What is it?
So you’ve already heard about the Incase Alloy Series Compact Backpack, and perhaps you felt that the style was super slick but you tend to prefer messenger bags over backpacks. Well, no worries. Incase has a space pack for every need, including the Alloy Messenger Bag. It’s got the same silvery metallic finish, and fits just as much of your junk, but can be tossed over one shoulder instead of two.

As far as style is concerned, the bag will certainly attract people with very specific tastes. That silver metallic finish certainly isn’t for everyone, so if you prefer a more weathered or classic look, this may not be the bag for you. Then again, its construction is super lightweight, making it easier to pack this thing full of goodies. In fact, since it’s a messenger bag instead of a backpack the material is much less rigid to where you can probably fit a few awkward shapes in there and still have no problem.

The Alloy Messenger Bag is one of the most comfortable shoulder bags I’ve used all week. No matter how much junk I packed in there, it was still comfortable to carry around all day long. A huge amount of credit has to go to the breathable mesh shoulder strap pad, which is way more comfortable than the shoulder pad on the Andy Warhol Shoulder Bag.

Protection, on the other hand, became a bit of a concern. My laptop, cuddled comfortably in the faux fur-lined laptop sleeve had no issues. My camera, on the other hand, which was sitting in the roomy main compartment, hit the ground with a hard thud when I put down the bag. The main compartment doesn’t have any extra padding or cushion, so anything that goes in there need not be easily breakable. Otherwise, you’ll have a mess on your hands.

The snap buckles that hold the bag closed are protected with some soft touch plastic, which seems like a tiny unimportant detail but it could actually prove quite useful. Those plastic buckles break all the time, and placed at the bottom of the bag they’re way more susceptible to harm. Any extra protection that can be offered to those buckles is much appreciated.

The bag offers quite a bit of space, as I’ve already said, but I was disappointed not to see a rear magazine sleeve. I find that type of easy access to paperwork and the like pretty useful on messenger bags. The front zippered pocket, however, is super accessible and is a great place to store an iPod or iPhone thanks to that protective faux fur lining.

Who is it for?
The Incase Alloy Messenger bag is for the reader who wished that Incase’s Alloy Backpack came in a messenger-style. Also, anyone who digs all this silver, anyone who needs a lot of room but not necessarily high-end protection, anyone who can’t stand an uncomfortable shoulder strap, and anyone who has a C-Note to burn.

Do I want it?
To be honest, I’m much more of a backpack person. But if I had to choose one of the messenger bags we reviewed this week, this one would certainly be in the running. I don’t like that anything sitting at the bottom of the main compartment is at risk of being broken, but I really appreciate the space and the level of comfort provided.

Check out the rest of Bag Week 2011 here.

Google quietly added a trending topics section to Google+ last night which now shows up when you perform a search on the social network. The new “Trends” section appears on the right-hand side of the page, and currently lists the top 10 items under heavy discussion like “Natalie Wood” and “Breaking Dawn,” for example.

The feature was first spotted by Richard Lusk who posted a screenshot to Google+ and tweeted about the update. Because the feature only appears after you perform a search, Lusk and others are suggesting that “Trends” should appear next to the homepage’s main stream, where the feature would be more obvious. That’s probably not a bad idea, but for now that space is used to prompt users to add more friends via “Suggestions” and “Send Invitations.” Since Google+ is still trying to grow its user base, it may not be ready to give up that key spot just yet.

What’s more interesting about this development is its potential for future integration into Google Search. Earlier this month, the company announced a change to its algorithm (the “freshness” update) which impacted 35% of searches. The update’s goal was to better highlight more current content, including things like recent events, hot topics, reviews and breaking news items. The increased focus on more recent content seemed to almost forgo the need for a specific “real-time” search vertical, like the one that Google shuttered back in July when its contract with Twitter expired. At the time, the company said it would re-open Google.com/realtime with Google+ search results in the future. The introduction of Google+ Trends could certainly be the first step towards that.

We asked Google about its future plans in this area, but a spokesperson would only say that there are “no updates at this time for trends to be incorporated into Google Search.”

Image Credit: Richard Lusk

Back in the early days of Android, people ooh-ed and aah-ed over every little thing, even the seemingly-innocuous pattern unlock feature. It appears that Google has bigger plans for that lockscreen, as they have been granted patents for both the pattern unlock method and a way to control applications with definable touch gestures.

