All Your Face Are Belong To Robo.to
Here at LaunchSquad, we like to say we’re all about working with cool new companies that have innovative ideas and stories we feel passionately about. With that in mind, we couldn’t be more thrilled to work with Particle, whose ambitious motto is to create Web and mobile apps that “shorten the distance between the Web and awesome.”
Particle’s first product is called Robo.to – a strangely addictive online app that lets you record short video clips of your current mood, activity or location. The 4-second clip becomes sort of a personal video avatar, accompanying text status updates and integrating with social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. The site has been attracting loads of fans, including a few folks you might recognize here and here.
A few weeks back, we introduced a new Robo.to feature called TV Mode, which literally lets users “watch the Web” by creating TV channels with hashtags, keywords or individual people, then view user-generated video status updates of trending topics. For example, you can flip from video to video on a particular topic to get a glimpse of individual reactions to major events. The potential in the ability to “see what the Web looks like now” is enormous. Imagine if we’d been using this for #IranElection or even #KanyeWest … a really interesting idea, we think.
Others certainly agreed with us as Robo.to’s TV Mode caught the attention of The New York Times, NewTeeVee, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, Beet.TV, and many others. In honor of the launch, we threw a party at Potrero Hill hot spot Mighty, complete with robot hostesses and Robo.to stations to record the fun with the new TV Mode feature at #RobotoParty. Maya Baratz wrote this great piece about the party in SF Weekly. We all had a great time. But don’t just take my word for it. See it for yourself here: http://robo.to/tv/robotoparty