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If Baxter had a favorite band, it might be The Carpenters. Rethink Robotics' new droid could hum "Close to You" while it gets cozy with human workers along the assembly line.

The Boston-based startup launches Baxter today, billing it as a revolutionary humanoid robot that could help stem the tide of manufacturing going overseas for cheap labor.

For one thing, Baxter itself is surprisingly low-cost. Priced at $22,000 including software upgrades, it goes for far less than traditional industrial robots and puts automation in the hands of small and midsize companies that may not have been able to afford it. Labs and universities are also expected to show interest.

Also, unlike most factory robots, Baxter doesn't require a safety cage. People can work alongside the droid, which is covered in soft materials in case of impact. Sensors tell it when people are near, and it will stop moving if it does make contact with something unexpected. … Read more

Facebook will comply with an order from the U.K.'s High Court to reveal the identities of cyberbullies who targeted a woman with abusive comments.

Nicola Brookes appealed to the court after she was falsely labeled a pedophile and drug dealer by fellow Facebook members who set up a fake profile page of her on the site, according to the Guardian. The abuse allegedly started after Brookes posted a comment supporting a contestant on the British TV show "X Factor."

The order, which Facebook has not yet received since it must physically be delivered in the U.… Read more

The former head of News Corp.'s U.K. newspaper business Rebekah Brooks has been formally charged in the phone-hacking scandal that took the popular News of the World down.

The U.K.'s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) today announced that it has charged Brooks with three counts of "conspiracy to pervert the course of justice." CPS claims that last July, Brooks "conspired" with her husband, chauffeur, and others to "conceal documents, computers, and other electronic equipment from officers of the Metropolitan Police Service." CPS also charged Brooks and her assistant with "permanently&… Read more

London police have arrested six individuals in last year's News of the World phone-hacking scandal, and one report claims former News Corp. exec Rebekah Brooks is among them.

Citing sources, Britain's Sky News is reporting today that London police have arrested Brooks. Scotland Yard confirmed that one 43-year-old woman had been arrested, but did not provide her name. Brooks, who is 43, was a close ally to News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch, whose media conglomerate owned News of the World.

Last year's scandal, in which the newspaper was accused of hacking cell phones in order to dig … Read more

BOSTON--Robot engineers would do well to play with video games and other well known machine interfaces to get their creations out of the labs and into the marketplace, according to robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks.

Speaking at the Human-Robotics Interaction (HRI) 2012 conference here, Brooks said that academics too often expect the users to adjust to robots and don't foresee how people will use the robots they design.

The former director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brooks was a co-founder of iRobot, which sells the Roomba vacuum cleaner and robots to … Read more

Hoping to tap the expanding online fashion market, eBay this week launched Fashion Outlet, a virtual U.S. outlet mall that lets brands and designers connect directly with eBay customers. Think of that outlet mall in the boonies without the drive down some random highway.

The launch of the fashion outlet follows the debut of eBay outlet sites in the U.K. and Germany. The fashion items sold through the "Buy It Now" feature are priced at 20 percent to 65 percent off retail price, making them comparable price-wise to items found at outlets, Miriam Lahage, eBay's … Read more

This last week saw yet another big auto show in the form of the 2009 SEMA Show at the Las Vegas Convention Center. The show ran from November 2 to Friday November 6, and boy, was there a ton of eye candy for us car enthusiasts. However, the SEMA Show was not open to the public--only auto industry insiders were allowed inside these doors full of what SEMA refers to as "automotive specialty products." This video is a teaser of some of the many automotive delights that were on display at this year's event.

Here we go … Read more

This week: What Intel is doing to keep the momentum in computing moving from the desktop to mobile platform. A look at Atom, WiMax, Netbooks, and what to expect from the Intel Developer Forum next week in San Francisco. Guests: senior editor Dan Ackerman, and writer Brooke Crothers.

It's Reporters' Roundtable No. 2, and I wanted to get deep into hardware. So this week, with mobile computing and chip experts Dan Ackerman and Brooke Crothers, we talk about Intel's mobile computing road map. As always, read on if you want the raw show notes, but click the audio or video stream to get the full firehose of content. … Read more

Apple's Snow Leopard operating system, which hits the streets on Friday, has plenty of new technology--but one of its major new features will soon be available on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and other major platforms.

OpenCL, the Open Computing Language, was originally proposed by Apple to support parallel programming on GPUs. There are other GPU programming languages, such as Nvidia's CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) extensions for C and the Brook stream program language developed at Stanford University and included in Advanced Micro Devices' Stream Computing software development kit, but rather than choosing one of these languages, Apple chose to create a new standard … Read more