MIT's Humanoid Robotics Group - Domo

The development of Robots around the world is occurring more rapidly and diligently than most people might realize. The purpose for this development effort are the many tasks and applications that Robots can be designed to perform. With the number of elderly people forecasted to grow exponentially across the globe in the coming decade the market for in-home assistance that robots could provide is enormous and the return on investment proposition, given alternate care models, will become quite attractive once the technology is proven.

As with many technologies, a large number of engineers are working on various aspects of the robot solution: particularly humanoid robots. For example, engineers at the MIT Humanoid Robotics Group have developed a robot called Domo that can adapt to situations to assist people with everyday chores, everyday life, and everyday work. Cameras inside Domo's eyes enable him to see and adapt to his surroundings. Twenty-nine motors equipped with computer chips run off a dozen computers continuously updating information

The Olympics Meet New Channels of Distribution

The shift to digital content deployment represents the most rapidly advancing and impactful distribution change in the history of business. Many, as this article will show through the example of NBC's Internet broadcasts of the Olympics, are embracing the shift while a large number of other businesses are wrangling to adapt because of perceived risks and more critically the requirement for their leadership to actually think anew about extant business models. Failure to quickly adopt these new methods of customer interaction will result in catastrophy for many organizations while other competitors pass them by. This is even more true forcompanies that rely largely on the deployment of digital media content. The 2008 Olympics is illustrative of this point. Just two years ago during the 2006 Turin Winter Games, NBC streamed only one hockey game online. This year, the network will stream 2,200 hours of 25 events live. In only two years time the shift occured. Imagine what the next two years will bring.

The rapid pace of advancement for the new channels is occurring from a combination of factors. There has been a significant recent change is the amount of video organizations can put online. YouTube is the lingua franca of what's happening on the Internet, and has expanded enormously in the past two years. In addition the consumer’s appetite for content has changed. It’s no longer about just putting content online. Consumers now demand and expect transmission onto mobile devices and the ambition for enlightened organizations is to be able to reach as many viewers as possible. Video player technology is also much improved today, processor connections and network connection feed is much better and this will continue to improve at a rapid rate. In the end the biggest driver are consumers who have been exposed to online video and digital content and are increasingly expecting it.

Depite the obvious, many organizations are failing to proceed with the adoption of these new channels because they cannot reconcile the perceived threat these new channels entail to their existing business models. However, time is their enemy. They are the buggy whip makers watching the Ford production plant spit out the first fleets of cars from afar. Leadership of these businesses naively believes that the cannibalization of current revenue streams is not worth the risk of moving into the future. The tragedy is that because of this thinking, these organizations are not even preparing for just how rapid this change will occur. Because of their failing to accept the inevitable they will be ill equipped to catch up when the avalanche of consumer demand reaches a “tipping point”, which it has. Just think about the NBC Olympics example. This is a company whose revenue model is nearly exclusively surrounding digital content deployed on television and they are embracing the risk, because they know they have to.

Research shows that if you look at households with children, there are more laptops than televisions in the house. The way young people and increasingly older people are approaching the world, seeing technology as a tool, is changing things very quickly. Failing to embrace this change in your organization is a prescription for obsolescence.

Lively - Google's Entry Into Virtualization

Further evidence of the advancing revolution of content being delivered as “experience” is Google’s latest expansion beyond its main mission of organizing the world's information. Google unveiled a free service Tuesday, July 8^th, 2008 in which three-dimensional software enables people to congregate in electronic rooms and other computer-manufactured versions of real life. The service, called "Lively," represents Google's answer to a 5-year-old site, Second Life, where people deploy animated alter egos known as avatars to navigate through virtual reality. Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) thinks Lively will encourage even more people to dive into alternate realities because it isn't tethered to one Web site like Second Life, and it doesn't cost anything to use. After installing a small packet of software, a user can enter Lively from other Web sites, like social networking sites and blogs.

The Lively application already works on Facebook, one of the Web's hottest hangouts, and Google is working on a version suitable for an even larger online social network, News Corp.'s (NWS, Fortune 500) MySpace.

