Nanny Robot

It is really a joy to have an addition to one's family especially a new born. Working mom's though take off from work for few months to take care of the baby, it gets them to a point where they feel that they are getting more lazy and missing on the outside world.

 It becomes more difficult when the mom cannot even leave the baby for a while and do some home work or prepare food or take bath, since you don't know when the baby will cry and may be even start moving to unsafe location. With a new born/toddler who starts to move, every location in your house feels unsafe and you need constant monitoring.

Japan, China and may be many other countries have been researching and have working products of Robot Nannies that take care of the baby and one can monitor the robot and the baby via their video phone or laptop.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3343667/Robot-nannies-threat-to-child-care.html

http://dvice.com/archives/2010/04/family-nanny-ro.php

 But is it necessary to solely depend on the robot nanny? Doesn't this break the bonding of baby with the parents? Doesn't the baby start thinking the robot as a human and change the mental state?

 With advancing technologies and organizations allowing employees to work from home, wouldn't it be great to have a robot nanny, that can just take care of the baby in your control area, while you are working and doing some other work. This enables the parent to have care for the baby as well as monitor the robot, thus have a greater bonding with the baby and have a very good robot friend for the baby.

 Babies should be made to think that these robots are like their daily playing toys which help them while the parents are little away from them (not visually/ but physically). These robot nannies can feed the baby, make baby to sleep or even bath the baby while in the presence of the mom or the dad. This makes the parents feel they are with the baby and also get to work and do other things.

 May be we want the robot to carry the baby things while we carry the baby during a walk or outing and not the other-way round as the robot nannies are getting developed.

Backup Bet

Organizations having critical data have a backup plan to ensure that they get data back at any time they need. Many have backup policy to backup to a local tape library and store it in a vault or some safe place to ensure that they have access to the critical data when there is disaster.


This kind of strategy needs both man power and infrastructure, which inturn costs more to the organization. This discipline is followed in organizations which can afford such a cost. There are lot of organizations who have critical data but could not afford such an infrastructure, this is the place were cloud based backup emerged.

 But this again has its own cost of subscription and support for the kind of environment the organization is might be limited. This also needs a discipline to be followed on having the data organized and setup for backup.

Now there is a new trend of software is emerging, where the vendor himself helps the customer to  perform the initial setup personally. Other vendors send a hard disk via mail and ask the customer to connect, so there is auto backup of the first set of data(which in general huge and reason for downtime). The customer mails back the HDD and the backup schedule is setup. This helps the customer to cut-short on the downtime and it is more automated. Some do a combination, where they get the initial data in a HDD and also setup the backup folders for the customer as per the customer's need, so that the customer need not even touch the software CD.

Customer service is going heights now-a-days due to huge competition and also to tap the market where there is a need for customer, but the customer does not have time/resource to do it.

There is a World Backup Day being celebrated (on 31 March) every year to create awareness about the importance of backup.
http://www.worldbackupday.net/

There are many small business organizations that do not worry about backup, mainly due to resource constraints and are actually unaware that there can be a catastrophe and data can vanish. These segment of people need protection and there are few who concentrate on such organizations.

Also consider people like me, who just has a laptop and never bothered to backup, thinking my flash drive will save me or my hard disk will never fail. I would like to have a daily backup of my laptop and desktop, but do not have time and infrastructure to perform a tape backup (time/resource constraint). Even though I am online most of the time (internet is getting cheaper day by day and we get unlimited for few $10 or less) I just bet on my luck that nothing happens.

If I have something like an online backup being done while I type this and know that I can access my data via web whenever I want and however I want, wouldn't it be cool. I can spend another couple of $10 for such a solution every month and have my data safe, rather than being lazy.

There are solutions like
SpiderOak, BackBlaze, CrashPlan etc, lets hope more such solutions come to various regions and share the market.

Days are not far away for such facilities, are there any such customer centric ones?

A recent poll by Slashdot