Engadget reports Aldebaran Robotics’ Nao robot has already received a few upgrades from both the company itself and other developers: features like a 1.6GHz Atom processor and dual HD cameras that promise to allow for better face and object recognition even in poor lighting conditions. What’s more, while robot’s outward appearance hasn’t changed much, it has also received a number of software upgrades, including Nuance voice recognition, an improved walking algorithm, and a number of other measures to cut down on unwanted collisions.

Interested developers will finally be able to get their hands on a bot of their own quite soon. To do so, they’ll have to sign up and quality for the just-launched Nao developer program, which costs €3,600 (or roughly $4,800) and will initially be limited to just 200 participants. That hefty price does naturally include the robot itself, along with a complete software suite, and “privileged access” to Aldebaran Robotics’ source code.

The holidays are more than just eggnog and present-opening. This season can give entrepreneurs the opportunity to do great things with their business. Here are some business strategies that will help make your holiday season not only joyous, but lucrative, too:
Read More

Perhaps there is no better way to gauge the impact the Internet has had on our lives than with the emergence of Cyber Monday—the Monday following Thanksgiving and Black Friday—when people log onto countless retail websites in their quest to find holiday deals. Gone are the days when it’s necessary to camp out in front of stores at ungodly hours, only to stampede through the doors and wrestle fellow shopper for the hottest video games and electronics. Instead, it is now possible to get all of your holiday shopping done while sipping coffee in your pajamas and watching daytime television.

This year, shoppers spent a record $1.25 billion on Cyber Monday, up more than 20% from last year and surpassing early estimates. Some 10 million people took advantage of this day of online deals, setting a new record. Buyers averaged nearly $125 in spending, and 10.8% of consumers used a mobile device to access businesses’ websites (up 3.9% from 2010).

Read More

Whether you’re designing a website for personal use or to help build your business, you undoubtedly understand the importance of showing up in search results—the higher, the better. Whereas this was once accomplished with “black hat” tactics like keyword stuffing and spammy links, Google has made most of these tactics ineffectual at best.

Google’s Panda Update was unofficially aimed at “content farms”: “We’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content. […] As ‘pure webspam’ has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to ‘content farms,’ which are sites with shallow or low-quality content.” Read More

Andrew Clancy is a talented videographer who lives in New York. He shot and edited this video as a lyrical interpretation of New York City. He says on his blog:

Living in New York I’d grab my Canon 7D, or S95, and shoot footage of what was going on around me. It seemed like a never ending project and you could stay filming life in New York for a long time Eventually I put the camera down and started to edit. Here’s the end result, it’s a bit rough and ready but that’s life in the Big Apple I guess. Turn up the volume on this one for the beautiful song ‘We Don’t Eat’ by Irishman James Vincent McMorrow.

Enjoy watching the amazing views of New York City and listen to the wonderful background music.

A Year in New York from Andrew Clancy on Vimeo.