News Blog

In addition to an expected increase in sales to the U.S. military, iRobot says it will see growth in its unmanned robot platforms from foreign buyers.

iRobot's Warrior robot can be modified to support chemical sensor devices or functioning weapons.

(Credit: Candace Lombardi/CNET News.com)

The "Unmanned Systems Roadmap 2007-2032," a report put out by the Department of Defense last year, outlined a strategy to increase spending in unmanned technology for the air, sea, and ground.

iRobot, which has already been supplying the U.S. military with unmanned robots for use in ground reconnaissance and combat, has repeatedly said it will benefit from the military's increased need.

But the company now says that as its robots have proven themselves useful in Iraq and Afghanistan, interest from foreign armed forces has also increased.

iRobot has sold robots from its line of unmanned military drones internationally to 13 allied countries, including Australia, Gemany, Israel, and the United Kingdom, since 2006, Joe Dyer, president of iRobot's Government & Industrial Robots division, told reporters in a Web conference Wednesday.

The international market consisted of only a handful of robots sold in 2006, but about 8 percent or 9 percent of iRobot's total revenue for unmanned robots in 2007. This year, iRobot estimates that its foreign market will increase to about 15 percent of its total revenues for its government and industrial division, according to Dyer.

But how do export license approvals work when a company is a supplier of dual-use technology to the U.S. military? Admittedly, iRobot's unmanned platforms are just as suited to benign first-responder search-and-rescue functions as they are to lethal combat. But either way you look at it, iRobot is still selling hardware with high-tech military capability to foreign entities.

"It's on a country-by-country basis. If country X desires to purchase iRobot robots, we take it to (the State Department) for approval. If we receive it, we proceed," Dyer said.

Your next car might know you better than most of your friends or family do.

Stanford conducts a wide array of automotive research. A team representing the university has competed in DARPA's Urban Grand Challenge, an event that showcases breakthroughs in self-driving cars. Stanford's robot, Junior, was the first to cross the finish line in the competition last November.

(Credit: Stefanie Olsen/CNET News.com)

If current research pans out, the car of the future could figure out not only where you drive, what sort of music you listen to, news preferences, what you like to eat, or whom you are calling--but it might also know how your mood affects your driving. And eventually, it could turn into the ultimate backseat driver, taking full control if it's not satisfied with the way you're manning the steering wheel.

It might sound like something from the distant future, but researchers at Stanford University are working on all manner of technological improvements to the automobile. They're hoping features like camera detection of face movements, voice analysis, and sensors in the steering wheel will result in cars that can accurately detect a driver's mood and make appropriate adjustments if it's affecting their driving.

Clifford Nass, a professor at Stanford and director of its Communication between Humans and Interactive Media (CHIMe) Lab, believes autonomous driving will not be limited by the technology itself, but rather how much responsibility people are willing to outsource to their cars. We have already seen them give up some control. Antilock brakes and stabilization systems, for instance, are already standard features, and the next step could manage everything from imposing speed controls for lead-footed drivers to using sensors trained on road surfaces to guide the car by itself.

The lab is also looking at ways in which cars can improve someone's driving by giving them audible feedback. Some drivers are already having conversations with their cars every day, interacting with navigation or voice-operated music systems, for instance. But that's still a relatively new technology.

"Talking directly to your car is not all that common...but increasingly, the car is inviting you to talk. What is going to happen next is cars talking to you. There is a great interest in how cars can teach you to be a better driver," Nass said in an interview with CNET News.com at the university campus.

Researchers are busy exploring how drivers behave in simulated situations, and they've found that feedback from the dashboard isn't always welcome. In trials, a synthetic car voice might tell people, "You're not driving very well and you need to pay more attention." That message actually tended to worsen people's driving habits as they got angry, and with more sincere warnings like, "You really need to be more careful," driving deteriorated even more until the voice insisted that the driver pull over--the driver getting so furious that the trial ended with an accident, (fortunately, just a virtual one).