For those who haven’t taken a peek at patent applications before, I’d suggest you start with this one. The pattern unlock concept is simple enough that you could explain to friends with just a few sentences, but Google had considerably more to say on the subject. They, for example, describe pattern unlock thusly:

A lock screen view is displayed on the mobile device to prevent unauthorized and inadvertent access to the mobile device's data. While the mobile device is locked, a touch gesture having a pre-defined shape is detected on a touch screen of the mobile device independently of the initial position of the touch gesture on the touch screen.

But that’s not all! The filing goes on to say that certain patterns can be connected to applications, so defining and drawing a “M” could automatically fire up your Gmail app. HTC’s new ubiquitous Sense UI does something similar now, with users dragging a magnifying ring over their function of choice. Their solution is arguably easier, but it’s still interesting to see Google’s take on the issue.

Interestingly, Google’s other new patents tread on similar territory but with a bit of a twist. The idea, as laid out in “Automatic Derivation of Analogous Touch Gestures From A User-Defined Gesture,” involves setting a specific pattern that gets tied to an application action. Once that pattern is drawn on the screen, it executes the action — fair enough, but here’s where it gets interesting. If you then draw a variation of that same pattern on the screen, that application will perform an actionsthat’s “different from but related to” the original.

It’s a little abstract, I know, but imagine this: you’re walking down the street listening to music and you’d like to change tracks. Instead of unlocking the phone, opening the music app, and hitting the button to change tracks, you could draw a small arrow pointing to the right on your screen to do the same thing. Want to jump to the next album? Draw a big version of that same arrow. Want to return to the previous track? Draw a small arrow pointing left, and so on.

Google’s been having more than a little fun with devising neat ways to unlock your device (Face Unlock, anyone?), so it’s possible we’ll see something like this in the not-too-distant future. Perhaps in Android 4.1?

Every year at the global electronic bazaar that is the Consumer Electronic Show, there is a product du jour. A certain product segment seemingly overloads the trade show. iPad killers were out in force at 2011′s show. 2010 was all about 3D TVs while netbooks was the popular product in 2009. It seems that utltrabooks might be 2012′s hot product. But can they break the dreaded CES curse (a term I coined for the purpose of this post) that plagued the previous hot products?

Recently at a CES Unveiled event in London, a director of research for the CEA, Shawn DuBravac, forecasted a bunch of ultrabook debuts at the 2012 CES. He stated, “We expect to see 30 to 50 new ultrabooks launch at CES.” That’s a whole lot of MacBook Air clones.

The term ultrabook refers to a ultraportible notebook built using a small footprint Intel chipset. These notebooks are just now starting to hit the market from nearly every PC manufacturer, but the first batch are just to test the market. The real fun comes yet later this year when Intel releases the 22nm Ivy Bridge CPU chipset that will offer a modest performance boost over the current Sandy Bridge chips as well as offer USB 3.0 and PCI Express 3.0. With Intel passing out these chips prior to 2012, expect most of the ultrabooks announced at CES 2012 to be built on this next-gen platform. It’s then that with these even more mobile CPUs that ultrabooks will hit the big time. That is, of course, if ultrabooks feature staying power greater than previous hot CES product.

Last year, at CES 2011, nearly every major CE player debuted or teased their upcoming Android tablets. These slates were supposed to challenge the iPad, but now, not even a full year later, it seems some are ready to pull the plug on their tablets thanks to poor sales. CES 2010 was all about 3D TVs. Massive booths were surrounded by crowds of people waiting to see the future through several pairs of 3D glasses. Sony, Panasonic and others were preaching a message about buying a 3D TV now to use to watch all the upcoming awesome 3D content… 2009 was all about the netbook. But that wasn’t the star of the show. No, as the video embedded here shows, that title was earned by Greg and Doug during the SanDisk Rockband 2 competition.

Ultrabooks are supposed to the answer to Apple’s increasingly popular MacBook Air. Intel designed the computing platform to be as thin as possible while keeping the price low. The first batch of ultabooks start at $899 and offer competitive performance. But they’re still not built as well as the MacBook Air. CES 2012 starts the second week of Janaury but most of the products are announced early. Prepare yourself for the ultrabooks. They are coming.

Erick and I were pretty much of the same mind when it came to the Kindle Fire: it’s pretty darn nice. But will it Fly or Die? Find out in this exciting, Fruit-Ninja-infused episode.

