When it comes to robotic vacuum cleaners, Roomba’s still the most well-known model. But there’s a new vacuum robot from Japan that’s attempting to conquer our hearts. And it can not only suck up all the dirt and grime from every corner of your home, but also talk to you in three different languages.

Talk to Sharp’s dinner plate-sized Cocorobo, and it responds to you with the (metallic) voice of a young boy in Japanese, Chinese, or English. It can even speak in Kansai, which is a more laid-back and witty Japanese dialect used in some of the country’s provinces. Ask it “How’s it going?” and it will reply with: “So good.” Adorable! Even its name is endearing: Cocorobo is a portmanteau of “kokoro,” which is the Japanese word for heart, and “robot.”

While it can’t be controlled by your voice, it could be a great companion during lazy Sunday mornings when there’s no one else awake in the house but you. Not that it needs to be controlled: The vacuum is completely autonomous and can navigate around your furniture on its own. And if you want to use its built-in camera to look behind the sofa for your missing remote control, you can see what it sees by using its upcoming Android or iPhone app.

You may have to wait for quite some time before Cocorobo makes it way stateside, though. It will be out in Japan next month for $1,600, and will head to China and other Asian countries next.

(Source)

This article was written by Mariella Moon and originally appeared on Tecca

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Google Translate marked its sixth birthday on Thursday with news that more than 200 million people use the free online translation service monthly.

“In a given day we translate roughly as much text as you’d find in one million books,” Google Translate engineer Franz Och said in a blog post.

“We imagine a future where anyone in the world can consume and share any information, no matter what language it’s in, and no matter where it pops up.”

Och worked at US military research arm DARPA before joining California-based Google in 2003 to be part of a team of engineers ramping up the quality of computer-driven language translations.

Google Translate, which lets people paste or type text in an on-screen box to have it quickly converted into a language of their choice, rolled out in 2006 with English, Chinese and Arabic.

“We can now translate among any of 64 different languages, including many with a small Web presence, such as Bengali, Basque, Swahili, Yiddish… and even Esperanto,” Och said of the service at translate.google.com.

Traffic to Translate from smartphones has been growing exponentially, and more than 92 percent of the users are from outside the United States, according to Google.

“What all the professional human translators in the world produce in a year, our system translates in roughly a single day,” Och said.

“By this estimate, most of the translation on the planet is now done by Google Translate.”

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Sanjay Jha, the chief executive to Motorola Mobility, was awarded a total compensation package of about $47 million in 2011, almost four times his 2010 pay, according to a regulatory filing.

The cellphone maker, which agreed to be bought by Google Inc for $12.5 billion, said on Friday that the rise was due to the successful splitting of Motorola into two companies last year to form Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions.

Jha’s pay package, including option awards, increased from about $13 million in 2010, the company said in its proxy filing on Friday.

Motorola said it still expects the Google deal to close in the first half of 2012 even though the Chinese government last month extended its review of the deal, which has been approved by U.S. and European regulators.

Motorola Mobility said it and Google are working closely with China’s regulators in their investigation of the deal.

The company scheduled its annual meeting for June 4 but said it could be canceled depending on the timing of the sale’s completion.

(Reporting By Sinead Carew in New York, Himank Sharma in Bangalore, Editing by Leslie Gevirtz)

LONDON (Reuters) – Exuberant global markets have taken a reality check this month on chronic U.S., Chinese and European growth concerns, and investors should hold companies’ relatively rosy profit outlooks up for scrutiny too.

“Cheap” valuations based on historical price/earnings ratios have kept many investors bullish on world equities over the past three years despite what now appears to be routine economic disappointment and seemingly shorter business and profit cycles.

But there is growing anxiety that temporary sentiment and stock price boosts related to central bank money printing and emergency lending bear little relation to the long-term profit outlook, among non-financial firms at least.

Even though 12-month forward price/earnings ratios for world equity look good value, periodic pops in prices have increasingly not been matched by rises in earnings projections which have started to move sideways.

As ever, either the price in this P/E ratio is indeed cheap or earnings projections need a reality check too and historic valuation averages are restored by a drop in the profit outlook.

Macroeconomic hopes hinge on a U.S. recovery gaining more traction, a soft landing of Chinese growth to about 7.5 percent from the double digits of the past decade and a resolution of euro zone’s systemic sovereign debt and banking problems.

All three of these, however, were in doubt again in April and the anxiety knocked some 5 percent off MSCI’s world equity index from their March peaks. That leaves stocks still up 8 percent on the year but, just like last year, the price momentum and direction seems to have stalled.

