By Maggie Lake, CNN

New York (CNN) — A smartphone or tablet feature high on your holiday list this year? How about a robot instead?

Cynthia Breazeal, head of the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab, is launching a crowd funding campaign that will let you buy exactly that. What is being billed as the first family robot — Jibo — is on the way.

At $499 for consumers and $599 for developers, the price is in line with a high-end smartphone. But Jibo is intended to be so much more. Breazeal, who has pioneered work in making robots more social and interactive, believes Jibo can be an organizer, an education tool, even assist elderly family members.

“Jibo is this helpful presence that helps support your family, your human network, to be more efficient and feel more connected,” says Breazeal.

To continue reading, please click here: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/07/16/business/lake-jibo-robot/

By JOHN MARKOFF

As a graduate student at M.I.T. in the 1990s, Cynthia Breazeal studied with the roboticist Rodney Brooks and explored the idea of “social” robots that were designed to interact and collaborate with humans.

In 2012 Dr. Brooks began selling a stationary robot, Baxter, bearing an expressive LCD-panel “face” and intended to collaborate with human workers in manufacturing and logistics.

Now Dr. Breazeal (pronounced bruh-ZILL), who is on leave from her teaching position at the M.I.T. Media Laboratory, is trying to bring similar ideas to the home in the form of a robot companion: Jibo.

Dr. Breazeal is best known for the creation of an elaborate robot head, Kismet, that contained actuators, sensors and computer technology for understanding and interacting with humans, primarily infants and young children. Kismet had eyes, ears and a mouth, was expressive and tried to mimic human emotional states.

Jibo, in contrast, is more of an abstraction. Almost a foot tall, weighing six pounds and wirelessly connected to the Internet, it has a moveable LCD screen that in demonstrations displays an expressive orb, but not a human face.

Jibo will be something of an alarm clock on steroids. The robot, which is a stack of three components allowing the display to swivel freely in any direction, is intended to be a family companion performing a variety of interactive tasks like sending messages, taking pictures, acting as a personal messenger and serving as a robotic stand-in during conversations between people in different places, as well as a “friend” with a personality.

The company, which is running a crowdfunding campaign for the robot on Indiegogo.com, is also hoping that software developers will seize on Jibo as a platform and create applications that will extend the robot’s functions to things like tutoring and coaching.

To continue reading, please click here: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/16/a-robot-with-a-little-humanity/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

 

BY CHRISTINA BONNINGTON

For many families, the tablet has become the central, shared computing device in the home. It’s a hub for learning, for entertainment, and for staying connected. But what if your tablet was even more interactive? What if it woke up when you can home, recognized your face, and suggested a couple of things you might want for dinner? What if, when asked a spoken question, it could tailor its answer directly to you, instead of just offering a blanket response?

A new device called Jibo can do these things, and it could mark the next step in group computer interaction in the home. But Jibo isn’t a tablet at all: It’s a robot.

Specifically, Jibo is a social robot. You talk to it, ask it questions, make requests. It talks back, provides answers, and takes care of grunt work like setting reminders or scouring the web. It’s meant to act as a helper and a partner in a variety of household experiences, much like a physical embodiment of Siri, Google Now, or any of the voice-activated concierge services available on our smartphones or tablets.

But unlike those handheld touchscreen devices, Jibo tries to act like more of a participant than a tool, as if it’s a part of the family. It has a big round head, and a face that “looks” around the room. The foot-tall, bulbous body can rotate to address the person speaking. It even leans a bit when it turns to face you, as though it’s listening more intently.

Jibo is only a prototype right now. The team behind it, headed by founder Cynthia Breazeal, who is also director of MIT Media Lab’s Personal Robots Group, hopes to bring it to market in time for the 2015 holiday season. Curious early adopters can join the crowdfunding campaign that begins today. The pre-sale price tag is $500 for early backers, and $600 for a developer kit. That’s a little more than the cost of a good tablet. And Brezeal is clear about how Jibo is designed to perform the same types of interactions families currently use tablets for, but to do so with a physical presence that fits into human lives in a more natural way than just another touchscreen.

To continue reading, please click here: http://www.wired.com/2014/07/jibo-family-robot/

 

By Rudina Seseri

Venture capital is one of the last industries where women have not made great strides. Of the hundreds of senior investing partners in venture firms, fewer than one in 20 are women. The dynamic has to change.

We are in the business of helping to define the future. Whether we invest in industry disrupting startups or support entrepreneurs creating entirely new spaces, one of our most important attributes is the ability to envision products and solutions that may not exist today, but can become pervasive in the future. Diversity of thought in our profession is a must, and leaving out the perspectives of 50 percent of the population only hurts us.

Of course, this begs the question of how women can enter or be recruited into the industry. Venture capitalists often come from the ranks of successful entrepreneurs and operators in technology companies. These individuals have deep understandings of technology, often with computer science and engineering degrees, complemented by business building experiences. Historically, these individuals have been men. To this day, only 10 percent of computer science and related majors are obtained by women. And, the pool of talent narrows further since only some of these women pursue entrepreneurial roles.

This is in no way an attempt to justify the dismal representation of women in venture capital, but it has contributed to the situation. The good news is that this dynamic is changing. The advent of digital, from the emergence of e-commerce to digital publishing, from mobile to social, has opened doors for women to lead technology-enabled startups without the need for knowing how to code or understanding the inner workings of an integrated circuit.

In Boston alone, we have several women-led and founded companies that have launched successful initial public offerings or been acquired at very high prices. Furthermore, the number of women who have taken senior leadership positions in large technology companies has also increased. In other words, the talent pool of women for senior venture capital positions has increased meaningfully in recent years.

When I was promoted to partner at Fairhaven Capital at the end of 2011, a reporter highlighted Fairhaven as one of only six firms in Boston to have a woman in its senior investment ranks. Only 2-½ years later, I count five new women-led seed funds, three venture capital firms led by women, and a number of other women who have been promoted to partner positions. Others have advanced to partnerships by switching firms. The momentum for change is there.

While the sense of urgency to bring women into the industry should continue and grow, I remain confident that in the not too distant future, when we see our names in the media, we will no longer be rare specimens who have broken the glass ceiling of a male-dominated industry. Instead with a better-balanced industry, I look forward to the day when we are viewed simply as successful investors who have helped build landscape-altering businesses, with little regard to our gender.

Rudina Seseri is a partner at Fairhaven Capital in Cambridge, leading software as a service investments in marketing, sales, and other enterprise-related businesses. Follow her on Twitter @rudina11.

To see the article on the Boston Globe website, please click here: http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/07/11/women-leaders-venture-yet-fulfilled-market-opportunity/o6RRS8rKaEG7hAE5iGCuxJ/story.html