We’re working on our Kindle Fire review as we speak – we took a bit of time to do the Nook Tablet review first – but thus far it’s been an interesting device.

Like the Kindle, it’s Amazon incarnate, a device that’s aimed at Amazon customers, dealing up Amazon content. It is compact, well-made, and, dare I say it, sexy as an ereader and, although a bit less interesting as a media device, it’s one of the most promising devices I’ve seen.

That said, there are lots of ereaders out there and this is one of many. Will it survive – fly or die, if you will? We shall see.

An odd but interesting new photo-and-video sharing iPhone app called Chumkee is officially announcing its public launch today. I know, I know. Another photo-and-video sharing app – just what you need. But Chumkee is doing something a little different here with its concept, user interface and design. This app isn’t about simply “sharing photos with your friends.” It’s about sharing publicly, in an almost Twitter-like format, complete with @usernames and a “reply” feature. In other words, social conversations based around photos and videos.

But that’s not all. The app also ditches the traditional Twitter timeline-esque view for a photo pile design that allows you to move pictures and videos around on the screen or drag them off the side of the screen when you’re done.

When you first load Chumkee, you’re presented with the “everyone” view which is a heaping stack of photos and videos. The videos have live thumbnails, though, which gives the app a sort of “real-time” feel. It seems like all those people are chatting live now, even though that’s not the case.

Although the app supports photos, the majority of the thumbnails I saw upon first launch were videos. You can move these thumbnails around on the screen to discover the ones hidden underneath or you can flick them off the screen when you’re done. While this is not a design that allows you to consume a large amount of media at a glance, it’s actually kind of fun to use. There’s a goofiness and playfulness to Chumkee that so many of today’s apps are lacking.

That said, if photo piles are not your thing, a monkey holding a joystick at the bottom of the screen (yes, I told you it was goofy) lets you switch to a tiled layout.

When you find a video (or photo) you want to see, you just tap it, then tap “zoom” and watch. You can also “like” the item or follow its creator by tapping the included “follow” button. The app’s users are given @usernames, like on Twitter. To see just the people you’re following, tap the drop-down box at the top of the screen to switch between “Everybody,” “Following,” “My Profile,” and “Search.”

As on YouTube, the app supports video replies to prompt conversations between users. This is done via the “Cam Reply” button at the bottom of each item. (Test replies are also supported).

Even though it’s not built around live chatting, Chumkee has that same sort of random, serendipitous and voyeuristic vibe that Chatroulette once offered before things went bad. It would be great if, at some point in the future, you could “go live” and have real-time chats, too. Of course, then it would face that same Chatroulette porn problem. In the meantime, it’s less likely you’ll see the naughtiness of Chatroulette (prior to its cleanup) here now, but there is a “flag” button if you do encounter something odd.

Chumkee is the creation of New York-based C-Vibes, Ltd. It was previously soft-launched for beta-testing purposes, gaining 15,000 users worldwide, 85% of which now engage daily. The app was built by David Aumoier and Thomas Prevot, whose backgrounds are in creative, design and investing. Currently, Chumkee is boot-strapped with support from a few angels.

You can grab the app in iTunes here.

We covered Saddleback Leather’s products last year and we thought it would be fun to bring these guys back on stage one more time for an encore. As you can see from the images, these are, in a sense, your grandpa’s bags. They are made of thick, old-world, heavily-stitched leather and feature heavy duty hardware, delicate pigskin lining, and a lot of polish. While I wouldn’t go as far as to say you’ll hand this down to your children, the leather in this thing is so thick and luxurious there’s a good chance they’ll be able to eat it if they ever run out of food in the wild.

Style
Look at that rich, creamy, potentially-Corinthian leather. When you open this bag, you can smell it – the polish, the shine, the metal hardware clashing with the tannin. It’s like opening the door of a new car.

The bag has a large center compartment, separated into two by a thin sheet of leather. You can stick a full-sized laptop in here with room to spare and all of your legal briefs in the other pocket. It does’t expand as much as I’d like – it’s more of a briefcase size than an actual “bag” – but I fit a Macbook Air and two ereaders along with headphones and a power cable and it didn’t even look like it was full.

You’re going to have decide if this bag is for you. It’s very polarizing. Either you like the “Hemingway At The Harvard Law Library” look or you don’t.

That said, this huge bag is just that – huge. It’s heavy and thick and quite handsome and will hold almost any laptop with aplomb.

