Rose founded the company Interactive Factory in 1992 following several years of working as a software engineer in speech recognition and robotics. Interactive Factory, now iFactory, a division of RDW Group, is a boutique design firm specializing in digital and interactive media. After Interactive Factory's acquisition in 1997, Rose patented the first online photo sharing service and founded Opholio. The start-up was bought by Flashpoint Technology in 1998 and Rose went on to found Viant's Innovation Center, where he was director for four years. In 2002, Rose co-founded Ambient Devices, a spin-off from the MIT Media Lab and a pioneer in embedding Internet information in everyday objects. The Ambient Orb was one of Rose's creations. The company developed over a dozen internet-connected objects including the Ambient Umbrella, the Ambient Dashboard, 5-day Weather Forecaster, and the Energy Joule. In 2008, Rose founded Vitality, a high-tech healthcare start-up. At Vitality, he conceived of and led the development of the GlowCap – the first cellular-connected pill cap. The product was a recipient of the 2010 Medical Design Excellence Awards. Vitality was sold to biotech investor Patrick Soon-Shiong in 2011 and rolled into his NantHealth business. Rose is the founder and CEO of Ditto Labs, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based start-up focused on image-recognition software. From CrunchBase, "Ditto Labs was first-to-market with a dashboard tool to help top brand marketers derive insights, prospect audiences, and measure campaigns from what appears in social media photos. Ditto’s patented machine learning and computer vision capability is integrate with a majority of enterprise social listening platforms. In July 2014, Rose published a book about the Internet of Things, Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things. In the book, Rose argues that the cell phone monopolizes attention and that there is an opportunity to unglue society from these screens by spreading apps into every day objects like clothing, jewelry, and rooms.
Recent work
Over summer 2017, Rose completed a project as a Futurist in Residence at IDEO where he worked with a team to design and prototype gestural based-interactions. He developed technology that allows users to perform one and two-handed gestures to control light and sound in the environment. As part of the project, Rose filmed dancers, American Sign Language teachers, mimes, and an orchestra conductor to learn about subtle gestures. Rose was the VP of Vision Technology at Warby Parker from 2017-2019. He is a senior lecturer at the MIT Media Lab where he has worked with the Tangible Media and City Science groups. He currently teaches a course called "Enchanted Architecture."
