iRobot today won a $3.3 million contract to build a shape-shifting, flexible robot for dangerous or hard to reach combat duties.

The robot is part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Chemical Robots (ChemBots) program that seeks to build soft, flexible, mobile objects that can identify and maneuver through openings smaller than their static structural dimensions; reconstitute size, shape, and features while delivering a meaningful payloads or performing significant tasks, DARPA said. DARPA notes too that ChemBots represent the convergence of soft materials chemistry and robotics to create a fundamentally new class of soft meso-scale robots.

“During military operations it can be important to gain covert access to denied or hostile space. Unmanned platforms such as mechanical robots are of limited effectiveness if the only available points of entry are small openings,” said, Mitchell Zakin, Ph.D., program manager at DARPA in a release. “We believe that a new class of soft, flexible, meso-scale mobile objects that can identify and maneuver through openings smaller than their dimensions to perform various tasks will be quite valuable in many missions.”

DARPA goes on to say nature provides many examples of ChemBot features including mice, octopi, and insects, that readily traverse openings barely larger than their largest “hard” component, via a variety of reversible mechanisms. These mechanisms include (1) using elastic materials to twist, crumple, and bend with many degrees of freedom, (2) utilizing the flexibility of the musculoskeletal structure to squeeze through openings, and (3) exploiting reversible changes in modulus (i.e., flexible to stiff) to achieve dimensional reductions which can exceed 10:1. Soft invertebrates typically move by crawling,  peristalsis (earthworms, caterpillars), pedal waves (snails, slugs), cilial motions  and utilize means such as gripping, hooking, and suction to ensure sufficient traction with the terrain, DARPA said.

This ChemBots award is the latest in a series of DARPA project awards iRobot has won within the past 10 years. DARPA initially approached iRobot in 1998 to create the PackBot for its Tactical Mobile Robot program.

More recently, iRobot received an award under the DARPA LANdroids program to develop a new portable communications relay robot that is small, inexpensive, intelligent and robust. To date, iRobot has delivered more than 1,500 PackBot robots to a broad range of military and civilian customers worldwide, and continues to enhance this technology with its next-generation PackBot 510, iRobot said.

IRobot also makes the popular Roomba vacuuming robot and the iRobot Verro Pool Cleaning machine.

TAKEN FROM www.networkworld.com

When iPhone was first released, just having one was enough to draw attention and establish hipness with beautiful women. Remember when girls crowded around for a demonstration of the magical touchscreen or to watch YouTube videos in the palm of your hand?

Their eyes widened with childlike wonder as you described the beauty and elegance of iPhone and its utter superiority to every device known to man.

Sadly, those days are gone. In the past year iPhone has become common place. With the coming price drop to $200 any goober will be able to get one.

Yet the iPhone is still a powerful tool. Here are the best ways to unleash the seductive power of iPhone.

1. Unlock it

Nothing tempts a girl’s wild side like a bad boy, and that’s exactly what an unlocked iPhone says: I don’t play by the rules, danger doesn’t scare me, and I have crazy skills you can’t even comprehend. Plus it gives you access to the 3rd party apps that are too cool for regular users.

Who cares if it can be done by any chump in 45 seconds. She doesn’t know that. Bonus points for using the term “hacked” and alluding to the danger of an iPhone being “bricked”.

2. All-Star Photo Album

So you just met a cute girl. How do you prove that you do amazing things all the time and have many cool friends? This is the ideal use-case for the All-Star photo album. Create a special album on your iPhone of all your most impressive pics: snow boarding in the Swiss Alps, you with your friends at the Radiohead concert, and pictures of you with other attractive women are all good candidates.

When you get her alone for a moment, say something like, “OMG you’ve gotta see this photo of me [insert cool thing here]” and proceed to go through the entire album, commenting about how great a time you had and how cool your friends are.

3. iPod Tunes Master

Dozens of targeted playlists in the palm of your hand. This needs no explanation. Create playlists to set different moods: chill, party-time, low key, and of course, romantic. To get the ultimate effect, invest in a set of portable speakers. When you bust out the tunes at the beach, park, etc. you will be the man. We highly recommend flipping through cover flow mode for maximum visual effect.

4. Contacts, the more the merrier

Make sure you have lots of contacts, because seriously, you are so freaking popular. To inflate your contacts count, import all of your email contacts into your address book and upload them to iPhone. She won’t know that 2/3 of those people have never seen you in person.

