Now that Westnet is owned by iiNet there will be even more competitive rivalry between the two companies. The first that I have been involved with is a Westnet vs iiNet Robot Soccer competition.
The competition is actually being held by SciTech and they are allowing us to compete. The idea is you need to build robots no higher than 22cm that are able to play soccer, with an infra-red transmitting ball, totally on their own. No remote controls! The robot needs to think for itself.
To make it even more complicated is it is a 2 vs 2 competition. So you will have two robots thinking for themselves trying to get a ball into the opposition goals. There are heaps of other rules like the robot has to release the ball into the goal, it can’t push it in, and the robot needs to keep within a 122cm x 183cm matt.
We have decided to go with Lego Mindstorms NXT robots. These kits come with various sensors and all the blocks needed to build your own robot. All we need to do is write the AI code and engineer two fully operational machines.
How hard could it be???
With this distraction, I’m betting on a dip in the iinet share price
I don’t know if the share price could handle being much less than it is. The share price is currently at a 6 month low.
Once the soccer comp is over I’ll program the robot to make money for the company…
iiNet bought westnet? When did that happen and for how much? So iiNet owns them all now? Far out
Yep, that’s right. We were sold! It happened in May this year. They bought us for about $81m.
Not much has changed though, it is still business as usual for us. We are running independently, under the iiNet group.