Ali Kuru

RIKEN, a natural sciences research institute in Japan, and Tokai Rubber Industries designed a robot which can pick a person off the floor to his/her wheelchair, or vice versa. This is useful in Japan, where people often sleep on futon floor bedding or relax on floor tatami mats. “Riba II” named robot is able to lift off a person weighing as much as 176 pounds (approx. 80 kg for us, the SI system users).

Aging population is a serious problem especially for developed nations, and developers of the robot are hoping to help caregivers with the problems of nursing of elderly. According to RIKEN, caregivers on average lift patients from floor bedding into wheelchairs 40 times a day, adding that the elderly nursing-care population in Japan will hit 5.69 million by 2015.

RIKEN is set to test Riba II at nursing homes in Japan, and eventually bring the bear to market with price tag around $70.000, says CNET. Most important thing here is, this could be the first robot ever find its way into our houses! Japanese might just have been invented the very ancestor of T-800; the Homo erectus of Skynet :)

Check out the video after the break to see how Riba II operates.
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Remember my complaint about how slow is DealExtreme? I wrote in a post that it would probably take more than hundred days for them to deliver my item, and I think I owe them an apology now. I forgot to mention that my item has been arrived last Saturday, 2^nd of April to be exact, which means the DealExtreme were able to deliver my item in exactly 100 days, not more :)

Congratulations to them for sucking a little less than I expected.

DealExtreme is one of those Hong Kong online retailers which you can find a lot of goodies at no price with free shipping. I’ve bought a lot of things from them in the past and, although their service was little bit slower than usual when considered to local sources, I was overall happy with their service. Their support were able respond you in a couple of days and they always returned with a reasonable solution.

Unfortunately, they appear to left those good days far behind.
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This is the most beautiful and clever design (with projected desktop and keyboard, integrated bluetooth/IR dongle which doubles as an haptic controller – awesome!) for a mobile phone I’ve seen so far.

Unfortunately it’s just a concept and, since it’s designed by Billy May of Mozilla, we will never have a chance to see it in its physical form, probably not even a prototype. Being created by Mozilla Labs is not the only reason we will not see a phone like this anytime soon, there is also another big problem: nobody currently has a reliable battery technology to feed this greedy piece of machinery – well, not at least for a day :)

Here is what Mozilla Labs post says;

How does this relate to Mozilla / Mozilla Labs?

• Billy is a community member in the Mozilla Labs community and created Seabird in his spare time. Seabird is not a Mozilla or Mozilla Labs project but part of the Mozilla Labs Concept Series. The Concept Series provides a place for the wider community to create and collaborate on projects which push the boundaries of the Web and the browser.

Does Mozilla have plans to produce a mobile phone?

• No. Mozilla produces Firefox for Mobile, the popular Firefox browser for mobile phone systems such as Nokia Maemo and Android.

You must see the impressive video presentation of the concept phone after the break. (more…)

According to official DLNA web site, Arçelik is going to be the first Turkish manufacturer to offer a DLNA certified product: an LCD TV in an unknown size with a LAN connection, which will act as a “digital media player”.

According to DLNA, the model of the certified product is 32SXCR6 and certificate date shows 8/30/2010, yet couldn’t find any news about the new LCD TV neither on Arçelik’s official web site, nor on Google.

No wireless network interface according to certificate, wonder if it is going to have an internal drive.

Here is the given certificate (PDF).

Update: Seems like Arçelik won’t be the only Turkish electronics manufacturer with DLNA certified goods in their product line. Vestel says (Turkish, sorry) that they’ve already demonstrated their “DLNA TV” at IFA 2010. It’s really interesting to hear that they’ve demonstrated their DLNA capable product before they got the certification though :)

I’m a long time HTC Touch Diamond user, and the phone I’m using now was already SIM-unlocked when I bought it. Recently, I had a chance to grab another one for real cheap from eBay for a friend, which was locked to Orange. Since we don’t have Orange here in Turkey, I’ve started a search for ways of unlocking the device.

Below is the method I used for unlocking my new Diamond. If you don’t want to use the overpriced unlocking services that certain web sites offering, you might find this free alternative useful ;)

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It is obvious that the “Surface” will be the next big thing not only for Microsoft, but for all of us. The clip below was shown at Wharton Business Technology Conference, and it’s called 2019, is showing how far will Microsoft is planning to go with its interactive surfaces. They are planning to embed this technology from your walls to your electronic newspaper, your table to your remote, to your cell phone, simply every surface you encounter in your life.

Give your 5 minutes to see this teaser of future, it is impressive!

[via gizmodo]

Rumor has it; Amazon is planning to release a student’s version of Kindle this year, with a full 8.5″x11″ display.

As I’ve said earlier, I don’t really think we need an e-book reader and the only good thing about Kindle 2 is its free 3G connectivity. But, Kindle for students with a larger screen? Although this is a good idea, I think Amazon will need more than just a larger screen to con students to buy these devices. If I were a collage student, I would consider buying a Kindle if it has; (more…)

There is a lot of buzz around Amazon’s new Kindle 2 and, may be because being a member of a nation that don’t read much, I’m getting hard time understanding why everybody is thrilling for a yet-another e-book reader.

Since almost every technophile in the world, who can afford a netbook or a smart/pda phone, has already have a gadget that gives him (or her) pleasure of reading books in a digital environment, what is the catch for a new pricey ($359!) e-book reader that its sole ability is to serve you digital editions of books? Oh, I know, Kindle has a web browser and plays mp3s, too. But even netbooks’ performance on browsing web is questionable, I don’t think one can use the Amazon’s gizmo for a satisfactory browsing experience, and your cell phone is probably a much more capable player when it comes to music.

Comfort of having a specifically designed device, which resembles a book and has an optimized screen for reading books, can make you feel good if you are a frequent reader. But for me, it is just an addition of another brick in my bag.