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Robotic CRM Maybe One Step Closer
TMCnet Contributing Editor
New offices in Australia and North America and an alliance with the Melbourne-based IniPax capital market will increase Kiwi Growth Partners' ability to help New Zealand companies to find the finance they need to expand, according to company officials.
KGP founder Alvin Donovan says KGP has become an associate of the IniPax capital market, which provides “fair, orderly and transparent capital market services for businesses working towards a formal stock market listing.”
IniPax and KGP are currently in the process of preparing Robot-Hosting Ltd. for listing, saying the company has "developed ground breaking 3D computer animated robot technology with huge potential in both commercial and academic applications."
Robot-Hosting has recently signed a deal with American company Ai-Dealer worth many millions of dollars that will see their 3D robot technology used by on-line car dealerships, according to KGP officials, who say Robot-Hosting has "another deal in the making with one of the world’s largest CRM firms worth tens of millions," and will be announcing further details "in the very near future."
The robot can be used for a range of ways, from an on-line customer services representative to a classroom teacher or lecturer. Company officials say these robots have a 200,000 word vocabulary, use 100,000 grammar rules and can "think," using a logical reasoning engine.
The idea of using robots in CRM is hardly new but mostly unfulfilled. Four years ago "servicing machines and customers remotely has come to CRM. But it has arrived more slowly, and with less fanfare, than industry observers originally predicted," industry observer Kimberly Hill wrote.
That was back in 2002, and Hill blamed "the down economy" which "deflated the plans of many businesses to deploy remote device relationship management, or DRM, technologies." Yet she cites Aberdeen Group research director Kent Allen who saw a "coming wave" of mobile applications applying DRM techniques to CRM initiatives.
That wave hasn't hit the beach yet, I'm afraid, although there were isolated products offered, such as the one in 2002 where a company called Questra "teamed with CRM software maker Astea to blend DRM and CRM technologies in mobile devices," as Hill reported:
"According to Deloitte Consulting partner Rich Apicella, however, spotty wireless coverage makes these types of systems difficult to implement. 'I don't know that the technology has evolved enough to make it ubiquitous,'" he told Hill.
Robot Hosting already has a list of clients, including The University of Auckland (two robots), The Auckland University of Technology (two robots), The Arizona University, The National Defense University of Budapest, Cancer society NZ, SPCA and Farmers trading company.
The technology was profiled in Business Week's May 2006 edition, which called it one of the hottest emerging money making technologies, attracting investment from the likes of Dell (News - Alert) computers founder Michael Dell and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims’ columnist page.
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