Imagine Star Wars C3P0 and R2D2, imagine Wall.E and EVE, imagine Marvin the Paranoid Robot (from The Hitchiker's Guide to Galaxy?), David Swinton from A.I, Sonny from I,Robot, Data from Star Trek! Well some may argue that one or more of the listed are cyborgs, not robots, but hey, if some genius out there managed to build one, and build one for the consumer, aren't we all game for it? 

I'm sorry Google Glass, your capabilities really astound me but you're just too expensive for such a small device that achieves the same tasks as my Android smartphone can. Move over Siri, you're so uptight sometimes. Welcome Jibo, the world's first family robot. 

Cynthia Breazeal and Jibo

Created by MIT roboticist Cynthia Breazeal, Jibo is a finalised version of a work-in-progress, with developer and consumer version scheduled to be available sometime in 2015. OMG I can barely contain myself! It's finally here! 

It's not just a tool that you use, it's your helpful partner! 

Yeap, that is what sets Jibo so far apart from other consumer technology approaches for instance smart-homes etc. Implementing emotion and intuitiveness as the core of its design, Jibo "learn skills" rather than "installing apps". Of course the whole idea is to develop a platform on top of which developers can program skill algorithms and machine learning capabilities (hopefully), but consumers in general are not interested in those technobables. 

The initial skills that Jibo has are oriented towards coordinating a busy family, especially one that does not live together under the same roof, helping with communications and bringing contents to life such as warm and friendly greetings and reminders. A key feature was the camera as a social tool. Whereby with a physical camera be it a high end DSLR or a phone camera, it is a tool and you remove yourself from the action but with Jibo, it can help to take the photo for you without much hassle of finding a substitute person and everyone can be in with the action. 

The consumer wants a helper that integrates into their lives - managing the household to a certain extent for instance turning on the lights at night when someone walks into the room, changing the air-conditioning temperature, taking calls and messages and reading aloud emails and alerting scheduled items - and not just that, the consumer also wants to do all these with the feel of interacting with someone. 

Jibo is just that. In different instances Cynthia was quoted to say "putting a warm personality on a lot of the things that we use or apps for today" and "Jibo is one of the first of its kind to humanise way of relating and experiencing technology". It is capable of recognising individuals through visual (face recognition) and audio (voice recognition), a great way to personalise experience with Jibo itself. 

I am super excited that Jibo is going to be out in the consumer market soon, and that Cynthia has taken the crowdfunding route to collect funding for it. To keep up with the latest news on Jibo or to get one for yourself, visit www.myjibo.com or add the blog to your reading list at http://blog.myjibo.com/. You can also contribute to the Jibo project through IndieGoGo. 

In the mean time, check out this awesome introduction video of Jibo! 

*Disclaimer: Photo and Video are owned by respective owners. I do not claim them to be mine. 

Tired of losing lives at Candy Crush? All huffin' and puffin' about Temple Run and not getting anywhere? Can't sleep thinking of your Plants and Zombies? Well, lemme make an attempt to bring you out of your (current) misery and introduce you to a new addiction - Alien Hive! 

Sliding Tile Puzzle

LOL I made myself sound like a cheesy salesman there. But in good faith, if you remember the sliding tile puzzle - hours upon hours spent trying sliding and attempting to align the pieces to the proper order wither in numeric sequence or to reveal a picture, together with every frustration that came with it - you are going to love this game! I for one, am addicted to it! Much of the childhood memory planning strategies to move the pieces across the board, the painstaking effort, crunching your mind just trying to get the pieces in place without causing other pieces to go out of place came flooding! It's insane! Add move counts and limit to that - you just HAVE to try it!! 

Alien Hive is just like that - and more. It's a combination of match 3 or more and the sliding tile puzzle. What it means is that across the 6 x 6 board, one tile is left blank. You slide the tiles vertically or horizontally in attempt to create a match of three or more of the same pieces. To make it even more interesting, the pieces don't just disappear off the board, but evolves into a higher level "being". Match three or more of those to get a higher level being until you manage to get a supreme alien! 

CUTE!!!!

Get the objective yet? There are basically three different types of "beings" in Alien Hive - the crystals, match three or more of these to get more moves; the plants, also gives moves as well as Magic Fruit in the final evolution; and finally the star of the show, the aliens - match three or more eggs to make an egg-womb, three or more egg-wombs make an alien embryo, three or more of those make a baby alien, three or more of those make an alien, three or more of those makes an alien coccoon - and frankly that's as far as I could go for now. 

