Strange going-ons in Vegas: Russians from Warminster vs Tesla
Tom Paine
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At CES last week, there was an odd incident in which a Tesla, supposedly in self-driving mode, ran into a small robot also in the road.
It was obviously a publicity stunt set up in advance. The bot was from a company named Promobot. Its website says the company is located at 626 Jacksonville Rd, Ste 125, Warminster, PA.
As the name Promobot suggests, the company tries to rent robots to companies for use as promotional tools.
Its not clear who produces the robots, or how many Promobot actually has.
Its Founder and Chairman of the board of directors, Promobot, is Alexei Iuzhakov. Back in 2008, Iuzhakov was in a (Russian) Presidential program for training of managerial personnel for organizations of the national economy; he also received training at some Silicon Valley institute and with NASA, according to a brief CV. The rest of Promobot's personnel listed on its website are also apparently of Russian origins, judging from their names.
Promobot's only funding, according to CrunchBase , was $2 million in 2016 from (the Russian) Internet Initiatives Development Fund (IIDF).
Nothing particular wrong with this, unless it was a serious attempt to undermine Tesla, but its kind of an odd proposition. I don't waste much time on publicly stunts, but I just wanted to identify who was behind it. I'll pass on anything else of importance that comes out of this.
More analysis of event by the website Evolving Science .
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