31772a6dd13fa30012a6de614c7ac0fc9734955e5797a33812 Money And Knowledge: 2014

Robots that can sing, read human's feelings

Talk about robots that can walk, talk, sing, read the news, tell the weather, gointernet shopping and even read human feelings.

Meet Charles or Charlie, one of the world's most advanced robot, designed by Rajiv Khosla an alumni of Indian Institute of Technology and professor at Australia's La Trobe University, which can do all of that.

At mere 20 cm tall, Charlie is a 'Partner-Personal Robot', who has been specifically designed to assist children and adults with problems like dementia, autism, cerebral palsy, brain injury and other such illness.

"A child with dementia will often forget to wash his hands in the washroom. The robot will constantly have his eyes on him and remind him that he hasn't washed his hands and that he needs to do it," Khosla said at the demonstration of the model organised by the Australian High Commission here.

More than 20 field trials have been conducted with Charlie and other robots - Matilda, Jake, Lucy and Sophie- in Australia. Communication with the robots can be done through voice commands, touch pads, tablets and even using facial expressions. They detect how a person feels and accordingly personalises their services.

"These robots are multi-lingual and can be personalised based on the language, culture and lifestyle of their human partners," Khosla said.

An alumni of IIT, Khosla an expert in creating "emotionally engaging robots" said he believes that robots like Charlie can cross the boundaries of "language, culture and lifestyle."

"Once the emotional status is established, then the learning starts for both the robot as well as the human being. It can be used by all age groups to take therapeutic effects and positive stimulus," he added.

Capable of providing emotional engagement with users, the robots are designed to have natural integrations and not computers with users, said Khosla who is the Director of the Research Centre for Computers, Communication and Social Innovation at the La Trobe University.

Computer Economics Report: Cloud Computing Saves 15% in IT Budgets

After analyzing the costs and benefits associated with the massive use of the cloud for seven companies, a study by Computer Economics concludes that it is better to migrate to cloud to save 15 percent of IT budget.
Buying software licenses for employees is really cheaper than subscribe to cloud services? The SaaS allows real saving for CIOs? These are the questions that Computer Economics sought to answer by analyzing the cases of seven big companies that have largely migrated their IT systems to the cloud. The study came to the conclusion that these companies were on average able to save over 15 percent IT spending per user.
The analysis notes that the savings made ​​not only come from spending cuts in the data center, but also those related to IT staff. With these gains, companies using the cloud are able to devote a higher percentage of their IT spending on new projects, and less to support. These savings in costs associated with strategic benefits such as agility, speed, scalability and argue in favor of organizations moving aggressively to the cloud.
The seven cloud user organizations that participated in this study include two manufacturing companies, a life sciences organization, a wholesale distributor, a systems integrator, and an online content provider. The survey respondents use a variety of cloud providers, including Amazon, Autodesk, Box.com, Coupa, Docusign, Insperity (ExpensAble), FinancialForce, Google, Infor, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite, Okta, Paylocity, Plex, Rootstock, Salesforce.com, Saleslogix, Ultimate Software, Virtustream, Workday, and yieldEx.
Majority of respondents have already moved or are in process of moving their services to the cloud. Nearly 61 percent CIOs surveyed reported that cloud increases innovation and the business commercial agility. The innovation includes simplification of business process both in terms of commercial agreements and functionality; and flexibility in commercial contracts with cloud providers in terms of prices and services offered.
Computer Economics looked at six key metrics including personnel, applications, data center, network, user devices and other while assessing the saving associated with the cloud. After evaluating, Computer Economics found that cloud technology is making the process easier, allowing companies to increase productivity by offering trusted applications on the go and on their choice of device. The report further found that detailed analysis of respondents’ IT spending mix shows that the savings come not only from a reduction in data center spending but also in IT personnel costs.
NTT Com Security recently published a report in which it found that North American businesses are cloud enthusiasts, while Asian companies come second followed by Europe, Japan and the Nordics. Another report by the market research firm MarketsandMarkets found that government agencies will invest $18.48 billion dollars in cloud computing by 2018 in sectors such as server and storage, collaboration, business operations, disaster recovery/data backup, health and safety, security and compliance, mobility, analytics, cloud gaming and content management.

Autoplay video ads coming to Facebook soon

Facebook has been reportedly testing an auto play video ad unit, which is now in its final stages and will be released soon.
David Lawenda, head of global marketing solutions at Facebook said that he will be meeting with the movie studios this week to help them see what is possible, adding that they should look at us like every other media platform that they're doing business with.
According to PC World, while the company's march to a mobile-first mindset and delivery has been persistent and widely recognized, Facebook is rising to the video occasion with a more deliberate rollout.
Facebook hired Lawenda, who has more than 25 years of experience in broadcast, cable TV and ad agencies, to oversee Facebook's sales relationships with big brands and agencies domestically.

1 Month Ago, the WhatsApp CEO Promised He Wouldn't Sell

Just a month ago, WhatsApp founder Jan Koum appeared to be dead-set against selling his company. In an interview with Wired UK editor David Rowan, Koum pointed out that the best companies — including Facebook — have resisted buyout attempts.
"I think for us, when we started the company for me and [co-founder Brian Acton] personally, we wanted to build something that was here for the long term," Koum said. "We wanted to build something sustainable. It's not that hard to sell a company. But if you look at the great companies we have today — Facebook and Google and Yahoo and Twitter — the companies that have been around for a long time, they didn't sell. They actually stuck around and stayed independent and built a great offering for their users."

Google developing phone that views in 3D

Google has been working for the last year on 3D smartphones that aim to give the devices greater awareness of space and motion in natural environments.

   Google Project Tango logo
Google Project Tango logo
The goal of Project Tango is to give mobile devices "a human-scale understanding of space and motion," wrote Johnny Lee, project lead at Google's Advanced Technology and Projects group, in a Google+ post.
The awareness of space and motion is fundamental to the way people interact with others and their environment, Lee and his team wrote. "Yet, our mobile devices assume that physical world ends at the boundaries of the screen."
The possibilities for the technology are myriad, according to Google. Users can walk around their homes with the 3-D smartphones to get the dimensions before going out to buy furniture, or use the phone to find the exact shelf where a product is located in a store, it said on the Project Tango page. The visually-impaired could also use the new Project Tango technology to navigate unassisted in unfamiliar indoor places.
The prototype of the smartphone is a 5-inch phone running Android, which combines robotics and computer vision technology to track the 3-D motion of the phone, while creating a 3-D model of the surrounding environment.
The prototypes, algorithms, and APIs (application programming interfaces) are still in development, and the experimental devices are "intended only for the adventurous and are not a final shipping product," Google said.
The company is counting on professional developers to use the platform for a variety of applications, and said it has 200 development kits that it plans to distribute by March 14 to developers.
It has allocated some of the devices for projects in the areas of indoor navigation and mapping, single and multiplayer games that use physical space, and new algorithms for processing sensor data. "We have also set aside units for applications we haven't thought of yet," Google said, while asking developers to be creative, specific and bold.
Google has worked with universities, research labs, and industrial partners across nine countries to develop the platform, including the University of Minnesota, George Washington University, German tech firm Bosch and the Open Source Robotics Foundation.
Movidius in San Mateo, California, said its Myriad 1 vision processor platform will power Project Tango. The vision processor platform is described as an ultra-low power, high-performance programmable architecture of computational chips, software and development tools that enables devices to "intelligently understand and contextualize their surroundings."