Who is it for?
Are you a corn-fed midwestern cowboy lawyer? The most interesting man in the room? One of those dudes who inexplicably makes a lot of money and has lots of planes and guns but no one knows what you do for a living? This briefcase might be for you. It’s definitely an investment in both time and energy to buy and carry this fairly heavy bag but it will last you a lifetime – or at least 100 because that’s how long the warranty lasts.

Do you want it?
At $411 it’s a pretty tough sell, but Saddleback makes some handsome bags. It would make an excellent graduation gift for a young businessman in training who doesn’t want the square-corner style briefcase yet needs to appear serious. I would like to emphasize that this isn’t a good “traveling” bag (although I’ve travelled with one before). It’s a bit heavy on the shoulders and tends to weigh you down. If you’re in and out of cars, planes, and trains in your travels, however, this is the bag for you. Drop in a jar of Grey Poupon and you’re set.

This is a lot of bag for arguably a lot of money, at least when compared to the other bags in this round-up, but it may be worth it if the style, size, and pockets suit your needs.

Product Page

Don’t forget to check out the rest of our Bag Week 2011 reviews.

Klip, an iOS app that allows users to capture, share, discover and view mobile videos, has raised $8 million in Series B funding from Benchmark Capital, with Matrix Partners and Alain Rossmann (the founder of the company) participating. This brings Klip’s total funding to $10 million.

Klip, which launched in September, is focused is on the discovery and providing the highest quality video streaming around for mobile device. You simply shoot a new ‘Klip’ or grab one from your Camera Roll and share it with the Klip community, your friends on Facebook, Twitter, on your YouTube channel, or by email.

Within the app, you can watch Klips from around the world, follow other Klippers, re-klip the Klips you think are worth sharing again, or stay on top of hot topics by following hashtags.

All sharing is built around hashtags, making it easy to surface relevant content by topic or event. Rossmann tells me there’s an explosion of use around hashtags, in the app, especially amongst sports fans.

As we noted in our initial review of the App, Klip’s secret sauce is the technology behind the app. If you want to preview a video, you can Swipe the video and it will play at the accelerated speed at which you move your finger across the video. If you shake the phone, all the videos will begin playing on the page. And because mobile bandwidth can be flaky, Klip includes adaptive video streaming. The app will actually check and adapt streaming to your bandwidth once every 4 seconds.

Rossmann tells me that the new funding will be used towards future product development, especially in driving technology on ‘user experience side and cloud side.’ He explains that there is a big cloud component in the app’s technology, with the ability to search and index hashtags in realtime. For now, there are no plans for an Android app, says Rossmann.

He adds that since launch, Klip has consistently been the highest ranked social video app in the Apple App Store. He’s optimistic about the user response and engagement the app has seen so far, and doesn’t seem to be to concerned about the fellow competition in the mobile social video sharing space, which include Vlix, and SocialCam.

Editor’s note: Adam Rodnitzky is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Favo.rs. Rodnitzky is based in San Francisco and you can follow him on twitter @rodtwitzky.

As the Occupy Wall Street movement keeps growing, many of the issues raised by the protestors continue to gain support from the average American. In particular, the erosion of the middle class due to job losses and the increasingly large income gap have become key issues in the 2012 presidential elections.

At the moment, Wall Street and big corporations are getting the lion's share of blame for these issues, but the reality is that no single region or industry is solely responsible for our current woes. In fact, we're all doing our part—including us here in Silicon Valley.

Think about it. The success of most tech companies' products is predicated on delivering scale and efficiency, also known as the ability to do more with less. That "more" typically means more wealth generated. And that "less" typically means with less and/or less expensive labor. In other words, the primary export for many Silicon Valley companies can be simplified down to labor substitution. In the near term, there are a variety of unfortunate ways in which this is manifesting itself as a social fabric-eroding, wealth-concentrating job killer. For the future? I believe there is a different story.

In one of his most insightful blog posts, Josh Kopelman outlined a philosophy that powers many of today's most successful technology-enabled retail and services companies. Put simply: If you can enter a big market where the incumbents charge a lot for their product, yet you can sell an equivalent or better product for less, then you've changed the game and shrunk the market.

This scenario has been replayed a hundred times over in movie rentals, bookstores, record stores, and so on.  With the disappearance of each of these bricks and mortar stalwarts, tens of thousands of positions have been made obsolete in a matter of years. All the wealth in these markets has been shrunk to a fraction of what it was before. And what wealth remains has been redistributed to a smaller number of people. Sound familiar? Job losses. Growing income gap. Check and check.

