If Cisco and iRobot have their way, robot CEOs may invade boardrooms from Tokyo to New York in 2014. The two companies?recently announced collaboration on the autonomous Ava 500 telepresence robot for business. The firms hope the Ava 500 will allow business people to attend daily meetings in person, across the planet?without ever changing a plane or time zone.
The navigation technology behind iRobot?s Roomba robot vacuum cleaner and the RP Vita medical telepresence robot will guide the five foot five inch, 100 pound Ava 500. Meanwhile, a Cisco TelePresence EX60 personal video endpoint will broadcast a worker?s face and voice from its?21.5? screen and send back sounds and images via an onboard camera and microphone.
Using a special app on a tablet, remote workers will wake the robot up and tell it where to go. The Ava 500 can map and autonomously navigate the halls of its home office, freeing the telecommuter to make small talk along the way (or leave the screen off until it reaches its destination). After a meeting, the unit dutifully returns to its charging station to catch a few winks and juice up for its next appointment.
iRobot CEO, Colin Angle, told the Boston Herald the Ava 500 gives folks the chance to be in the same room as the people they?re meeting, to see facial expressions, and to go in the hall after for a private chat. Angie Mistretta, director of telepresence solutions at Cisco, says, ?The real value of the robot is that spontaneity.?
The question is whether that spontaneity is worth the robot?s $70,000 price tag?(or?$2,000 ? $2,500 a month to rent). iRobot and Cisco are targeting executives, corporate trainers, site inspectors, and remote employees. Travel costs for these folks can stack up fast.?If Ava 500 saves even a few trips a month, the robot could pay its way.
But businesses are cost cutting machines. If telepresence robots are attractive at $70,000, then they?re even more appealing at $7,000, and exponentially sexier as the price tag approaches $0.?And already, firms can order a simpler telepresence robot from Double Robotics for $2,599. Businesses may be willing to sacrifice a little screen real estate and autonomous navigation for $67,000 in saved costs.
Double Robotics iPad telepresence robot.
And they may not need to make that sacrifice very long.?Advanced AI and robotics are entering the consumer market at drastically reduced prices.
We recently wrote about AI startup Anki. Anki?s robot cars drive themselves around a track at top speed, avoiding each other, the wall, making evasive maneuvers?all this runs on iOS with an expected cost of $200.?But Anki isn?t just about toy cars. It?s an iOS-powered consumer AI and robotics platform.
Such technology will just as easily guide an autonomous telepresence robot through the office. And soon. Offering enterprise solutions at enterprise prices in a world where AI and robotics are hitting consumer markets at consumer prices?how long will such products make sense?
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Jimmy Fallon asked people to send in videos of playing video games with their moms for "Video Game Week." On Thursday's "Late Night" he aired the best clips.
Check out the video above to see why these moms should play video games more often.
Also on HuffPost:
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Rdio, the streaming service that hates the letter a, has updated its iOS app to help users find new, yet similar, music. Song Stations will generate playlists from a single artist, which folds in related music as it goes. The feature will let you preview the next four tracks in the list, giving you the power to skip as many time as you like -- just in case you find yourself trapped in a singer's middle-period creative slump. Rdio has also added autoplay to the app, so when your current playlist has ended, it'll find something similar to ensure you're never plunged into an awkward silence.
Filed under: Portable Audio/Video, Software, Apple
Source: Rdio (App Store)
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Some VCs are into kite-surfing. Some do triathlons. Then there’s i/o Ventures managing director Paul Bragiel, who has spent the last two and a half months in the Nordics, either cross-country skiing for two to four hours per day or doing “swamp training,” where he runs through bogs for several hours. His dream? To compete in the Winter Olympics, which are just eight months away in Sochi, Russia. “I want to walk into the Olympic Stadium with people from all 192 countries. This is what’s awesome about the world. I’ve wanted to do this since I was 11 and watching the 1988 Seoul Olympics on TV,” he said in an interview from Austria, where he just relocated to train for a month. “I kind of gave up the dream when I was 14 and became a computer nerd. But that’s a whole different story.” The U.S. team only has about four slots and is one of the most competitive countries in the world, Bragiel said. So he’s in talks with various South American and Sub-Saharan African countries to get dual citizenship to compete on their behalf. Because he also co-founded the Tanzania and Kenya-focused Savannah Fund and advises other countries on how to grow startup communities, he believes citizenship won’t be that big a hurdle. “This is an honor. Someone giving you citizenship? I’m going to wear that country’s flag proudly,” he said. Picking a sport was a long process. One of the first sports he looked at was curling. He even visited a curling center in Minnesota, but then he realized that there wasn’t a team that would let him join on less than a year’s notice. Then he looked at bobsledding, and traveled to Latvia to look for a team. “The costs ended up being very prohibitive. It can cost millions of dollars and you have to ship a bobsled internationally,” he said. He also would have needed to find a driver. “If I did it, I would probably flip over and die,” he said. Then the luge terrified him, and he didn’t think he could get used to downhill skiing as a longtime snowboarder. So that left cross-country skiing. He reached out to friends like Trulia co-founder and competitive triathlete Sami Inkinen and others, who helped him find a coach. Then Bragiel bought a one-way ticket to Finland a little over two months ago and began training.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/9iZi42Znx8k/
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WASHINGTON (AP) ? The Justice Department has charged former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden with espionage and theft of government property in the NSA surveillance case.
Snowden, believed to be holed up in Hong Kong, has admitted providing information to the news media about two highly classified NSA surveillance programs.
