About HeadThere

Founders' Bios

Roy Sandberg ( Carnegie Mellon BS in EE, Whittier Law School JD ) has had a life long interest in robotics. Following an internship at the Carnegie-Mellon Robotics Institute, Roy started his career at a small startup writing software for motion control systems and consumer electronics. He subsequently led software product design teams at a major telecommunications company, and developed robotics products for a biotech company. In law school, he focused on intellectual property law.

Dan Sandberg ( Stanford BS in CS ) has over a decade of experience as a software engineer, focusing on Internet applications and telecommunications. He has been a frequent contributor to open source projects. He also has years of experience with analog and digital electronic design and implementation across a wide variety of projects.

Stephen Von Rump ( Washington University BSEE, BS Eng. Math., MSEE ) has extensive startup experience as CEO of Metreos and Be Here Corporation and public company experience as CEO of VTEL and GM of internetMCI. He has spent much of his career in Internet communications, including the launch of numerous audio, videoconferencing and streaming products and services. Stephen also has extensive sales and marketing experience both domestically and internationally.

Vision

Robots have always been a staple of science fiction, and their introduction into our lives has been long awaited. However, before general purpose robots can permeate society, a "killer app" is required. HeadThere believes the "killer app" is telepresence, and the Giraffe has been designed to bring telepresence into the mainstream. And while the Giraffe will be tremendously useful straight out of the box, we don't intend to stop there. Using an open-source software model, we hope to enable robotics enthusiasts throughout the world to turn science fiction into science fact.

How to Contact Us

If you want to find out when our product will be released, when our source code will be released, or if you want to beta test our product, please sign up for announcements.

Finally, you might want to post to our forums with any specific questions or comments you have.