Yet it isn't just the employees of old-school bricks and mortar retailers that are suffering. The disruption has been moving up the corporate ladder for decades as well. After all, the single biggest line item for most organizations happens to be an easily-adjusted variable cost: labor. When that labor is expensive middle- and upper-management, then any opportunity to minimize or eliminate those costs will be considered.

There are few remaining professional frontiers that have not been touched by the cold hand of automation and outsourcing, and employers that choose not to leverage this new global marketplace for talent and software will suffer at the hands of their competitors. Coming soon to a web near you: virtual lawyers, remote marketers and automated accountants. Those corporations who do enable these new methods of production increasingly benefit from growing profits distributed to a shrinking payroll. The result? The winners win more, while the losers get nothing. Sound familiar? Job losses. Growing income gap. Check and check.

At this point, then, we must ask ourselves a question: are we actually a bastion of evil, disguising ourselves as an innocent collection of the crazy ones and the risk-takers? Am I suggesting that we should stop developing the next revolutionary business or technology that risks destroying the status quo and putting hundreds of thousands of people out of work? The answer is resoundingly no and no.

As we continue to create these new technologies that eliminate labor at the large corporate level, we are also creating new opportunities to build jobs and wealth at the small business level. And, as it turns out, these new jobs often fit nicely into the gaps created by what is being creatively destroyed in the old guard.

To take just one example, traditional retail markets once disrupted by large online retailers are being disrupted again by a new wave of micro merchants. Companies like AirBnB, Etsy, HiGear, and Foodzie are powering this new peer-to-peer retail revolution that puts the national power of a branded retail or service business into the hands of individuals and local merchants – and more are on the way. These new markets allow individuals to create new companies, and as those companies grow, they create new jobs and redistribute wealth.

Large corporations that eliminated employees in the name of outsourcing and automation are now facing increasingly stiff competition from small businesses with access to these same efficiency-enhancing tools. From sophisticated CRM systems to low-cost marketing automation tools like LoopFuse, it's easier than ever for these once disadvantaged small businesses to successfully compete against much larger ones. That brings in more work to smaller, local companies, thereby creating new jobs and redistributing wealth.

And that’s the other side of the coin.  Professionals whose jobs were eliminated due to automation and outsourcing can now outsource themselves on automated marketplaces. Many of these skilled professionals are finding new homes as independent knowledge workers connected to a broad base of smaller organizations via evolved crowdsourcing marketplaces like oDesk and Trada. Once again, this is creating employment and redistributing wealth back into more hands.

So perhaps we're not evil. After all, the technologies we are creating in Silicon Valley are inevitable. If we don't build them, someone else will. They are also disruptive and game changing. Those who don't use them will suffer at the hands of their competitors. Yet most importantly, we have built them to be inherently democratic. There are no velvet ropes keeping these efficiency enablers solely in the domain of large corporations.

We may be killing jobs and concentrating wealth in the short term, but in the longer term we are creating tools that are giving thousands of unemployed and underemployed people the ability to take charge of their future and redistribute wealth back into their own hands. While the markets that these new companies participate in may shrink in size and rely on less upper management, one thing they certainly don't leave out is the need for employees.

And therein lies a world of new occupations for Main Street, courtesy of your friends here in Silicon Valley.

Photo credit: Bob Jagendorf/Getty

Onkyo Japan has been releasing quite a few Windows-powered tablets in the past months, and the company yesterday announced [JP] yet another model. The TW2A-A25Z7CK features Windows 7 Home Premium as the OS (32 bit), and comes with a stylus, a stand/case, and a Bluetooth keyboard.

Onkyo’s so-called Slate PC has the following specs:

• 10.1-inch LCD screen with 1,024×600 resolution
• Atom Z670 CPU (1.50 GHz)
• Intel SM35 Express chip set
• 2GB memory
• 32GB SSD
• IEEE 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi
• Bluetooth 2.1+EDR
• two USB ports, a microSD slot
• 1.3MP web cam
• around 6 hours battery life
• size: 267×173×15.5mm, weight: 892g

Onkyo plans to start selling the Slate PC in Japan on December 2 with an open price model (“over US$780″).