Expert tip: Complain about searching your contacts list saying, “I can’t stand looking for contacts on my iPhone — it only lets you search by 1 letter. How am I supposed to sort through 300 Johns?” Note: This is the only acceptable circumstance to complain about iPhone.

5. Stocks

Women like men with money and ambition. Show her you’re on the way to wealth by constantly checking your stocks. When you catch her trying to see what you’re looking at, casually comment on your gains and losses, throwing around buzz words like “credit crisis”, “oil bubble”, and “consumer confidence”. Assure her you will achieve superior returns by investing in commodities and precious metals that will be essential to the growth of developing nations.

6. Save the Day with Maps

Maps is the ultimate clutch iPhone feature. The best time to break it out is when you’re with a group of people and need to find something in an unknown area — pizza, hardware store, gas station, etc. As soon as the opportunity arises, execute a search in maps and lead the group to success. Even better if you can use iPhone to instantly call the place. By solving the problem and taking charge you’ll establish yourself as a resourceful leader — a quality highly regarded by women.

7. Look Smart with Safari

When an argument arises over a particular fact, look smarter than everyone else by finding the correct answer with Google. This is the only time you will wish to conceal iPhone use from females. It’s great for settling disputes about the proper definition of a word or the location of obscure African nations.

In case it’s not clear, using iPhone will make you look like a rich, smart, cultured, resourceful, exciting, and popular bad ass. We can’t wait for 3G.

TAKEN FROM www.peoplejam.com

With his tongue firmly in his cheek, Kid Rock has been commenting on file-sharing again but says he doesn’t need to steal himself, because he’s rich - but not rich enough, as it turns out. Kid Rock announced that he’s boycotting iTunes because he says between Apple and the labels, they’re keeping all the money.

In recent comments, Kid Rock - real name Robert Ritchie - has said that his record company had previously asked him to stand against “illegal downloading” because he was told that people were stealing from him. According to a BBC report, his response to the label was: “Wait a second, you’ve been stealing from the artists for years. Now you want me to stand up for you?’

In true rock and roll style, this performer wasn’t going to do as he was told. “I was telling kids - download it illegally, I don’t care,” he said. “I want you to hear my music so I can play live.”

Now, in 2008, Kid Rock is boycotting iTunes because he says that artists are not getting their fair share of the revenue generated by the Apple store. He is annoyed at this ‘old system’ “where iTunes takes the money, the record company takes the money, and they don’t give it to the artists”.

Kid Rock crucially talks about how the Internet should’ve been a “great opportunity for everyone to be treated fairly, for the consumer to get a fair price, for the artist to be paid fairly, for the record companies to make some money.”

Of course, as the singer notes, it hasn’t turned out that way but concedes that he’ll probably have to put his music on iTunes at some point but notes that he’s doing ok overall without it: “I’ve just sold a million records, I’m not really feeling that blow” he said.

With his tongue firmly in his cheek, Kid Rock also says he doesn’t agree with the one-sided argument against file-sharing: “I think we should level the playing field. I don’t mind people stealing my music, that’s fine. But I think they should steal everything. You know how much money the oil companies have? If you need some gas, just go fill your tank off and drive off, they’re not going to miss it.”

Will this rocker be taking his own advice? Probably not. “No, I don’t steal things. I’m rich” he said.

TAKEN FROM torrentfreak.com

LinkedIn Corp., a business-networking Web site, has received a $53 million infusion from blue-chip venture capitalists that values the company at $1 billion.

The investment comes as rival Facebook Inc., a site that originally targeted college students, has been attracting older users, leading to speculation that Facebook — like LinkedIn — could become a destination for professionals hoping to make new contacts, recruit employees or find experts in certain fields.

LinkedIn was the pioneer in that concept. The Mountain View, Calif., company has more than 23 million users and added 250 new employees in the last 16 months. It drew more than 7.5 million unique visitors world-wide to its site in April, up 7.6% from March, according to the most recent figures from comScore Inc.

But Facebook has a much larger audience. Its unique visitors rose 6.6% to 116 million during the same period. The Palo Alto, Calif., company completed a funding round last year that valued the company at $15 billion.

LinkedIn lately seems to be emulating Facebook in some ways. It added a “status-update” feature to its site, similar to one on Facebook, that lets people tell their contacts where they are or what they are doing at any time. LinkedIn is also in the process of opening its site to outside software developers, something Facebook did to great fanfare last year.

