TurkmenPost

JAPANESE engineers have designed a novel solution to childcare - a 38cm robot that can send pictures of your child to your mobile phone on demand.

The new ‘humanoid’ robot, called PaPeRo - short for Partner-type Personal Robot - has a camera in each eye and uses image recognition technology to remember and identify people. It can move at 20cm per second to track children around the house or nursery.

The futuristic robot also has an inbuilt mobile phone. When a parent calls it will locate the child and start to play with them. Parents can also send text messages and talk to children using PaPeRo’s inbuilt microphones and speakers.

As part of a deal between computer giant NEC and Japanese telecommunication company NTT the new service will be trialled in a Tokyo nursery school from this week. 

But the company is also marketing the product to busy executives as a personal assistant.

"It checks your email, tunes the TV to your favorite channel, and dances with your children," NEC says on it’s website.

"This egg-shaped robot named PaPeRo knows your favorite football team and searches the Internet for the day’s lineups and scores when you get home. It will also develop a personality depending on how you treat it. Speak to it nicely and stroke its head sensors and PaPeRo will learn to love you."

NEC’s Multimedia Research Laboratories senior manager Yoshihiro Fujita said the robot has been designed to remove typical ‘computer’ features like keyboards.

"We envision a future with simpler interactions with technology," he said. "You don’t need to learn to use PaPeRo like a PC, you just need to talk to it"

via News.com.au

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A hacker who as a teen cracked the encryption on DVDs has found a way to unlock the code that prevents iPod users from playing songs from download music stores other than Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes, his company said on Tuesday.

Jon Lech Johansen, a 22-year-old Norway native who lives in San Francisco, cracked Apple’s FairPlay copy-protection technology, said Monique Farantzos, managing director at DoubleTwist, the company that plans to license the code to businesses.

"What he did was basically reverse-engineer FairPlay," she said. "This allows other companies to offer content for the iPod."

At the moment, Apple aims to keep music bought from its iTunes online music store only available for Apple products, while songs bought from other online stores typically do not work on iPods.
 

But Johansen’s technology could help rivals sell competing products that play music from iTunes and offer songs for download that work on iPods as they seek to take a bite out of Apple’s dominance of digital music.

ITunes commands an 88 percent share of legal song downloads in the United States, while the iPod dominates digital music player sales with more than 60 percent of the market.

Cupertino, California-based Apple, whose profits have soared in recent years on the strength of the iPod, declined to comment.

Johansen, known as DVD Jon, gained fame when at the age of 15 he wrote and distributed a program that cracked the encryption codes on DVDs. This allowed DVDs to be copied and played back on any device.

His latest feat could help companies such as Microsoft Corp., Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., which have all announced plans over the past few months for music download services combined with new devices to challenge Apple.

© Reuters 2006.

Talk show host Oprah Winfrey and humanitarian rocker Bono hit the city’s "Magnificent Mile" on Thursday for a shopping spree to promote a new line of clothing, accessories and gadgets, including a special-edition iPod, that will raise money to fight AIDS in Africa.

Dozens of "(Product) Red" items will go on sale in the coming weeks by Gap Inc., Apple Computer Inc., Motorola Inc., Converse Inc. and Emporio Armani.

Portions of the product sales will go to The Global Fund, an organization that fights AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.

"Some people won’t put on marching boots, so we’ve got to get to people where they are at, and they’re in the shopping malls," Bono said in a phone interview. "Now you’re buying jeans and T-shirts, and you’re paying for 10 women in Africa to get medication for their children with HIV."

The Gap, which will debut its Red line in stores on Friday, will donate half the profits to The Global Fund.

Apple will contribute $10 from the sale of each new red-colored iPod nano. The model, priced the same as its $199 cousins, goes on sale Friday.

The celebrities, who arrived at the downtown Chicago Gap store in a red Ford Thunderbird, got a sneak peak at the products during a private shopping stint that will be broadcast Friday on Winfrey’s show.

After visiting the Gap, the duo walked along Michigan Avenue to an Apple store and picked up the red iPod, the first music product from the Cupertino, Calif.-based company designed to raise money for charity.