Today, Pushpins, the mobile app for saving on groceries, is relaunching as Pushpins 2.0, now a fully featured grocery shopping assistant. Previously, the app was focused only on delivering savings in the form of digital coupons and rewards to users who scanned UPC barcodes at the grocery store. With the update, the app offers everything a grocery shopper needs, including digital shopping lists, coupons, nutritional information and even access to your shopping history.

Pushpins plays in a crowded but popular, space: mobile shopping lists. I’ve personally tried several of these apps myself, in hopes of finding a favorite. Grocery IQ, ZipList, AisleMapper, Cozi and many others have all spent time on my homescreen over the years.

Although I can’t personally benefit from it (thanks a lot, Publix), one of Pushpins’ best features is its integration with the store savings cards from many brand-name grocery store chains like Foodtown, Giant Eagle, Harps, Lowes Foods, MainStreet Market, Marsh, Shop 'n Save and ShopRite. When you clip the digital coupons using the app, those savings are instantly loaded onto your grocery store loyalty card for use at checkout.

In the new app, Pushpins also offers a smart shopping list that can intelligently suggest coupons for the items on your list. For example, if you add “Chex Cereal,” the app won’t just tell you if the cereal is on sale – it can tell you if there’s a coupon for milk, too. In addition, you can sort products by aisle, view nutritional info and access a history of your past purchases and savings via the shopping history feature which can be printed out as a digital receipt.

The updated app is out now in iTunes here.

It’s only been a couple weeks since Nokia debuted their first Windows Phones, but today we’re getting something a little less official. The Nokia Lumia 900 has found its way to YouTube thanks to none other than Nokia themselves. Apparently the Finnish phone maker posted a video to court developers, promising them the combination of “Nokia’s stunning hardware” and “a dynamic Microsoft OS.”

The video has since been pulled (as expected), but the folks over at All About Phones were clever enough to download and re-upload the video to YouTube for all to enjoy.

We’re just a tad short on specs, but we do know this will be a 4.3-inch monster — about the same size as Samsung’s Windows-powered Focus S. On the design front, however, it seems Nokia is pulling more from their own Lumia design dress with a hint of Xperia Play mixed in there.

When we’ll actually see the phone in any official sense is still a bit of a mystery. There are two probable options: The Lumia 900 (codenamed Ace) will either show its face at CES in early January, or at Mobile World Congress in February. We’ll be at both events with our eyes peeled so stay tuned if this has piqued your interest.

Slingbox has made the act of watching your television from anywhere stupendously easy over the years, and now the company has added yet another way to catch up on Community on the go: now you can watch from your Facebook account.

That’s right, if their Android, iOS, PC, and Mac clients weren’t enough to keep you connected, Slingbox has recently released their new SlingPlayer Facebook app. Not every Sling fan will be able to partake, though: the SlingPlayer Facebook app only works if you have a PRO-HD or SOLO unit running the latest firmware update.

While cool, the Facebook app’s utility is a bit suspect considering users can already access their Slingbox’s streams from the Sling website. It could potentially see use in the workplace (though I’m sure none of our readers would ever do that) where IT departments can blacklist certain sites, but if that’s the case then they’re probably filtering Facebook out too.

The app’s social features are pretty limited too; users can post potentially TV-related status updates from within the app, but that’s about it. Slingbox promises to bulk up their app’s social functions in the future, so we’ll keep our ears to the ground for any new developments. For now, current Slingbox users can get cracking by clicking right here.

[via @davezatz]

Fuji Heavy Industries and Sumitomo have developed a cute robot that can help human workers clean offices. It’s a follow up to a simpler model the two companies unveiled ten years ago. This new robot can navigate through spaces full of desks, office equipment and other obstacles (including humans).

The battery-powered robot can move around at 30m per minute and is equipped with a laser range finder: before bumping into an obstacle or human, it says “Please get out of the way, I am cleaning this room!”. If nothing happens for 15 seconds, the robot will move around the obstacle and continue to do its job (at around 0:45 in the video below).

According to Fuji Heavy and Sumitomo, the robot runs 2.5 hours on one charge and cuts cleaning time by around 50%. It’s already commercialized (in Japan, at least).

This video shows the robot (and a human colleague) in action:

Via Robonable [JP]

Glam Media, one of the largest publishing and advertising networks on the Web, is launching a new rich media ad creation platform for advertisers, called GlamSplash. According to Glam, the new canvas allows brand advertisers to deliver the effectiveness of the '30-second' TV spot across Glam’s properties.