LinkedIn Chief Executive Dan Nye, however, said in an interview that LinkedIn has been working on the software-developer platform “for years,” and that his company has a much-richer, more-professional user base than Facebook.

“If you’re not on LinkedIn, you’re not on a professional network,” he said.

LinkedIn’s average user is 41 years old and has a household income of $109,000, according to Mr. Nye.

Facebook said it doesn’t release specific demographic information and declined to comment. But the company’s Web site says more than half of Facebook’s users are outside college, and users aged 25 and above represent its fastest-growing demographic group.

Mr. Nye says LinkedIn has long had other types of site features now popular on social-networking sites, such as online alerts when people add new contacts or update their online profiles. Still, LinkedIn remains a more staid, business-oriented site, where people post detailed work resumes and seek recommendations about jobs; Facebook is awash in games, fan clubs and quick chat.

“There are a lot of people who have both a Facebook and a LinkedIn account,” said investor Jeffrey Glass, of Bain Capital LLC’s Bain Capital Ventures, which led the latest financing round for LinkedIn. Other investors included Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners. But while LinkedIn “is all about productivity,” other social networks, like Facebook, are about fun, Mr. Glass said. “So I think there’s a lot of opportunity for these worlds to coexist.”

LinkedIn is profitable, Mr. Nye said, and is making money in several different ways. LinkedIn sells online ads; offers subscriptions to people who want access to more features on the site; charges for online job postings; and sells a recruiting product to big companies. The company will use the additional $53 million to pay for its expansion plans, which include moving into Europe and possibly making acquisitions, which Mr. Nye declined to detail.

LinkedIn was the subject of acquisition rumors this past fall. Reid Hoffman, a company co-founder, told the Sydney Morning Herald in January that LinkedIn had been talking to several suitors, but he declined to name them. Now, “our path is to build a strong, independent company,” Mr. Nye said.

TAKEN FROM online.wsj.com

YouTube (GOOG), known for short clips of dogs on skateboards, cats on treadmills, is trying something new: Showing video that is much longer than its previous 10-minute limit. It’s something of a test right now, limited to YouTube’s “content partners”, but it has potentially big implications.

The company outlined the new policy in a memo emailed to content partners last week:

Long Form Content
You now will be able to upload and monetize videos in your account that are longer than 10 minutes. This feature is exclusively for partners. Independent Film makers that partner with us will now be able to upload their feature films on our site. Please note that for long form content, the maximum file size is 1GB.

How much is a one gig? A lot: Almost enough space for a full-length, standard definition movie. Most full-length films on iTunes, for example, are 1.1GB to 2GB. A standard-def copy of “Semi-Pro” runs an hour and 38 minutes and consumes 1.1GB.

YouTube’s 10-minute limit has served a couple of purposes to date: It keeps bandwidth costs down, and it makes it harder for copyright owners to complain about unauthorized streams: Technically, you could cut up “300” into 10-minute chunks and distribute it through the site (reader Big Al points out that you can do this right now with News Corp.’s (NWS) “Idiocracy“, if you have the patience). But who wants to watch that? And short clips also work for YouTube because, well, it’s the Web, and there’s a limited appetite for anything that lingers for more than a couple of minutes.

So what’s Google thinking about here? One obvious answer: Advertising. YouTube sells ads against videos uploaded by its content partners, but there are only so many ads you can sell against a short, under clip. Presumably YouTube wants to figure out if it can sell more of them against longer clips.

That will depend largely on the quality of the video it can aggregate, so YouTube is actively soliciting good stuff. Fortune reports YouTube execs have been recruiting indie filmmakers at at the Los Angeles Film Festival to upload their work. Spokesperson Julie Supan told the magazine that YouTube fundamentally sees itself as a forum for short-form. “But as we test full-length content, we are starting to see that the audience is potentially there.”

But is the money there? We’ll look at the costs involved in streaming a 1GB clip and how much advertising would be needed to make that pay in a future post. UPDATE: Short answer: We think this won’t cost YouTube much, and might even help them eke out a few more dollars.

See Also:
YouTube Unveils ‘Screening Room’ For Free Indie Movies
Will Indie Movies Crush YouTube? No.
Study: Videos Live Fast, Die Young On Web
Why ISPs Want To Charge Bandwidth Hogs More Now: Web Video Traffic About To Explode

TAKEN FROM /www.alleyinsider.com

This was the title of a panel I joined at the Social Media Influence event earlier this week in London. It was a slightly tongue-in-cheek question from Matthew Yeomans, one of the conference’s organisers, but interesting because it touches on a number of current trends — the phenomenal rise of video usage on the Web, the success of user-generated video sites and the impression that, perhaps, blogging has become a bit passe. Just this week we’ve seen a new study show that online video consumption has nearly doubled in the past year while new social video services are growing very quickly and Youtube recently appointed a citizen video news editor.