The tone of the car's voice is important. Studies show that happy people drive best when they get advice from a happy sounding voice (listen to MP3), while the performance of drivers who are upset improves by 40 percent if the voice is more subdued flat (listen to MP3).

For drowsy drivers, some intellectual challenges can work out well. Stanford tested people by playing them Swedish language learning tapes and found that the ones who repeated the sentences stayed more alert.

"A small amount of talkback makes people stay more awake," said Nass, who thinks it could be beneficial for a car to engage its driver in a little conversation. There are cultural differences between countries that also need to be addressed. Some years ago, the German car maker BMW had a product recall of its 5-series because German male drivers could not stand the female voice in the navigation system. In driving simulations in Japan, people got upset if the mood recognition system used in simulations told them they were sad, while that was not a problem for people doing the same tests in the U.S.

Another goal is to develop cars that help elderly people, since graying populations all over the world continue to drive, but might be aided by warning systems for red lights, stop signs, or pedestrians. Stanford has teamed up with the American Association for Retired People for this development project.

Inexperienced young drivers have a whole other set of problems, as it takes 10 years to become a good driver, Nass said.

"One possibility is to let the car take over; like when entering a highway, the car can hit the gas for you," Nass said.

Two issues likely arise down the road are advertisements (would you want your car to deliver commercial messages?) and personal integrity (do you want insurance companies to monitor your driving behavior?).

"What the car industry is going to do (with all these technology advances) is a great question," Nass said.

Car manufacturers all over the world are following the experiments with great interest. After all, Silicon Valley has, in a very short time, become the R&D center for many car-tech companies as cars get new interface technology and become computing devices. "Everybody's opening up facilities here. This is the place now for car research," Nass said.

Last year, Volkswagen gave $5.7 million as a gift to Stanford's new CarLab, an effort to pool all car-related research into one place. The CarLab will be formally opened in September. One important focus will be the transition from non-autonomous cars to a vehicle that can operate itself.

"How willing will people be to let the car take over for you? That is one of the main missions with CarLab," Nass said.

A number of incidents recently illustrated just how poorly trained most tech support people are.

I suspect that they have the jobs they do because they are willing to work cheap. Period. It seems that companies offer very little training to tech support personnel whose main job boils down to reading from a script and being polite.

If you are dealing with a technical problem where you understand the concepts involved, you are likely to be frustrated talking to someone who does not understand the concepts, but is mandated to do step 1, then step 2, then step 3, and not let the facts get in the way.

In this situation, is lying OK?

Hard to say. On the one hand, when script-reading support persons tell you to do x and then y, they may be lying to you. That is, they may have no clue what x or y does or how it might solve the problem. If you know that x and y won't fix the problem, is it OK to lie and say you did it?

I recently had a problem with a standalone VoIP unit the first time I plugged it into a router other than my own. The unit plugs into the Internet on one end and a normal telephone on the other end. The Internet connection was fine, the lights on the router were all normal, but there was no VoIP dial tone. So I called the vendor of the VoIP box.

The tech support person said to first turn off the router, the VoIP unit, and the cable modem and then turn them back on again. This is a reasonable starting point, assuming you have no interest in gathering any additional information about the problem. In my case, I couldn't turn everything off because the Internet connection was needed for something more important than this VoIP problem. That was the end of debugging. If I didn't do step 1, they wouldn't go to step 2 in the script. The fact that the Internet connection was fine, never made it to the radar screen.

I stewed on the problem some more and narrowed it down a bit. Then I called back to provide my additional information about the problem and another support person said the same thing: turn everything off first. Neither support person had any interest in understanding the problem beyond the simple fact that there was no dial tone.

Apparently, they can't handle a full problem description that requires understanding what's going on. For example, neither person asked about the status lights on the front of the VoIP unit.

Eventually, I figured out the VoIP problem myself (it had to do with DHCP vs. static IP address on the LAN) and fixed it without turning off the router.

Update May 23, 2008. Clarified that in the example, I was talking to the vendor of the VoIP unit, not the ISP.

