An Encounter with Keepon, Hideki Kozima and Marek Michalowski

Last night, I ventured out to Wired NextFest's kickoff concert in Hollywood featuring Spoon and Keepon, the cute little robot we wrote about earlier. What a great event it was! I met with Hideki Kozima and Marek Michalowski and several of the Keepon bots. Hideki Kozima, co-star of the famous "Don't You Evah" video, is a great guy I must say. He and Marek let concert-goers get close to Keepon and play with the little bot as if it were alive. Oh and umm.. I forgot my camera.. doh! Some of Kozima's research involves using interactive robots like Keepon as a therapeutic tools for children with autism.

Keepon's becoming quite a star. According to GetRobo, it won this year's Robots at Play Prize in Denmark and has been gaining popularity in the mainstream media. Oh, and Jimmy Wales, founder of wikipedia showed up on stage