This was the full brief:

Okay, we’re joking…..sort of. But be it video-snacking, YouTube resumes, digital video activism or live-streaming to the web from your mobile phone, the world of Web 2.0 is being driven by the moving image. This panel will examine the role video is playing in shaping communication techniques within companies as well as helping reach new consumer audiences.

In a way the event answered the question itself. One of the participants, the BBC’s Robin Hamman, who I had thought was going to be on the panel instead streamed the proceedings live via his mobile phone to Qik where it is now archived. So now I’m thinking why blog about the event when you can see the whole thing on Qik? And, in my case, why write a note to my boss when I can just point him to the full recording and (slightly scary thought) he can make up his own mind on how it went?

In preparing for the event I did a couple of things. First, I thought about my professional experience within Reuters. We’ve got perhaps a couple of hundred journalists blogging on a regular basis but just a handful video blogging. That’s partly because video is still a bit tricky while blogging is relatively easy since, in essence, it’s just a text-based content management system and nearly all our journalists are writing on a very regular basis.

But that’s the view from a mainstream media organisation. What’s the picture in the blogging world? I asked a number of people in the Global Voices blogging network for a perspective. These are people who live and breathe blogging. They deal with the realities of handling content using social media day in, day out and from the four corners of the globe. I thought their answers gave the topic a deeper perspective that I struggled to get across to the London audience.

…there’s definitely lots going on with video, but I firmly believe most people spend so much time in their pyjamas they won’t want to be on video most of the time they spend online. It’s hard enough to get people to use their own names in discussion forms, blog and article comments.Someone sent us a link to this Wordpress plugin the other day that allows people to make comments in blogs with videos. It’s kind of neat and perhaps the kind of thing we’ll be seeing more of soon. It’s complimentary to the Web 2.0 activity that already exists rather than something that replaces it. Personally, I think we’re more likely to see video, still photos, and text mingling more effortlessly on the web, rather than a situation where moving images dominate. The multi-media experience is much more effective for interactive story-telling. Text is just too effective and easy to lose the battle.

Solana Larsen

I think the idea that the world of web 2.0 is being *driven* by the moving image is debatable, especially given the dominance of microblogging platforms like Twitter that are primarily text based. Nor is video as immediately “social” as text. Which is not to say that it’s not an important ingredient in the mix.

I think that as more individuals become versed in multiple forms of media we’re probably going to see them mixing them and harnessing them for various purposes at different times. Online video can be of immense value, nevertheless, in the places where television continues to be very effective - ie in live coverage. Bandwidth and service constraints notwithstanding, the day a live streaming service like Qik is deployed beyond US borders it going to be revolutionary. And unlike TV, this content is instantly archived.

And of course, and perhaps obviously, the existence of cell phone and other small digital video cameras has completely changed the game in terms of security and privacy, both for better (police torture videos in Egypt) and for worse (videos featuring schoolgirls in Trinidad having sex). I was thinking just the other day how difficult it used to be to take photographs in airports, in many of which I think it’s still illegal to do so.

Georgia Popplewell

“As long as connectivity speeds are an issue, videos will continue being food for few. I´m hoping that web 3.0 will make it easier to tag online videos and search them, but so far it is mostly manual labor: sitting through dozens of videos trying to find the ones that have useful tidbits of information. So in countries where connectivity is slow, watching videos online can be torturous at worst and annoying at best. I spend most of my time looking at icons that remind me that the video is still loading, so I know firsthand it can get frustrating. Likewise with uploading content when one has an intermittent connection. Uploading and viewing video has tech requirements that blogging in text doesn´t, so I don´t think it will substitute blogs anytime soon, they will continue growing in tandem, complimenting the other’s content. As long as we depend on typed tagging for videos, videos will still depend very heavily on written context.”