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

SAN MATEO, Calif.--Catering to a rising tide of socially-conscious shoppers, eBay this summer plans to help publicly launch WorldofGood.com, a marketplace for buying fair-trade products, according to Robert Chatwani, eBay's general manager of the project.

eBay, in partnership with a separate fair-trade company World of Good Inc., has already built a community site for people interested in goods that are made of recycled materials or produced by fairly treated workers, for example. But the two organizations plan to open a shopping site that will cater to these "social change consumers," Chatwani said here Tuesday at the Dow Jones Environment Conference.

That segment of shopper spends as much as $45 billion on green products annually, he estimated.

"Those people aren't on eBay. We believe only between 7 and 12 percent of these social change consumers are eBay users now ... so this could be accretive to the business," Chatwani said on a panel at the two-day conference.

Chatwani helped conceive of the idea for the WorldofGood.com marketplace three years ago while traveling to India with fellow eBay employees. There, they found some sustainably made artisan products they believed would sell online, and could give some money back to the creator. They tested the idea and it worked. Bay teamed up with World of Good, a group designed to alleviate poverty in third worlds by helping sell local artists' goods globally.

Chatwani said WorldofGood.com is only one project inside eBay that's focused on social change. Historically, eBay has been what he called a low-carbon company, built with more efficient online practices and an emphasis on technologies that are good for the world. But eBay also operates explicitly more charitable projects.

Those include MicroPlace, a micro-finance site for people to invest in entrepreneurs in the developing world. It also runs eBay Giving Works, a shopping site that lets buyers and sellers donate a percentage of sales to a charity. Chatwani said that that site has raised more than $120 million for charities.

For its part, WorldofGood.com will focus on giving people more information about products--where they come from, how they're made, and how they effect the environment, Chatwani said.

"Our challenge is not so much about getting people to spend more. It's about introducing alternative forms of consumption," he said.

Red Herring's 19 employees were evicted Tuesday from the tech publisher's offices in Belmont, Calif., after it fell behind in rent payments, according to a source close to the situation.

Deputies from the San Mateo County Sheriff's Department on Tuesday arrived at around 3 p.m. and gave the staff 30 minutes to leave the premises, said the source, who is not authorized to speak on the matter. A locksmith and the landlord's attorney showed up at the same time to change the locks.

Employees were seen trotting back and forth from the office to their cars, hauling PCs and other belongings. The blog Valleywag first reported the eviction.

In a phone interview, Red Herring publisher and CEO Alex Vieux acknowledged that the deputies cleared out his staff, but said it was not unexpected and denied not having the money to make rent payments.

"We have been in negotiation about how to get out of the lease," Vieux told CNET News.com. "We did not agree and we made an economic decision."

Vieux said that he has already found a new office somewhere near his former headquarters, but he wouldn't disclose the location.

Red Herring was one of the tech magazines that rose to prominence during the dot-com boom in the late 1990s, competing with the likes of The Industry Standard, Business 2.0, and Wired. The magazine was a casualty of the Internet meltdown and ceased publication in 2003.

Vieux acquired some of its assets and reopened it as an Internet-only publication that same year. He started printing the magazine again in 2004. Since then, reports of financial distress have plagued Red Herring. The magazine has not been printed for at least the past six weeks.

If Vieux couldn't agree with his landlords on lease terms, he still may have to negotiate with them about taking possession of the company's e-mail servers, which are still in the building, according to a source.

Meanwhile, Red Herring's Web publication is still operating. The publication's servers were hosted in a different location, according to the source.

MENLO PARK, Calif.--The practice of playing up a company's green policies for show was the new black for the past few years. But now actually making and selling green products is what's hot because of its potential to put a business in the black.

At the 2008 Consumer Electronics Emerging Technologies Summit held here in Silicon Valley, venture capitalists, business consultants, entrepreneurs, and representatives of some of the largest consumer electronics companies in the world discussed the new wave of innovation in a rapidly commoditizing industry. It basically comes down to two words: energy efficiency.