For background, Glam’s various publishing verticals have a reach of 200 million unique monthly visitors globally, and is particularly popular amongst female audiences. Glam Media has more than 2,500 publishers organized across multiple vertical categories online including Glam.com for Women, Glam Entertainment for Adults, Brash.com for Men and Bliss.com for health and wellness. Glam also announced the acquisition of Ning in September.

Glam operates a web-based ad serving platform, Glam Adapt, as well as a recently launched mobile ad platform, GlamMobile. Previously, the company served rich media ads through these ad-serving platforms, but with GlamSplash, agencies can now both build and deliver rich media ads throughout Glam properties.

GlamSplash’s ad campaigns run across many platforms, including desktop, mobile, and tablets. The canvas allows advertisers to include featured videos, moving images, and quality editorial created by brands. Advertisers can include GlamVideo, an in-stream, in-display and in-mobile video ad platform; optimize with HTML5; and integrate social sharing features within the ad unit.

A number of brands are already using GlamSplash as the holiday shopping season approaches, including Timberland and BestBuy.

It’s no secret that Glam is gearing up for an IPO in 2012 (the company has also hit $100 million in annual revenue). However, until the Ning acquisition closes, which is expected to close in the next few weeks, the IPO process is at a standstill.

UserVoice, the maker of customer engagement tools, today announced that it has raised $1 million in equity funding. The round was led by Baseline Ventures, with contributions from Western Technology Investment, The Accelerator Group, Tekton Ventures, Dharmesh Shah, Mike Davidson, Peter Lehrman, Shan Mehta, Aayush Phumbra, and Reza Hussein. The startup raised $800,000 of seed funding back in May of 2009, bringing total investment to just under $2 million.

According to Richard White, Founder and CEO of UserVoice, the startup’s products, like UserVoice Feedback (a hosted tool for gathering and prioritizing product ideas directly from a company's customers) and Helpdesk, an easy-to-use ticketing system that lets companies solve more customer service problems in less time, have led to 75,000 signups and 40 million user interactions.

The San Francisco-based startup is growing rapidly, he said, so in order to support its growth, UserVoice is opening a new engineering office in Raleigh, North Carolina. “Being from Raleigh and very familiar with the wealth of engineering talent it was a natural fit to have an office there”, White said. With its new funding in tow, the startup is planning to build out its development, design, and sales teams over the next few months as well.

Since its founding in 2008, UserVoice has essentially become a hosted way for SMBs to intelligently process the feedback they receive from employees and customers through a social and game-ified idea generator, where they can suggest ideas, vote on others, and get quick feedback. It’s an effective way for software companies and web app developers to incorporate feedback tools into their product websites, extending feedback channels to give users an easy way to voice their thoughts on new features, roadmaps, etc.

Through products like Instant Answers, businesses can cut back on the amount of time they spend responding to customer questions and problems, as the tool pulls matching articles from companies’ knowledge base and instantly sends that info to customers to answer their product questions, etc.

UserVoice also offers widgets so that companies can get customer feedback directly from their websites, and iPhone SDK to embed a complete customer service solution with a single line of code, as well as a Facebook app so that fans can submit, discuss, and vote for ideas within the company’s Facebook page.

Companies like Seesmic, Posterous, Meebo, Miso, Rapportive, and HootSuite are currently using the startup’s customer engagement tools to streamline their customer relations and to diversify the ways in which they’re receiving feedback from their customers. (You can check out HootSuite’s integration of UserVoice’s feedback solution in the image below.)

For more on UserVoice plans and pricing, check them out at home here.

One additional note: UserVoice Founder and CEO Richard White, will be hosting a Fireside Chat on Monday, November 21st at 8:30 am PST, in which interested parties can ask the CEO questions about the funding round and what the future will look like for UserVoice.

The Europas, the annual European Tech Startup Awards, ended last night with a triumphant win by PeerIndex the social ranking service, which clinched the Grand Prix award. The result was based on both public online voting and expert judges, recognising the startup’s significant market traction against a much larger competitor, with less resources and a clear path towards both a big consumer and business market.

After 22 expert judges picked their favourites from 400 entries, and those results where combined with approximately 40,000 public votes from the tech startup industry, clear trends started to emerge from those marked out as Winners and those Highly Commended in the awards.

We wrote about stealthy startup Personal earlier this year when the company announced $7.6 million in funding from Steve Case’s Revolution LLC, Allen&Company, and others. This week, Personal finally launched its service, which aims to give consumers control over their digital data, to the public.

