Red alert, red alert!: A new household robot guardian won’t do the laundry or fix dinner. But the vacuum-cleaner-sized gizmo will instantly notify its master of burglars, fires and gas leaks.
The three-wheeled, cat-eyed machine will provide peace of mind at only a fraction the cost of its Japanese-made rival, according to its maker, the Seoul-based startup MOSTiTECH.
Packed with a small camera, motion detectors and heat and gas sensors, MOSTiTECH’s robot wheels around the house, takes snapshots of anything that moves and keeps an eye out for fire and gas leaks.
If anything is amiss, it fires off snapshots or text warnings to the owner’s mobile phone.
The robot can also be remotely controlled via cell phone and the Internet, and it automatically recharges itself when its battery runs low, MOSTiTECH president Park Sang-hoon said.
South Korea’s biggest mobile carrier, SK Telecom, plans to put the robots on the market by July for about $850. By contrast, Japan’s four-legged Banryu costs about $17,800.
Hitachi supersizes storage: Digital media hogs can celebrate.
A new, whopping 400-gigabyte hard drive from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies can store up to 400 hours of standard television programming, 45 hours of high-definition programming or more than 6,500 hours of digital music.
Previously, the largest such drive available was a 300-gigabyte product from Maxtor Corp., said Dave Reinsel, industry analyst at IDC.
San Jose-based Hitachi said it designed the monster drive, the Deskstar 7K400, for audio/video products such as digital video recorders.
Push is on for “.mobile” domain: Microsoft Corp., Nokia and other leading high-tech companies want a new Internet domain name that’s tailored for mobile services.
A name such as “.mobile” would let mobile Web users easily identify sites built for their smaller screens and that would encourage new wireless applications and services, proponents say.
Next Tuesday is the deadline set by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers for proposals to augment “.com,” “.fr” and more than 250 other existing domain names.
Applications cost $45,000 and are limited to suffixes set aside for specific industries or interest groups. Citing confidentiality, ICANN spokesman Kieran Baker could not comment on the number and types of applications received until after the deadline.
Study finds anti-spam tools can be unforgiving: As spam-fighting tools become increasingly aggressive, e-mail recipients risk losing newsletters and promotions they’ve requested.
A new study attempts to quantify missed bulk mailings. Return Path, a company that monitors e-mail performance for online marketers, found that nearly 19 percent of e-mail sent by its customers never reached the inboxes of intended recipients.
The figure, for the last half of 2003, is up 3.7 percentage points from the same period in 2002.
In some cases, the messages weren’t delivered at all; in other cases, messages wound up in spam folders that are rarely checked. Though technical glitches can also cause mail to disappear, Return Path blames most of the deletions on spam filters.
Major e-mail service providers, aware that filters can falsely tag messages as spam, have been working on better tools to verify senders of e-mail, so that legitimate mailings can get through.
Think green when buying a computer, study advises: Thinking of buying a new computer? Think again, a U.N. study warns.
The study from the Tokyo-based U.N. University urges people to be more aware of environmental issues when buying, using and disposing their computers.
Manufacturing one desktop computer takes more than 530 pounds of fossil fuels, or about 10 times its weight, the study says. By contrast, the amount of fossil fuels needed to make cars and refrigerators is roughly equal to their weights.
The study also found that making a desktop requires 48 pounds of chemicals and 3,300 pounds of water.
Rather than being resold, refurbished or recycled, the study says, older models are most often stored in warehouses or homes and eventually end up in landfills.
Associated Press
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