The two also stopped at Armani and Motorola stores.

"Shop ’till it stops," said Bono as he walked out of the Apple store clutching bulging shopping bags.

So far, the (Product) Red initiative, which began this spring in Britain, has raised more than $12 million for African AIDS programs, said Doug Piwinski, a spokesman for (Product) Red.

With Apple’s iPod alone, The Global Fund stands to raise millions of dollars. During the holiday quarter in 2005, Apple sold 14 million iPods. The iPod maker also plans to donate some proceeds from a $25 iTunes Red gift card to the organization.

"I love the fact that Bono is trying to do something about this problem," Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs said in a phone interview. "I’ve never been to Africa, but you don’t have to go there to know there are a lot of people dying of AIDS there. In a small way, this is something we could do about it."

Bono, who knows the difficulties of raising awareness for social causes, was thrilled with the retailers’ efforts for the campaign.

Gap had its four-story store in Chicago decked out in red banners. Apple planned to light up its flagship 5th Avenue store in New York in red on Thursday night.

"We’ve moved from the philanthropy budgets to the marketing budgets, and guess what, there’s no comparison in size," Bono said. "We now have some of the most creative people in commerce — Steve Jobs, the marketing people at Gap and Motorola — all working for the world’s poor. That is so so cool."

When Sony revealed the PlayStation 3 controller would be able to sense certain types of motion, skeptics scoffed. That’s because Nintendo announced last September that its recently rechristened Wii console would also have motion-sensing controls, leading many to believe that Sony had added the functionality at the last minute as a gimmick. A report in the New York Times didn’t help, as it said that some of Sony’s own developers were not given the PS3 controller’s tilt-sensitive controller until just weeks prior to its unveiling at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2006 in May.

Now, Sony has come out swinging. In this week’s edition of German magazine Der Spiegel, Phil Harrison, president of Sony Computer Entertainment’s Worldwide Studios, aggressively denied his company appropriated the motion-sensing idea from Nintendo. "In a certain way, I understand why people would say [such things], but it is stupid, if you’ll forgive me saying so," said Harrison.

Harrison went on to say that the PS3’s motion-sensitive controller had been in the works for some time. "We have already worked on it a long time, and Nintendo almost certainly has done likewise with something similar," he said. "It is perfectly natural for two companies to work on [nearly] identical devices. It’s like that with technology." He reiterated that the PlayStation 2’s Dual Shock controller is the "de facto-industry standard for video games…We define the standard for the man-machine interface for playing games."

Besides defending the PS3, Harrison took time to evangelize the device, which will launch worldwide this November. In particular, he said the Linux-based operating system on the console’s hard drive will have enough processing power and nongaming functionalities to render traditional PCs–most of which use a form of Microsoft’s Windows OS–moot in the home. "We believe that the PS3 will be the place where our users play games, watch films, browse the Web, and use other [home] computer functions," said Harrison. "The PlayStation 3 is a computer. We do not need the PC."

via gamespot.

A tipster just sent word on what a Nintendo rep said about the Wii. Some of it is rather obvious, some of it is surprising. Really surprising.

•The promotional material that the rep had with her only contained white consoles and peripherals. The Wii Classic controller was included, as well as the Zapper, as possible peripherals to be utilized at launch.
•There is concern about stores using halogen lighting. Tons of halogen spotlights scattered about may give everything a much warmer and more ambient feel. However, this particular type of lighting can throw off the aiming of the Wii controller when the lights are angled down through the path of the signal. So for people with halogen track-lighting in front of the TV, this could be a problem.
•Nintendo is aiming for an October launch. Since a number of big-ticket crossplatform titles like Madden will be coming out at that time, Nintendo doesn’t want to miss them. Apparently the company wants to beat Sony out the gate, and get some buzz going about their non-traditional controller in the meantime.

For most this won’t matter, but potential Wii customers with halogen lights in their living room could very well be effed. And with halogen illuminating more and more homes, this might turn into a minor prob for Nintendo.

via kotaku.