18 September 2010 | NewScientist | 19

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IT’S one small step for YouTube, but it could be a giant leap for internet TV: this week, the firm began trialling live broadcasting.

The website has occasionally offered live TV before – including US president Barack Obama’s first State of the Union address – but using third-party technology.

The two-day-long exercise was described as “an initial trial, a first step” by YouTube product manager Josh Siegel. Still, a study by internet marketing research company ComScore shows there’s an appetite: last year there was a 648 per cent surge in the amount of time Americans devoted to watching live streamed video on other websites.

Google TV is also launching in the US in the next few weeks. It aims to integrate full web access and search features into home television packages.

Beer-fetching bot now on saleGOT a spare £260,000 lying around? Forget buying a house and splash out on your own robot instead.

Silicon Valley start-up Willow Garage has put its PR2 robot (see photo) on general sale. The robot’s two gripper-equipped arms, laser scanner and multiple cameras allow it to fold towels, fetch a beer and plug itself into the mains when it needs to recharge. But even Willow Garage concedes that the price tag will deter all but the richest customers. “This isn’t pocket change,” says Keenan Wyrobeck of Willow Garage. The most likely customers will be academic and corporate research labs, he says.

Tomas Lozano-Perez at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology received a PR2 during a beta-test giveaway programme earlier in the year. “Many research

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YouTube tries live video streaming

groups will wish they had one. Funding at the required level can be difficult to find, though.”

Stefan Schaal’s group at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, also has a PR2, and says its open software will help speed the rate of progress in robotics research.

“Every new group can directly build on a large body of knowledge that has already been added to the open software repository,” he says.

The PR2 has a rival in the academic market. German industrial robot manufacturer KUKA will soon be selling its own mobile manipulation robot, the YouBot.

WILL Google soon be foretelling your every desire? That’s the future heralded by the company’s new search tool Google Instant, which delivers results even before you’ve finished typing a query.

Google Instant, which launched last week, takes auto-complete to a new level: as you type into Google’s search field, a list of results appears for the query Google thinks you want to make – in other words, for the matching search that is most popular or statistically likely. Google’s servers manage the increased load this requires by pooling resources to

google anticipates your every need

avoid repeating similar searches. Other search engines are

exploring more subtle improvements. For example, Yahoo Research in Barcelona, Spain, has shown that taking a user’s age or sex into account allows more appropriate search results to be delivered.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal last month, Google CEO Eric Schmidt described an even bolder vision: to provide what you want even before you ask, drawing on your social networks, past behaviour, location and so on. “Most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” he said. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

–For sale; deep pockets needed–

of people aged over 50 in the US now use an online social networking site, nearly double the percentage in 2009

42%

Jazz-pop singer Jamie Cullum pays tribute to Mario in the week that marks 25 years since Nintendo’s mascot was named. The Italian plumber is at the heart of the biggest game franchise in history, now stretching to more than 200 games (Pocket-lint.com, 13 September)

“He is consistently chubby, jumpy, interesting and red”

“The robot’s open software will help speed the rate of progress in robotics research”

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