Whoa. I thought Pleo was hot but this thing is out of this world. It’s basically a little walking robot that can see, hear, and recognize you from a distance. Originally designed to help teach autistic children, the Nao is now a fully-featured and surprisingly friendly-looking robot that can walk, play catch, and talk to you. The company, Aldebaran Robotics, updated their original Nao robot, adding a 1.6GHz processor and two HD cameras. This guy won’t be cheap – he’s a service robot and the movement is so surprisingly smooth that I don’t doubt it will be in the upper thousands when it’s finally available. You can pre-order right now although I suspect that these guys choose you rather than the other way around. From the press release: Three years after it started selling its first NAO models, the company has sold 2,000 robots worldwide. Aldebaran Robotics has now released the latest generation of its programmable humanoid robots, which is intended for research, teaching and, more generally, for exploring the new area of service robotics. Stemming from six years of research and dialogue with its community of researchers and users, NAO Next Gen is capable of a higher level of interaction, thanks to increased computing power, improved stability and higher accuracy. Therefore, the latest version of the NAO robot widens considerably the range of research, teaching and application possibilities made available to specific user groups. One of the NAO Next Gen‟s novel and most remarkable features is the fact that it is fitted with a new on-board computer, based on the powerful 1.6GHz Intel® AtomTM processor, which is suitable for multi-tasking calculations. It also has two HD cameras that are attached to a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). This set-up allows the simultaneous reception of two video streams, significantly increasing speed and performance in face-and-object recognition, even under poor-lighting conditions. As well as its innovative features with respect to hardware, NAO Next Gen boasts a new, faster and more reliable vocal-recognition programme called Nuance. This programme is coupled with a new functionality known as „word spotting‟, which is capable of isolating and recognizing a specific word within a sentence or a conversation. Product Page via Victor

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The Nao Next Gen Bot Will Be Your Friend When No One Else Will

Here are some recent stories from TechCrunch Gadgets: Video: Bridgestone Showcases Airless Tire 2011 Gift Guide: 6 Hot PC Accessories To Keep You And Yours Warm This Holiday The Behringer iNuke: The 8-Foot iPhone Dock For The Oligarch Who Has Everything ChaLearn Challenges You To Teach A Kinect Instant Gesture Recognition Transistor Tech Startup Takes On Intel With Powerful New Chip Creation Technique

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Daily Crunch: Thunder

We have covered the one or the other Hello Kitty gadget in the past, but it’s been a while since the last notebook featuring the popular cartoon cat. But now Japan’s Mouse Computer is selling the so-called LuvBook S, [JP], an 11.6-inch laptop with Hello Kitty all over it. It has been co-developed with Hello Kitty maker Sanrio and luxury goods maker Swarovski. Swarovski designed the body of the laptop (the Hello Kitty face and heart you see below is made of about 1,100 Swarovski stones): These are the three different wall papers buyers can expect: Screensaver and box: Spec-wise, the LuvBook S features an 11.6-inch LCD with 1,366×768, an Intel Core i3-2330M CPU (2.20GHz), a 500GB HDD, 4GB memory, Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0+HS, a 1.3MP web cam, a USB 3.0 slot, two USB 2.0 slots, an SD card interface, and an HDMI port. The LuvBook S runs on Windows 7 Home Premium (64bit/SP1). Mouse Computer has already started selling the device in Japan (price: US$900). Visit specialized sites like the Japan Trend Shop or  Flutterscape if you really want to get one shipped outside Japan.

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LuvBook S: Japan Gets Super-Cute “Hello Kitty” Laptop

Geek.com Everyone has New Years’ resolutions that they generally don’t follow through with, but Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is staunch in keeping with his yearly “personal challenges,” as he calls them. Mark Zuckerberg Only Eating Animals He Personally Kills

Intel already manufactures x86 processors for Apple’s desktop computers, and now the company may be taking a closer look at mobile ARM chips like the Apple-designed silicon featured in current model iPads and iPhones. According to the EE Times , Intel is courting Apple with the intent of manufacturing processors for future generations of Apple mobile hardware. Currently the A5 processor is manufactured by Samsung, however this is already slated to change. On the horizon is chip maker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), who has already signed a deal with Apple to take over the foundry relationship. TSMC could begin getting revenue from Apple business before the end of 2011. Advertisement: read more

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Will Intel Manufacture iPhone 6, iPad 3 Processors?

