IvanAnywhere

Let’s take a break from AdSense and online marketing and discuss something completely irrelevant and fun (at least for me): a robot friend of mine named IvanAnywhere.

“IvanAnywhere” is the name for the real-life robotic avatar created for Ivan Bowman, a colleague of mine at Sybase iAnywhere here in Waterloo, Ontario. I’ve known Ivan for a long time now — first as a co-op student on my team, then as a full-time colleague — and when he decided to follow his wife out east (to Halifax) he became a telecommuter, working remotely for iAnywhere out of an office in his house. Ivan’s a very bright bulb and we were lucky to keep him as an employee.

Working remotely is not without its downsides, of course, in that it’s harder to interact with your colleagues. I know this because I myself work remotely for a team in California. My situation’s different, though, because I still work out of the Sybase Waterloo office and I have two co-op students working with me here.

Ivan’s all alone, though. Which is why “IvanAnywhere” came to be, a way for Ivan to remotely interact with his colleagues without being tied to a single location within the Sybase Waterloo office. Both it and Ivan himself were featured in the local paper last weekend, so please read the IvanAnywhere newspaper article for more details.

What’s really interesting about all of this is how relatively inexpensive it was to create Ivan’s robotic avatar and how much Ivan’s enjoyed using it to interact with the other members of his team. And I suspect the free publicity iAnywhere’s gotten from it (psst… we make the best mobile database and the best mobile application platform) makes our little telepresence experiment well worthwhile.

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Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense. Subscribe to the blog and get free stuff!

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