Caring pet owners no longer have to worry about their furry friends getting bored while they are away. A group of young Ukrainians have invented Petcube, a gadget that lets owners play with their pets through their smart phones.
“Petcube is a home gadget, a small cube that should be placed at home and allows playing with a pet from any spot in the world,” explains Yaroslav Azhnyuk, business director and co-founder of the Petcube Project.
Azhnyuk said with an internet connection, users can command the cube to remotely point a laser beam around, call out their pets’ names through a speaker, and observe them playing through a camera.
A year ago the group initially nicknamed their start up project Rocki, after a dog that belonged to Oleksanr Neskin, the inventor of the pet gadget. When Neskin and his family, including Rocki, moved to a new apartment his dog showed signs of anxiety when left home alone.
“We have very thin walls and the neighbors started complaining and said they would call the police if we wouldn’t calm the dog down,” Neskin says. “I couldn’t understand what’s wrong but we just had to find out,” he said.
So Neskin took a video camera, attached two motors using adhesive tape and an Arduino prototyping board to finally see what was happening in his absence.
“And what I saw was very sad. Right after we left Rocci he would sit at the door and bark every time someone would go up or down the stairs,” Neskin explained.
Later he attached a laser pointer to his rudimentary device so he could play with the dog while at work. However, Neskin’s business idea popped up only after he solved his dog’s loneliness problem.
“I wasn’t always able to play with Rocci, so I made it possible to give access to the program to my friends or relatives and they got really excited about it,” he says, adding that his friends were even waiting in line to get a chance to play with Rocci distantly. “This gave me a clue that people want something like this.”
Still, the device isn’t fully developed. The latest Petcube prototype is a ten cubic-centimeter black aluminum cube with one dark glass side. It will cost $200 when released to the market, but not to the Ukrainian market.
“We plan (to release) the product on the American market,” Azhnyuk says.
He says the American market is the biggest in the world with consumers spending $52 billion a year on pets.
“So I guess buying a $200 gadget won’t be a problem,” he explained. He added that Ukrainian consumers will be able to order Petcube online through its website.
Larysa Stebliuk, a businesswoman and the owner of four dogs and three cats says the gadget would absolutely gain popularity on the Ukrainian market as well, no matter the price.
“Sometimes the damage pets make when left alone costs owners much more than $200,” she says. “We live in a single-family house, so our dogs and cats are mostly outside, but for an apartment such a device would be very useful.”
She told about a friend whose family members had to take turns in order not to leave a dog alone.
“Their crazy dog ate furniture, household appliances, documents, and believe me they would give up much more to have him preoccupied with something else,” she laughs.
The inventors also believe that it’s not only the gadget’s practical use that will make it popular but also the global online trend that their invention perfectly fits into.
“Soon every person will have hundreds of internet connected devices. They will be installed in cars, offices and homes and will be connected into one big network,” Azhnyuk says and adds that they have a couple of more startup ideas connected to modern-day world needs.
Read a story about Enable Talk device sturtup Inventors of talking gloves have global business plans
Kyiv Post staff writer Daryna Shevchenko can be reached at [email protected].
