MerkleBot at Techstars Foundercon 2022
In November 2022 Techstars Foundercon is finally back after a 3 year pause! As the new members of the Techstars family, my co-founder Aleksandr and I were excited to see everyone in person. We’ve also brought our pet — Boston Dynamics Spot robodog!
Foundercon Stages
In addition to networking with fellow Techstars founders, Foundercon had really good speakers. We really enjoyed the panel with CTOs of Applied Particle Technology, Interface Fluidics, Slag and Helper Bees. This discussion mainly confirmed ideas that were laid out in Pete Hanlon’s Forbes post: The Role Of The CTO, that the bridge between techteam and business is still playing an important role.
There were a lot of motivational talks given as well. In the opening session John Hill mentioned that a $100K SAFE was agreed upon at the venue elevator. We also met with a writer Antonio Neves who gave a talk “Mental Health: Burnout”. Everybody knows that it’s hard to keep the same motivation level in the long run. Most of our team members are science fiction fans and dreamers and this helps us to move forward no matter what. Antonio Neves also sees the source of additional motivation in SciFi culture. We had an insightful conversation with him about it and are excited to continue building our relationship further.
Merklebot-powered robodog at the Perks Expo
We were thrilled to participate in the Perks Expo and share our work with the Techstars community. Over the past year we have been perfecting our software’s operating experience on the Boston Dynamics Spot robodog. During the Expo, visitors were able to initiate a transaction with Spot and launch an teleoperation session from the browser. The 3D model of the environment and the system logs were recorded securely in Filecoin storage.
We made 40 recorded launches with almost 2 hours of continuous work and more than a half kilometer traveled under the control of Foundercon visitors! Each visitor who launched our demo has a cryptographic record of its session with Spot.
Conclusion
Needless to say that everybody was impressed by the incredible engineering of a Boston Dynamics robot, and Spot attracted wide attention. We met a lot of great teams during the Expo and validated the need for secure and affordable data infrastructure further. With robotics developers and business leaders we went deeper into the architecture discussion of our software, covering the benefits of our secure infrastructure layer for capture and management of machine data.
We invite developers around the world to learn how to use the Spot platform and SDK. Our team developed the educational course on the Spot SDK that allows developers to get up to speed with the platform and get practical experience by remotely renting the Spot in our lab. Read the overview of the course from our team here.