Even though bouts of central bank money-printing and cheap lending in the United States, Europe and elsewhere periodically offer a fillip, as the European Central Bank‘s money flood did again spectacularly in the first quarter, the effect on the real economy and market prices tends to fade fast.

In the event, the P of the PE ratio advances and retreats, but not the E – leaving bulls to state their case continuously on each pullback but pessimists to question the whole construct.

“Do people really think E would be as good without the massive QE (quantitative easing)around the world?” asked hedge fund manager Stephen Jen at SLJ Macro Partners.

SLICED AND DICED

Of course, there are many ways to dissect valuations and many regional and national comparisons.

For one thing, many investors are currently overweight U.S. equity on a belief that a steady if unspectacular recovery there contrasts to economic contraction and systemic problems in Europe and the slowdown in China and the emerging markets.

But, just as vastly superior growth in emerging markets last year did not stop their emerging equity universe significantly underperforming, questions of valuation and the best models to use have prompted some strategists to question a U.S. bias.

Richard Cookson, chief investment officer at Citi Private Bank, reckons the U.S. market may be cheap when comparing a forward P/E ratio of 12 with a trailing P/E of 15, but he said forward earnings are just a guess and take no account of whether you are at the top or bottom of the profits cycle.

“The problem with using either of these valuation metrics is that they’re pretty rubbish as a guide to future returns,” he said. “The consensus has completely failed to predict any fall in profits over the past 30 years.”

Cookson said he prefers the U.S. Shiller P/E model that works like a moving average of the past 10 years of profits to iron out the cycle and combined with dividend yields works well as a guide to implied 10-year returns.

At 22.2, however, the Shiller P/E is pretty expensive compared with the average since 1950 of 18.7. And while this partly relates to impressive U.S. corporate margins, these margins – as measured by profits as a percentage of nominal gross national product – are already at record highs of over 7 percent.

As margins have a pretty strong tendency to revert to their average over time, this leaves U.S. stocks “dangerously exposed”, Cookson said, adding that far cheaper equivalent European valuations at least pay investors for taking the greater systemic and growth risks there.

Citi’s implied long-term equity return in core Europe at 11.8 percent, for example, is more than twice that in the U.S. at 4.6 percent. And it’s hard to imagine a scenario where a full-scale euro meltdown – if that’s what such low euro zone equities imply – would not send systemic shockwaves across the Atlantic too.

What’s more, ThomsonReuters data shows that margin gains from cost-cutting in jobs, pay and other expenses was a significant part of the U.S. profit recovery since 2009 but that this route to bottom-line improvement is reaching its limits.

Only 41 of S&P500 firms releasing first quarter earnings this month are expected to report higher margins despite lower revenue, down from 86 in 2009. And 102 companies are expected to show lower earnings despite rising revenue, up from 54 in 2009.

The U.S. does not have to return to recession for investors to wonder where the extra juice for earnings growth is going to come from.

(Graphic by Scott Barber; Editing by Ruth Pitchford)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The FBI‘s former top cybersecurity official, Shawn Henry, said on Wednesday that he is taking a top job with Crowdstrike, a new security firm founded in February by two former executives with security software maker McAfee.

Henry, who retired from the FBI in March, said he looked forward to continuing his fight against cyber attacks from outside government, where such work often ran into bureaucratic, jurisdictional and legal constraints.

“I have always said the private sector needs to be a bigger part of the solution, and with CrowdStrike I’ll have more flexibility and opportunity to make a difference from this side of the fence,” Henry wrote in a blog posted on the company’s website.

George Kurtz, the former worldwide chief technology offer of McAfee, and Dmitri Alperovitch, that company’s former vice president of threat research, founded Crowdstrike in February with initial capital from private equity firm Warburg Pincus.

Alperovitch said Crowdstrike was helping Fortune 500 companies and government agencies track down and identify adversaries that had infiltrated their computer networks.

He lauded Henry’s work with the FBI, where he helped set up organizations that brought together all of the members of intelligence and law enforcement community to pursue coordinated action against national security threats in cyberspace.

Henry will be the president of a newly formed subsidiary, CrowdStrike Services, that will help assess, attribute and respond to targeted intrusions from Chinese adversaries and others who are suspected of trying to steal intellectual property and trade secrets from major Western companies daily.

“CrowdStrike provides me the opportunity to continue this fight, from ‘the other side’, using intelligence and technology to get in front of the problem rather than merely reacting to it,” Henry wrote in the blog. He said he liked the company’s “idea of protecting the innocent through relentless identification and pursuit of the enemy,”

Henry, who spent 24 years at the FBI, served as executive assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch since September 2010. Before that, he was the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Washington field office.

(Reporting By Andrea Shalal-Esa; Editing by Kim Coghill)