $199 :(
Posted at 11:45 pm on Apr 21st, 2009 by john
I was fortunate enough to see the workshop where pleo was designed and built. the (admittedly ugly) green skin was not the only one, I’ve personally seen a few prototypes that looked good, one was orange, I think I remember a purple one and I’ve heard of but not seen furry pleos.
this was circa 2007.
Posted at 7:51 am on Apr 22nd, 2009 by Choscura
@ macy:
CAPTCHA code is a series of number and or letters that are scattered and distorted in an image in order to prevent computer spammer (or scammer) bots from posting comments on a site or anything else such as acquiring hundreds of login names.
———–
P.S. What does this have to do with the article?
Posted at 12:35 pm on May 18th, 2009 by amishx64
Hack a Day serves up fresh hacks each day, every day from around the web and a special How-To hack each week.
Powered by WordPress
Guess it just had to go the way of the dinosaurs.
Posted at 11:14 am on Apr 21st, 2009 by Etan