The early bird robot price is $199. To interact with the bot, you simply call it via Skype after downloading the proper software. Motion controls allow you to move Botiful around the office, room, or under and around obstacles. Delaunay recommends using it to play remotely with pets and/or kids and to visit hard to reach places like a crawlspace or dungeon.
I wish I had seen the interview on CNBC – the looks on the hosts faces. This is big:
On Wednesday morning, the 79-year-old Weill, one of the 20th century’s most acquisitive bankers, stepped up to the mic to endorse … breaking up the banks. “What we should probably do is go split up investment banking from banking, have banks be deposit-takers, have banks make commercial loans and real estate loans, have banks do something that’s not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that’s not too big to fail,” he remarked on CNBC.
Obviously, Wall Street is shocked. How could it be bad for them to be completely free to do whatever they want? People are talking about Weills as wanting to repent, fix his legacy, etc.
Here’s a different take:
Weills is on the out. He will never be made CEO again of one of these huge consolidated, too-big-to-fail, WMD banks, or probably of any bank given how much he helped cause this mess. But if there is massive financial structure upheval due to regulatory reform — led by him — he may just find himself in charge of one of these split-off divisions. Chaos makes opportunity for people on the outside. I’m all for it.
The biggest mistake of Obama’s presidency was not restructuring Wall Street immediately, when they were vulnerable.
I have tried many collaboration websites and apps. Asana is really good (except for the iPhone app); I would invest.
Microsoft announces its Surface tablets…pardon…Tablet PCs, and quickly finds itself between two business models: Are they offering a vertically integrated device, a la Xbox; or are they licensing a software platform, as in Windows/Office? As remarked upon by Horace Dediu and others, one day Ballmer says:
“We are working real hard on the Surface. That’s the focus. That’s our core.”
and the next, with equal strength of conviction:
“Surface is just a design point.”
Interesting take on business model changes in the google-apple-amazon-microsoft wars.
The Dark Knight Rises was fantastic – a must see.
But.
Enough already. There have been many, many bad superhero movies. I thought the idea was to keep rebooting until you got it right. (Right: Toby McGuire, Sam Raimi in Spiderman; Chris Nolan, Christian Bale in Batman; Norton in The Hulk; see also Peter Jackson, Lord of the Rings). When you get it right: STOP! That’s it. The special effects technology is good enough now to find a good director/writer/actor combo and get it done properly. When you’ve done this, come up with new ideas.
Yet Isaacson understands how genius worship has led to multiple interpretations. “It’s like arguing the gospels with a fundamentalist,” he says about the futility of trying to rebut what he sees as misreadings of Jobs’ life. He tells me what he’s told lots of people who have sought him out to catechize about the book—that his biographies aren’t how-to manuals for the good life. He isn’t arguing that readers not look for guidance in the story of Jobs; he knows it is the nature of biography-reading to do so. But Isaacson stresses that Jobs’ life was complex, the lessons to be found myriad.
The legacy of the Walter Isaacson book continues with derivatives. I think Steve Jobs chose wrong, he should have chosen David McCollough. Isaacson missed something; he doesn’t have the love (of technology in this case).
Jobs was a unique character: he didn’t have to be the way he was to be successful, he just was that way.
But I hadn’t known about this addendum from Isaacson (not bad).
Pretty bland, but the threat is real – the economic IP theft is already thought to be huge.
The President’s op-ed reminds me of that scene from the West Wing when President Bartlett is deciding on an “equivalent” response to a terrorist bombing. Cyber War makes that kind of tit-for-tat war acceptable for even nuclear powers.
See also this much more interesting read in Wired on Kaspersky:
What is mentioned is Kaspersky’s vision for the future of Internet security—which by Western standards can seem extreme. It includes requiring strictly monitored digital passports for some online activities and enabling government regulation of social networks to thwart protest movements. “It’s too much freedom there,” Kaspersky says, referring to sites like Facebook. “Freedom is good. But the bad guys—they can abuse this freedom to manipulate public opinion.
He has compared university administrators to subprime-mortgage brokers, and called debt-saddled graduates the last indentured workers in the developed world.
At least Thiel’s fantasies are aimed at improving the world. “It seems like we’ve not been thinking about the right issues for a long time,” he said. “I actually think it is a big step just to ask the question ‘What does one need to do to make the U.S. a better place?’
What’s interesting about Thiel is his drive to make the world better (basically solely through technology) combined with his harsh Libertarian views. An unusual connection occurred to me while listening to NPR’s Fresh Air this morning: Jill Tartar, former director of SETI, kept describing civilizations (ours and alien ones) as technologies. E.g., “an old technology” might describe an ancient civilization who managed to get to us from across space. Describing our civilization by our technology alone…is certainly one way to describe us, but it assumes a equivalence of our fundamental nature, or our societal moral nature, while compared to another species.
iFab and Making Things are trends we will be talking more about here at Longvie.ws.
All of these advances play well into America’s ability to innovate, demolish old industries, and continually reinvent itself. The Chinese are still busy copying technologies we built over the past few decades. They haven’t cracked the nut on how to innovate yet.
Look here to look ahead.