And the reason it's important? Because it can make a product stand out. And if consumers can see a real benefit to using products that are environmentally conscious, they'll buy it. And that's potential profit for vendors and manufacturers.

"Before it was something (consumer electronics companies) just said to make themselves look good. Now it's a business imperative," said George Bailey, general manager of IBM Microelectronics.

That's because flashy, visible new breakthroughs in technology in the CE space aren't providing the same profitable bump for as long as it used to. High-definition televisions are a prime example.

"TV manufacturers are troubled in terms of profit," said Bailey. "They're asking, 'How can I add value, recapture profit?' Before it was larger format LCD screen. If yours was bigger you'd make more money. Now we know that's not true."

When the big TV manufacturers come to his division of IBM he says they are all looking for greener, more energy-efficient chips that will make their TVs consume less power because that's a way they can differentiate their product from others on the shelf. New technologies include High-K Metal Gate chips that IBM is working on that "leak" less power and can power smaller devices for longer.

But green-friendly products can be more expensive, which can deter certain types of consumers. A representative from Samsung in the audience said the company has yet to see that consumers are willing to pay for products just because they are "green."

That's why you have to give them a real benefit, not an imagined one that makes them feel good, said Steve Westly, who runs the clean tech venture capital firm The Westly Group.

"You have to give customers a real value proposition. A 'green' truck that gets 16 miles per gallon? Consumers will see through that," he said. A green product "has to have an added benefit."

Even if energy efficiency doesn't attract consumers in the numbers that these manufacturers and investors hope, businesses will be forced to green their products one way or another, Westly said.

"You'll see (environmental standards) dialed up in a government-mandated way," he said. "Government regulations and mandates are only going to increase. Not just here, but globally."

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Just yesterday I received a review copy of the book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.

In fairness, I've just started reading the book and am looking forward to it. But what I've gleaned so far from the cited research is that kids today are so busy texting friends, downloading content, playing video games, and socializing online that they're losing touch with reading (even online), civic engagement and a solid work ethic.

That profile--especially the last item--doesn't apply to the Silicon Valley teens here Tuesday at SD Forum's second annual Teens in Tech confab.

Take Anshal Samar, the 14-year-old inventor of chemistry card game Elementeo, who at last year's conference said he wanted to earn his first million dollars by the time he graduated middle school. Now on the verge of selling his fantasy-education game to the public, he could meet that goal out of 8th grade. (He already has 5,000 orders, but he hopes to raise as much as $1 million to distribute 50,000 sets by next fall.) Samar used the Web and photo-editing software to create his game.

Anshul Samar, the 14-year-old inventor of chemistry card game Elementeo

(Credit: Stefanie Olsen/CNET News.com)

Or Sejal Hathi, a 16-year-old at Notre Dame High School in San Jose, Calif., who founded the nonprofit Girls Helping Girls to inspire young women around the world to affect social change in their communities. The Internet is central to Hathi's push to get the word out about her organization.

Or Jonathan Wilde, a 15-year-old programmer who recently won Google's Highly Open Participation Contest for work on open-source document management software called Plone. He said during the conference that he's developing his own open-source software that he hopes to launch soon.

Sure, all of these teens loosely fit the mold of a wired generation. They spend multiple hours online every day on sites like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and YouTube. And they're no stranger to texting friends or creating content online. But they're behavior is more indicative of an uber-ambitious class of kids (likely raised by tech-savvy parents) that's bending technology to their will rather than staying beholden to it.

The teens were invited here Tuesday to Hewlett-Packard's campus as part of a day-long event focused on how the young generation is using technology to innovate, start new companies, or organize around causes. Marketers and investors were naturally in toe to talk about efforts to reach younger audiences online and scout for fresh ideas.

The panelists were arguably among the cream of the crop of their generation, so you could hardly consider them dumb. Their ideas and drive could turn them into the next Catherine Cook or Mark Zuckerburg. But that tech prowess and ambition could have as much to do with their genes as their geographic location.

