Data-collecting ocean robots earn Liquid Robotics $45M in its fifth funding round
Liquid Robotics doesn’t need to go diving for gold with its unmanned aquatic vehicles when investors are still willing to give $45 million in the company’s fifth round of funding. The money comes soon after Liquid Robotics sent one of these vehicles across the Pacific Ocean to collect data. The funding…
Doylestown Hospital Recruits a Superbug-Killing Robot
DOYLESTOWN, Pa. (CBS) A new robot is on duty at Doylestown Hospital, killing dangerous microorganisms by zapping them with ultraviolet light. The unit looks like the robot from “Lost in Space,” with its plate-shaped head telescoping above its body. The flashing unit, from a company called Xenex, sanitizes patient rooms…
Nikkei: Panasonic may end plasma HDTV production soon
While we’ve heard rumors of the death of plasmas before, Japanese business paper The Nikkei is reporting that Panasonic may stop using the technology in fiscal 2014. Without citing sources, it claims Panasonic will shut down production at its main Amagasaki plant, reducing production gradually to avoid angering partners and What’s…
Men, let robot find your size at jeans store run by former Amazon exec
At a small store in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood, designer jeans hang from metal racks attached to the ceiling, their QR code tags easily accessible. Shoppers use smartphones to scan what they like, and a robotic system in the back delivers items to their dressing rooms, where they can then send…
Google expands Chromebook availability to six more countries while doubling …
Google’s cloudy Chromebooks must be doing well. The company has just extended their availability to six new countries, namely Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands, and doubled the number of Best Buy stores in the U.S. in which the Chrome OS laptops are sold. According to a…
How To Raise A Robot Army For Mayhem And Profit
How do Trojan viruses infect your computer? Where does spam come from? How do hackers gain control over your computer? Often times, the answer is via botnet. A botnet is nothing more than a small program that people install (usually without realizing it) that “phones home” to another computer and…
iPhone under assault from big-screen rivals
The upcoming Samsung Galaxy IV phone will have a 5-inch screen, up .2 of an inch from the previous model. STORY HIGHLIGHTSWith the Samsung Galaxy S IV, phones with 5-inch screens are becoming common It’s a change from three years ago, when the 5-inch Dell Streak floppedThe iPhone 5 has a (CNN)…
I Want My M-WiFi
WiFi blanketing entire communities was a turn-of-the-century dream that failed to materialize, with a few exceptions, but it’s now being resurrected. “Simply put, carriers need WiFi,” said Steve Hratko, Ruckus’ director of carrier marketing. LTE alone won’t be able to handle the insatiable appetite for more capacity, as the proliferation…
Japanese Robot Actroid Gets More Social, Has No Fear of Crowds
Actroid-SIT, a lifelike robot from Japanese firm Kokoro, hasn’t received as much attention as her cousin Geminoid F, which happens to be a copy a real woman. But while Geminoid F is a teleoperated robot, Actroid-SIT can function autonomously, talking and gesturing while interacting with people. In fact, researchers have…
Developers prefer Apple’s iOS Maps SDK over Google Maps
By Daniel Eran Dilger An in depth comparison of the development frameworks behind Apple’s Maps and Google’s finds pros and cons in both, but highlights Apple’s as more mature, less limited and recommended for most third party app developers. Apple’s Maps: new, different and more mature? When Apple launched its…