Jive CEO Tony Zingale is finally announcing the results of a big project he’s been working on since he took over the company in 2010. It’s not an acquisition or a product release: It’s a massive upgrade to Jive’s board of directors. Joining the board are McAfee’s outgoing chairman Charles Robel, McAfee CEO (now at Intel)  Dave DeWalt , Facebook’s vice president of technical operations Jonathan Heiliger and Google’s vice president of product management Sundar Pichai .

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Jive Adds Four New Board Members as the IPO Gets Closer

Ten days ago Google discovered that apparently innocuous Android apps were in fact infested with “DroidDream” malware that included an Android rootkit, with the apparent intent of creating a smartphone botnet. It infected more than a quarter of a million devices before Google intervened. The thriller writer in me immediately began to wonder what would happen if black hats built a wildly popular game that doubled as a botnet beachhead. Imagine if Angry Birds was secretly the world’s biggest botnet: even without root access to its install base, those hypothetical black hats could grab private data from tens millions of people, and/or probably DDoS every wireless network in the developed world, especially if it ran as a background service with location access. That will never happen, of course: it’s what security guru Bruce Schneier calls a “ movie-plot threat .” But it does illustrate that you couldn’t stop a Trojan app like that in advance. Android Market security is based on permission requests when an app is installed: such requests are routinely ignored, since nowadays almost every app asks for full Internet and SD card access. Ah , you might say, if only Android apps were vetted in advance, like Apple’s! In which case you should really stop kidding yourself. Most apps seem to be reviewed in an hour or less (after days in the queue.) Apple appears to check the libraries they link against, and maybe they can decompile to the original source code, too – though I doubt it – but iOS apps are written in Objective-C, which includes support for C itself, a language for which labyrinthine obfuscation has become an art form . Any developer worth his/her salt could write an iOS app that includes code whose use only becomes apparent when the app receives a secret signal. Once upon a time, not so long ago, people talked about how “ walled gardens ” (like AOL and CompuServe, back in the day) would inevitably lose out to the free, wild, open Internet – and most software was preinstalled, shrink-wrapped, or downloaded from a trusted site. But nowadays users download potentially untrustworthy software from trusted sites. (See also: the Mac App Store.) That’s why providers need the remote kill switch that Google used on DroidDream; that Apple has had for years, and is ready to use on “unauthorized” iOS users as well as apps; and that Intel is now building in at the hardware level , so that phones (and computers) running Intel chips can be killed with a simple encrypted SMS. Ten years ago people were horrified at the notion of Intel adding a unique ID to all of its processors. Today every phone has a unique ID, and yours is probably uploaded to apps’ servers multiple times a day. Not so long ago, people were outraged that Amazon could and did arbitrarily delete books from users’ Kindles; last week they clamored for Google to exercise essentially the same power. Giving all that power and control to Amazon, Apple, Google and Intel in exchange for security may ultimately be a reasonable and necessary tradeoff — but that kind of centralization of control still makes me more than a little uneasy. As the developing world adopts smartphones as their first and only computers, Android and iOS will increasingly dominate all Internet traffic. (What about RIM and Windows Phone? I expect they both have kill switches too, but really, who cares; wake me up when one of them has won next year’s war for third place.) Android is a walled garden just like iOS, subtler but no less forbidding. And you can’t even escape the app garden via your browser, because your browser is, in and of itself, an app. While we weren’t looking, the walled garden won. Photo credit: James Whitesmith, Flickr

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The Walled Garden Has Won