"We know people already spend a lot of time online socializing, so we just want to try to make it more enjoyable," said Niniane Wang, a Google engineering manager who oversaw Lively's creation over the past year.

Although Google is best known for the search engine that generates most of its profits, the company has introduced other services that are widely used without making much, if any, money. Google's peripheral products include its 3-D "Earth" software, Picasa for sharing photos and programs for word processing, calendars and spreadsheets. The service also enables users to create different digital dimensions to roam, from a coffeehouse to an exotic island. The settings can be decorated with a wide variety of furniture, including large-screen televisions that can be set up to play different clips from YouTube.com, Google's video-sharing service. Lively users can then invite their friends and family into their virtual realities, where they can chat, hug, cry, laugh and interact as if they were characters in a video game.

The Continued Evolution of the World Wide Web

A much-read article in the New York Times last November clarified an emerging debate about what would or should be called “Web 3.0”. In it, John Markoff defined Web 3.0 as a set of technologies that offer efficient new ways to help computers organize and draw conclusions from online data, and that definition has since dominated discussions at conferences, on blogs, and among entrepreneurs. "There is a clear understanding that there have to be better ways to connect the mass of data online and interrogate it," says Daniel Waterhouse, a partner at the venture capital firm 3i. Waterhouse calls himself skeptical of the "Web 3.0" hyperbole but has invested in at least one Semantic Web-based business, the U.K. company Garlik. "We're just at the start," he says. "What we can do with search today is very primitive."

Communicating relevant information in a relevant manner is fundamental to delivering experiences that expands ones views and understandings; the essence of the value of the Internet. For some time now, and from now on, content will be the most element. Whether it's a product description or catalog entry, an e-mail dialogue, or Web-marketed hard goods, the ability to deliver the appropriate content to the appropriate recipients is the essence of creating value.

As the Web evolves, it's becoming different, very different. The pursuit of the semantic Web.is a major aspect of the shift and is planned to be integrated in the web 3.0. What the semantic Web's enthusiasts promise is the transformation of documents, videos, e-mails, music, images, everything — into elements of a database. This one database will stretch across, and through, the Web, and will be increasingly searchable in natural language, resulting in more effective searches from far more natural queries, generating far more specific and appropriate results from within Web pages, documents, videos, exclusive of the applications in which they were created or housed, rather than the morass of Web sites and pages that searches return now.

Like mashups on steroids, the difference is that the machines including your tools, programs, and software agents will do the mashing for you and those you are interacting with. For this approach to Web 3.0 to work the way the, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) envisions it, requires the development of "common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources" – a true iteration or transformation of the way the Web works.

In short, it will be a Web of data designed or redesigned for interpretation by the machines we use to store and access the data. And that has big implications for the way we'll do things. For examples, humans on the web will be much more effective at identifying and reaching the precise people they want to reach, rather than today's "craft your keywords and trust you'll get proper placement" approach. As browsers, calendars, clipboards grow more familiar with their users' preferences, histories, and needs, they'll be far likelier to bring relevant content to the users attention as opposed to the current dependence upon carefully crafted keywords vying to catch the attention of a search engine.

What this evolution of the Web truly represents, is another step to intelligence being created in the machines, making our lives simpler and more rich and changing everything about what we do and how we do it.

 

Robotics and the Revolution

Robotics are becoming an increasingly relevant solution to simplistic and complex challenges in today's world. The exponential advancement of technologies are enabling companies to deliverthese technological tools more affordably. A recent US News Report entitled The Robot Revolution May Finally Be Here provides some examples of these solutions.  Even more compelling evidence of what is to come exists in video which displays the amazing capabilities of ASIMO. ASIMO, a robot designed by HONDA, is an amazing system that has done everything from working autonomously in offices as a group to conducting the Detroit Philharmonic Orchestra. This is but the beginning of a new day and what robots will do for humanity is more than cleaning floors. They will integrate into our every day life and shortly at that.