Holy email flood, Batman.

We've been hit with a flood over the past 24 hours due to the articles on Robot Gossip, Engadget, and Gizmodo, so sorry if we're taking a while to respond to you - we're writing a personal response to every single email, and that takes some time.

One thing we're continuously amazed by are the concepts that people have been proposing for Echoes. Social, medical, educational and business applications, different community groups and locations, form factors, mashups... we're astounded by the creativity of the emails pouring in, and think they're fantastic. Thank you for all your ideas and enthusiasm! The majority of folks still seem to think we're a dating robot, so we'll be writing about other possible applications later on, but for now suffice it to say that we're hoping to make something much more useful than just a toy for finding romance.

Mel (one of our electrical and software engineers) was amused to discover how many people thought all the characters in this picture were guys. She's the one on the far left. From left to right, the others are Echo co-creators Joe, Joe (the same Joe, since Gui was napping and Andrew took the pictures) and Eric.



We've gotten a number of "Who are you guys?" queries, so we whipped out the cameras at this morning's meeting and will be posting profiles soon. For starters, we are...

• engineers and hackers
  
• bikers, lindy-hoppers, and capoeiristas
• vocal percussionists and political activists
  
• anthropologists and mathematicians
• fliers of both the frequent and stunt-kite variety
  

In other words, we're social geeks who believe that technology shouldn't be created in a vacuum; life is a lot more fun when you're sharing it with other people.