In January 2007 I bought my first Robot for $350. Her name is Roomba. Here she is with her frog friend. Isn’t she good looking?

on January 2007 issue of Bill Gates wrote an article: “A robot in every home”. I have Roomba, and actually like her.

She is a vacuum cleaner robot. Every morning around 11 am she wakes up, brushes and vacuums my living-room, then she goes back to her charger and sleeps till next day. Unless of course I decide to play with her in the evening…

She does actually work, can be improved, but does her job. When I get home I empty her bin and it always full of dust. No idea where she can find so much of it everyday. Maybe it is a dust producing Robot.

We, the people, should only buy stocks we understand. And I do understand Irobot’s Roomba. She removes dust.

Talking about Robots, my simple dusting views totally agree with what the biggest of the big guys thinks:

Bill Gates wrote on January 2007 an article on Scientific American titled:

“A Robot in Every Home”.

Roomba is great, robotics is next big thing according to Gates, more than 1.5 million house-cleaning robots have been sold, and… Irobots is the stock!

http://www.irobotcreate.com/chat/viewtopic.php?t=4425

On November 2005 IRBT launched a $115 Millions IPO last year at initial-public-offering price of $24 a share. IRobot’s stock is now down 45%. Being optimistic I see it as a bargain. Unfortunately there is reasons for this poor performance.

If I look at Yahoo Finance Irobots numbers, they don’t look bad:

Price/Sales: 1.67 is not too much for the “next big thing”

Qtrly Revenue Growth (yoy): 31.50% looks nice

Net Income: 3.57M is fine

Total Cash: 70.38M means that more than 20% of what I will buy (I sure will) is cash.

I forgot to mention that 25% of Irobot sales are military robots which perform battlefield tasks like recognition that are too dangerous for humans. They don’t shoot yet, but still if you have a problem with companies involved with armies, stay away form IRBT.

I have convinced myself. I will buy in the next 5 minutes… and will buy more shares than I should, because I like my Roomba!