"Being in Silicon Valley makes it impossible not to be an entrepreneur. I didn't want to wait 10 years," Samar said during an opening presentation of his company. Dressed in a power-blue shirt and blazer, you could hardly tell Samar from the executives in the crowd, except that he barely cleared the podium.

Most of the teens had behaviors unlike what you read in most research reports.

For example, during a panel at the conference (which I moderated), all of the kids said that they had abandoned MySpace in favor of Facebook. Among the reasons: Facebook lacked MySpace's gaudiness, offered superior privacy controls, and could better connect an upwardly mobile teen to professional contacts. Hathi, for example, uses Facebook "cause" groups to market her nonprofit.

Still, given the choice of another, simpler social network, most of the teens said that they would have no problem switching if their friends were there.

Most of the panelists said that they don't use instant chat, despite popularity of tools like AOL Instant Messenger among teens. Instead, most of them said that e-mail was the best way to blast out a message to friends; and then catch up with responses when they're not busy later. None of the teens seemingly had the time for the micro-blogging service Twitter.

In response to a question about whether e-mail's utility will stay relevant in the age of MySpace and Facebook, they all said that it would.

"E-mail will survive because it's far more professional than other forms of digital communication," said Hathi.

Another apparent anomaly among these teens was that they were all concerned with their privacy online. The group said that they try to avoid leaving any digital tracks and use high privacy settings in social networks.

Wilde, for example, attributed this behavior to his parents. Wilde said they made an impression on him while young to avoid sending e-mail or posting anything online that he wouldn't be comfortable with the world reading.

As for books, most of the teen panelists lamented that they didn't read as much as they would like, apart from school assignments. Yet they do get much of their news online. Hathi said she regularly reads The Economist and The New York Times online. Deanna Alexander, a 17-year-old from Mountain View, Calif., said she read about the recent earthquake in China online. Wilde, who writes his own blog on robotics, said he likes to keep up with industry sites like Engadget.

So what's missing in all this technology? Oddly enough, most of the teens said that personal connections are getting lost in the time spent with software built to connect people. When asked what they would do without MySpace and Facebook, for example, most of the panelists said with some regret that they would probably spend more face time with their friends and family.

"We might spend more time with people on a more personal level," said Alexander, who builds art-focused Web sites in her free time.

Wilde agreed. During his work on the Google contest, he said he met some of the event organizers. But ultimately he felt a lack of a real connection to them through email or a social network.

"You don't really establish a relationship until you actually talk to that person or shake their hand," he said.

Sounds smart to me.

I'm not a big fan of surveys, so I don't quote them often. But a recent Consumer Reports survey about PC manufacturers listed Apple as No. 1 in tech support, with Lenovo second, Dell third, and HP dead last. I should also say that Dell came in second in desktops.

I thought the headline should be "Survey says leading PC maker HP dead last in tech support." But that's not what happened. The media hailed Apple, trashed Dell, and gave HP a pass.

Horror stories about Dell's support are all over the blogosphere. Why is that? I mean, why does the media give Dell such a hard time?

Because perception is reality. But aside from being a pithy statement, what does that really mean? ... Read more

Wind energy company Noble Environmental Power has filed to raise as much as $375 million in an initial public offering, according to a document with the Securities and Exchange Commission that was filed Thursday.

The Connecticut-based company, which plans to list its shares with the Nasdaq under the symbol "NEPI," operates in the booming wind power market. But the company will still have to brave a weak IPO market.

The 4-year-old Noble runs wind parks in New York state that generate about 282 megawatts of electricity; and later this year, it plans to open added parks in New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Maine, and Texas. Noble is seeing demand for wind power in the Northeast partly because of renewable energy mandates in the area. But the wind-power industry is hampered by a shortage of wind turbines.

Noble plans to use the money from the IPO to develop its business, invest in new technologies, and ink future turbine supply agreements. Lehman Brothers, JPMorgan Securities, and Credit Suisse Securities, are underwriting the IPO.