A one-page criminal complaint unsealed Friday in federal court in Alexandria, Va., says Snowden engaged in unauthorized communication of national defense information and willful communication of classified communications intelligence information. Both are charges under the Espionage Act. Snowden also is charged with theft of government property. All three crimes carry a maximum 10-year prison penalty.
The federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia where the complaint was filed is headquarters for Snowden's former employer, government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.
The complaint is dated June 14, five days after Snowden's name first surfaced as the leaker of information about the two programs in which the NSA gathered telephone and Internet records to ferret out terror plots.
The complaint could become an integral part of a U.S. government effort to have Snowden extradited from Hong Kong, a process that could turn into a prolonged legal battle. Snowden could contest extradition on grounds of political persecution. In general, the extradition agreement between the U.S. and Hong Kong excepts political offenses from the obligation to turn over a person.
It was unclear late Friday whether the U.S. had made an extradition request. Hong Kong had no immediate reaction to word of the charges against Snowden.
The Espionage Act arguably is a political offense. The Obama administration has now used the act in eight criminal cases in an unprecedented effort to stem leaks. In one of them, Army Pfc. Bradley Manning acknowledged he sent more than 700,000 battlefield reports, diplomatic cables and other materials to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. His military trial is underway.
Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, welcomed the charges. "I've always thought this was a treasonous act," he said in a statement. "I hope Hong Kong's government will take him into custody and extradite him to the U.S."
Michael di Pretoro, a retired 30-year veteran with the FBI who served from 1990 to 1994 as the legal liaison officer at the American consulate in Hong Kong, said "relations between U.S. and Hong Kong law enforcement personnel are historically quite good."
"In my time, I felt the degree of cooperation was outstanding to the extent that I almost felt I was in an FBI field office," said di Pretoro.
The U.S. and Hong Kong cooperate on law enforcement matters and have a standing agreement on the surrender of fugitives.
However, Snowden's appeal rights could drag out any extradition proceeding.
The success or failure of any extradition proceeding depends on what the suspect is charged with under U.S. law and how it corresponds to Hong Kong law under the treaty. In order for Hong Kong officials to honor the extradition request, they have to have some applicable statute under their law that corresponds with a violation of U.S. law.
In Iceland, a business executive said Friday that a private plane was on standby to transport Snowden from Hong Kong to Iceland, although Iceland's government says it has not received an asylum request from Snowden.
Business executive Olafur Vignir Sigurvinsson said he has been in contact with someone representing Snowden and has not spoken to the American himself. Private donations are being collected to pay for the flight, he said.
"There are a number of people that are interested in freedom of speech and recognize the importance of knowing who is spying on us," Sigurvinsson said. "We are people that care about privacy."
Disclosure of the criminal complaint came as President Barack Obama held his first meeting with a privacy and civil liberties board as his intelligence chief sought ways to help Americans understand more about sweeping government surveillance efforts exposed by Snowden.
The five members of the little-known Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board met with Obama for an hour in the White House Situation Room, questioning the president on the two NSA programs that have stoked controversy.
One program collects billions of U.S. phone records. The second gathers audio, video, email, photographic and Internet search usage of foreign nationals overseas, and probably some Americans in the process, who use major providers such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Yahoo.
___
Associated Press writer Jenna Gottlieb in Reykjavik, Iceland, contributed to this report.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nsa-leaker-charged-espionage-theft-001952096.html
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Female astronaut Wang Yaping took questions live from students in Beijing
China's second female astronaut, Wang Yaping, has delivered the country's first-ever video lecture from space.
Speaking to students via live video, Ms Wang used spinning tops, a ball, water and a fellow astronaut to explain physics in zero-gravity.
She was speaking from the Tiangong-1 space laboratory, where the Shenzhou spacecraft is currently docked,
China's fifth manned space mission, Shenzhou-10, is scheduled to end around 25 or 26 June.
The crew is also expected to attempt a manual docking later on Thursday.
This will involve getting back inside their Shenzhou capsule, unhooking from Tiangong and then flying around the lab to re-attach the capsule to the laboratory.
'Sixteen sunrises' Continue reading the main storyEnd Quote Wang Yaping AstronautThe sky we see isn't blue, but black. And every day, we can see the sun rise 16 times?
Ms Yang used different experiments to demonstrate the concepts of weight and mass in space.
After showing how normal scales did not work in space, she used a special scale to measure the mass of crew commander Nie Haisheng, using Newton's second law of motion - measuring the mass of an object through force and acceleration.
At another point, to show how objects move in the microgravity environment of space, she asked her colleague to help her rotate 90 degrees, and then 180 degrees, from the floor of the laboratory.
Spinning tops were used to create gyroscopic motion in space, and a ball attached to a string to demonstrate pendulum motion.
Towards the end of the class, Ms Yang made a film of water using a metal ring, explained by the increased surface tension of water in space. She then turned the film of water into a water ball by pouring more water onto it, to wide applause from students watching in China.
Around 330 primary and secondary school students watched the lecture from a special classroom in Beijing, where they could also ask Ms Wang questions through a live video feed, state media said.
In response to a student's question, Ms Yang described what she could see in space.
"The stars we see are much brighter, but they do not twinkle," she said, explaining this was due to the lack of Earth's obstructing atmosphere.
"The sky we see isn't blue, but black. And every day, we can see the sun rise 16 times because we circle the Earth every 90 minutes."
An estimated 60 million students and teachers around China were also expected to watch the lecture live, the Ministry of Education said.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-22981839#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa
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