Juliana Rincon

Instead of writing this I could have recorded a two minute ‘piece to camera’ (will we start calling these items ‘pieces to mobile’?) and uploaded it to a social media platform. I haven’t done that because I just don’t think I’d have been able to tell the story as well. I like the flexibility that blogging gives me. I’ve got video here, I’ve been able to link to underlying sources, I’ve been able to use all the media there is. And very quickly.This feels like genuine multimedia production that plays to each medium’s strengths. I just can’t see video alone eclipsing this ability to weave media strands together.

TAKEN FROM blogs.reuters.com

Ever get the feeling that text messaging makes your cellphone bill just a little too expensive? A British space researcher, of all people, might finally have an answer for that end-of-the-month jawdrop.

Assuming the average price to send a text is 10 cents and the message itself is about 140 bytes in size, Dr. Nigel Bannister calculated that texting costs about $749 to send just one megabyte (MB).

According to the University of Leicester detector physicist, NASA stated that it costs just $17 per MB to download transmissions from the Hubble Space Telescope—at most. From there, Bannister made some “conservative assumptions” to account for “the cost of ground stations and the time of the personnel along the way.” Thus, getting data from the telescope—whose pictures are helping to generate Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope program—can range from around $17 to $170 per MB.

“The bottom line,” Bannister said in a statement, “is texting is at least four times more expensive than transmitting data from Hubble, and is likely to be substantially more than that.”

So unless you’ve got more pocket change than an astronaut or DIY rocketeer, next time send an email or just make an actual phone call.

TAKEN FROM www.popularmechanics.com

It’s been more than a decade since the original American Gladiators went off the air. So when NBC announced the show’s return last fall, the official release claimed that, “Using splashy twists including special effects, water skills and the latest technology, the classic games will be upgraded with even higher thrills, impact, energy and spectacle.”

A brief first season aired earlier this year, but aside from the excruciating presence of hosts Hulk Hogan and Laila Ali, and a redesigned final obstacle course, the upgrades were hard to spot. Except, of course, for the occasional crack shot during the Assault event, in which contenders fire a variety of weapons at a target above the Gladiator’s tennis-ball cannon (powered by the No Country for Old Men-esque thump of compressed air). If a crossbow bolt so much as grazed that elevated target, the Gladiator would be instantly hauled backwards on a ceiling-mounted dragline, launched through the air and dumped into a pool of water. It was a carnival dunk tank writ large, and a distillation of the entire show—simultaneously thrilling and useless.

For the second season of American Gladiators, which debuted Monday night, we decided to take the producers at their word, and explore the “latest technology” used in the show. You know, maybe we missed something last time around. And there are seven new events promised this season. Who knows, could one of them involve an exoskeleton, or motion sensors, or, like, lasers? Although we can’t reveal any of the events being unveiled in the weeks to come, executive producer David Hurwitz, who also produced Fear Factor, gave us the inside scoop on one of the events that debuted last night. The secret behind Rocketball, in which contenders and gladiators are launched 25 ft. into the air toward a series of nets, is a device called a ratchet decelerator. Another fun fact: Stuntmen have been using these things for more than 25 years.

The first decelerators weren’t as precise or as safe as today’s models, but the basic idea remains the same—by attaching a dragline to a harness, stunt coordinators can control a person’s speed of ascent and descent. Legendary stuntman Dar Robinson is credited with inventing the first decelerator in the 70s, and the devices have since become extremely sophisticated. On American Gladiators, the decelerators are preprogrammed with the height and weight of the contenders and gladiators, to ensure that everyone in Rocketball is vaulted to the exact same altitude. It’s the same device that dumps the losing Gladiator in Assault. “You take anyone, from a 150-pound woman to a 300-pound man.” says Hurwitz. “If you program their size/weight ratio, you can land them on a dime.”

Admittedly, Rocketball is fun to watch. That’s because it feels completely out of control. Contenders are allowed to time each launch, but once they pound the button, the contraption takes over, and whether they’re headed face-first into the fang-dentured Wolf, or hurtling into an easy dunk (points are scored for each ball that lands in the elevated baskets), they’ve been sucked into a kind of competitive Cirque du Soleil.

Other than the high-flying decelerators, and some other harnesses and lines, like one that allows contenders to be safely hurled into the water at the base of the rock-climbing wall, that’s basically all the technology that the new American Gladiators has to offer. No rapid-fire paintball turrets in Assault, no robot gladiators and only a few seconds of first-person headcam footage. And even the new gladiators were a little disappointing. When Phoenix arrived, she soared into the arena wearing a massive pair of feathered wings. That, and one of those decelerator harness things

TAKEN FROM www.popularmechanics.com

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