Jeremy Corenbloom is Senior Director of Marketing at Anki, a pioneering robotics and artificial intelligence company. Previously, Jeremy worked as Marketing Director for match.com and also held marketing positions at HTC and T-Mobile. 

Tell us a bit about Anki and Cozmo

Anki was founded in San Francisco in 2010 by three Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute graduates who were driven by the belief that robotics and artificial intelligence could offer huge benefits to our every-day lives.

Our products use cutting-edge AI and Robotics technology to excite, inspire and benefit our customers.

Our first product Anki DRIVE and its successor Anki Overdrive was the first consumer product to blend robotics, mobile gaming technology and the physical world, and so combine traditional video games and toys to create a completely new product category and truly bring objects to life.

We may be slightly biased but we think Cozmo is the coolest robot ever invented. Developed by a team of roboticists, world-class animators, and game developers, he brings together film, toys, video games and robotics to be a crazy amount of fun.

Cozmo the robot is packed full of things for kids to do, from making friends with him, to playing games that test your memory and agility, and even creating cool things for himself to do through his simple coding programme.

What made you decide to produce a book that helps children to code?

We really wanted the book to help kids to code but also to help mums to code with their kids.

When we spoke to mums they understood that tech is the future, but didn’t understand the coding their children were learning at school and how they could help support their child’s learning

Cozmo brings to life the coding children are learning at school in a fun and accessible way for everyone, so we wanted the book to do just that too.

At its core the book needed to show parents how coding can be fun – and educational – for them and their child.

Putting a highly illustrated book together is inevitably a complex collaborative process. What were your main takeaways from the project?

We learned many things along the way. But for me they are:

• Involve the experts – whether that is coders or book publishers, all the people at Anki and at our partners provided valuable insight that meant we were able to publish to the best result possible.
• Be patient – it takes time and a lot of patience to create a book, but the end result is worth it!

Can you tell us about any future product launches?

I’d love to but sadly I can’t at this stage! But rest assured that whatever it is, it will take us one step further to a world where humans and intelligent, general-purpose robots can live in a mutually beneficial way.

You can find out more about Anki and Cozmo by visiting their website, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Youtube pages.