Personal is a free web and mobile service that helps you take control of all the digital information about yourself and your life, decide who gets access to it, and use it for your benefit. This information ranges from your passwords, your kids allergies, emergency contacts, credit card info, and more. Basically, any information you may not want to store in email but want to be able to share with your loved ones or friends.

With Personal you can store various information in ‘data vaults’ where you can selectively share certain vaults with people. Of course, all accounts on Personal include a legal guarantee that you own your data in the system.

For example, one way to use Personal is via its Form Killer app. You simply enter personal data once (that you would typically enter into forms such as address, social security numbers, birth data and more and then you can gill out forms with a single click using the startup’s Form Killer app

At the very heart of Personal, are what the startup calls ‘gems.’ Gems are nuggets of reusable information that represent the details of your life – your family, pets, car, home, office, food and travel preferences, and more.  You can decide which gems to add to your vault and which to share with others using our grant and request features. And you can download existing data from LinkedIn and Facebook. Personal also has a Gem Gallery, which is where you browse for the gems you need to use.

Your Personal data vault is a secure and convenient place for your gems. All sensitive data that you put in gems must be locked and unlocked with an owner-chosen password that Personal does not store and therefore, cannot access. Personal uses a 256-bit SSL encryption and HTTPS to ensure that there is no eavesdropping whenever data is transferred back-and-forth from your computer to Personal.

Personal is available on the mobile web and will be launching native Android and iPhone apps will be released soon.

There are number of services similar to Personal (such as Singly) but one thing the service has in its favor is its relatively clean and easy to use UI. It makes understanding which data is being shared very easy. Considering some of the hesitations we have sharing certain types of confidential information over email, or even Facebook; there is a need for a private (and highly secure) data organization service.

For background, Personal was founded by the same management team that built business mapping application The Map Network (which was acquired by NAVTEQ in 2006).

Sins used to require effort. In biblical times, even sloth meant having to sit around using your imagination. Now, a 1-inch hand gesture is all that separates human kind from the bookmarked sin of choice. The faintest desire for a fix of narcissism sees us pawing through Facebook and Twitter for Likes and retweets. If the task at hand seems daunting, we can hastily retreat to Netflix where we’re only asked to stare. A stray carnal thought can be indulged at any moment thanks to 4Chan and YouPorn.

College Humor’s graphic The 7 Deadly Websites is most fascinating not because it’s clever and accurate, but because the internet has removed the taboo from sin. Go ahead, live vicariously through friends as they post about their hot new spouses and high priced vacations, we’re all on Facebook doing the same thing. It’s openly acknowledged that people use Twitter to experience the pride of celebrity, and why put on pants to go to a restaurant when there’s Grub Hub. These services have many redeeming qualities, but they are ripe for misuse.

There are angels trying to save us from ourselves. Asana, Khan Academy, Fitbit, Up. But those take at least some determination. Sean Parker at his wickedly extravagant Spotify party said that “Solving the piracy problem can’t happen if you don’t build a service that’s more convenient than piracy.” The same goes for sin. Until technology makes it easier to stay humble, content, active, and pious than to devolve into corruption, righteousness will be reserved for the strongest of will.

Peer to peer marketplace CustomMade has raised $2.1 million in Series A funding today, led by First Round Capital and Google Ventures with additional investment from Founder Collective, Launch Capital, Next View Ventures, Andrew McCollum and David Tisch.

Like Etsy’s Alchemy feature (now retired), CustomMade allows customers who want to make custom products like jewelry and furniture post project proposals, and it retains a community of makers that can browse through projects and assign themselves to ones they are suited to. Makers can sign up for and build profiles on the site, which allows customers to browse through their portfolios. The site has over 3,000 makers and has overseen over $2 million in project requests, averaging around $1,500 a job.

“A lot of people think that custom is expensive and out of reach, and that's really not true any more,” says co-founder Mike Salguero, “There's a lot of trade winds right now about buying local and buying green and supporting your local economy.”

"We see a large opportunity in technology platforms that can seamlessly connect consumers with the goods they want specifically designed for them," said Google Ventures partner Rich Miner in a release,  "By combining local artisans – from the custom furniture maker in New Mexico to the jewelry designer in Austin – to millions of shoppers around the country, CustomMade serves the need of a growing marketplace.”

CustomMade plans on using the funding to expand both its staff and site features, with the eventual goal of disrupting big box retail with its suite of personalized products.