A look at my hives!

I'll be nice and post some tips I got from the developers website :

• Always plan a few steps ahead.
• Look at the whole board, don't just focus on the area surrounding the empty slot.
• Try to use minimum resources to gain maximum result – use as few moves as possible!
• Each powerup is valuable, try to use the proper item at the right moment.

Here's a demo video to get you started :

For you puzzle game addicts out there, I seriously recommend this game. Watch out for those Naughty Bots too, they're nasty! Visit Google Play or tap on the Play button to directly download the game into your phone! Enjoy! 

Use these links to get play  Alien Hives on your iPhone / iPad or Blackberry.

          

Being a geek that I am, as long as I have the internet, I prefer to use my own tools and interfaces, regardless of PC or laptop or even phone that I am using. Thanks to gmail and Google Chrome, I am able to do this. Sure there may be other mail accounts and browser are able to do this, but I got used to gmail and chrome and all of it's extensions. 

For those unfamiliar with what I am talking about, in a nutshell, I have my gmail and Chrome synced together. So as long as the machine (Desktop, laptop, phone etc) that I use has Chrome installed, I can sign in and voilà! I have all my Chrome extensions (similar to you phone's apps, which includes calendars, notes, YouTube  mail, and even games) ready to be used. Pic on the left are some of my extensions. 

Tweetdeck is one of my most used extension. I got news weeks ago saying that Tweetdeck will be retired. Its connection to Facebook and FourSquare has been removed recently, adding to the validity of the news. So I went out to find myself a new Twitter aggregator, and lookie lookie, I found HootSuite!

At first I was sceptical - it's difficult to find extensions that does just what you want it to do. More is welcomed, but then again some of them just go overboard. I also would not like to have to pay for them (typical Malaysian - sue me {that was a joke, please don't sue me} ) yet if they're free, I would not like to be bombarded with adverts. So yeah, finding extensions that fits the requirement can be tough. However, I digress. 

HootSuite has a paid version and a free personal version. The paid version (naturally) offers more features like extensive traffic reports and analytics (bloggers tend to want to keep an eye on this) and what not, but I settled down comfortably with the free personal version. It offers me to connect up to 4 social accounts - I have Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Google+ (still no idea how to utilize this to the max) so far. If you use Wordpress as your blogging client, you can link that as well. As for me, since I use Blogspot, HootSuite allows me to install a Blogspot extention into it so I can have another tab for Blogspot. 

Fuuuhhh... this is probably another long post, but I am certain that you can benefit from using HootSuite like I did. First of all, it is very clean and well designed. No clutter, single place to post to all your connected social network, or just to some that you can select to your liking! You can attach pictures as well, and it will generate a short url should you want to post it to Twitter to save up some of those characters. XD 

Why HootSuite? Why would you want to have Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, and all your social network in one browser tab? Simple. Window Asset. I used to have one tab open for each of my social network, and add that with various Googling I normally do on a daily basis for both work and play, I may end up with 10s and 20s tabs open. How about new window? Well that doesn't solve much, does it? More clicking, more alt-tabbing. (yeap, a geek always find the shortest means possible to access anything and everything). 

With HootSuite, I get one tab, and within that one tab, I have another level of tabs for each of my social networks. All streams are in their own respective tabs. I used to have Facebook + FourSquare + Twitter on the same stream. I had to scroll down a lot and end up missing some interesting posts. Having them separated but still in the same place is convenient. I can even have specific columns for specific items - as you can see my Facebook tab has columns for RWMF so I get posts in it at a glace without having to go into the group's page. All the settings and profilings and preferences are placed vertically and minimally on the left side. All in all, a compact, versatile and easy to use extension. 

So if you're like me, a social junkie, lots of social accounts, always on the go, do try HootSuite as a Chrome Extension. If you need clarification, post a comment, I'll help you out - no charge, just satisfaction (please don't take that in the wrong way. seriously. just, don't. >.<) 

HootSuite also has wicked sense of humour. LOL!

PS: One of the shortcoming is that on Blogspot, I don't get all the functions like resizing my images with a single click, justified text allignment, uploading my own image etc. Well, least all the basics are there.

PSS : HootSuite is available on Chrome Extension Store. Also avaliable in Google Play for Android devices.