I've been repeating the story that personal robotics will be the next revolution, on par with the PC revolution. I can't recall where I read this first, but it I can believe it. Guess who is jumping into the fray to help that prediction along? It's Microsoft. It's been announced in several places:

• At robots.net
• By Robert Scoble
• At ars.Technica
• and by Microsoft themselves

Here's the homepage for Microsoft Robotics Studio.

The notice at Robots.net has an interesting take on all this...

Their development tools are designed to lock the user into Microsoft's .NET programming languages (e.g. JScript, C#, Visual Basic) and MS Windows XP.

Sounds like MS :) I think I'd much rather use open source tools than getting locked into .NET programming.

Update 2006/06/21: Here's a good article about Microsoft's efforts in the robotics arena from an educator's perspective. The author quotes Microsoft's Tandy Trower saying:

"This is not about Microsoft trying to control the world. This is about Microsoft providing a very simple foundation that allows the community to step forward and exchange information with itself. It will allow the community to evolve on a quicker pathway, on a natural pathway that it’s already on, and it will help accelerate that process. What this is all about is Microsoft being able to help the industry bootstrap itself, you know, ignite itself toward the expectations that everybody has."

Back in December 2005 I posted about creating my first "lens" on the Squidoo site. Some time between then and now, they have turned on the money tap (i.e. stopped funnelling all of the ad revenue to charities). To continue my experiment, I chose to have all of the ad revenue for my lenses be transferred to my Paypal account. If you can see the image in my post here, you'll see that the money came through in a big way... all $0.18 worth :)

Update (later that same day): There's an interesting post on TechCrunch about the future of Squidoo and how it's downfall might tarnish Seth Godin's reputation as a marketting guru. I'm tending to agree with Michael Arrington's assessment. When comparing Squidoo to Wikipedia he states:

"It’s unlikely that a Squidoo lens on a given topic (when there are a potentially infinite number of other lenses on the same topic) will ever gain that kind of authority."

Update 2006-09-12: Payday number two gave me a cool $1.21 USD this time around. That's a grand total of $1.39 USD for my efforts... which isn't really all that bad. At least I can set my pay threshold, unlike a certain ad network. By the way, you can see my Squidoo profile and list of lenses here:

http://www.squidoo.com/lensmasters/onecog2many 

A book written by Karl Williams, a local robotics specialist has found it's way onto a University of Maryland's course reference list. The Spring 2006 course is "Biologically Inspired Robotics". Karl has written three robotics books: Insectronics, Amphibionics, and Build Your Own Humanoid Robots. Congratulations Karl!

And by the way, Karl's brother Doug Williams has also been published with PDA Robotics. I guess genius and robotics run in this family!

My Squidoo Robotics lens is on the list of Squidoo's top 100 ranking lenses... at least it was this morning. I'm not exactly sure how I made the rank or how it was taken away for that matter, but it was nice while it lasted.

Update, later that same day: Now I see... It was the "Top 100 Most Blogged" list... they have several different Top 100 lists. If you check now, I'm still there. I wonder who's blogging about this lens? If it's just me, then not many people are blogging about Squidoo in general! I'm wondering how long it will be around then? Technorati says I'm the only one blogging about this lens.

Could you make a business from this?

Setup a system which combines helium balloons lifting video camera platforms, and raise them at 3 or more locations of an outdoor event. The platforms should allow remote control of viewing angle and zoom level, likely constructed in a half-bubble inverted dome arrangement. With a wireless video signal transmitted to a control station on the ground, you could view any area of the event. This could be useful for surveillance, live actions shots (for sporting events), promotional photos and the like.

Maybe it could be used over hazardous areas (remote viewing of a forest fire). A level of autonomy could be added to the system as well... maybe tracking an individual in the crowd if they were suspected of stealing something. Likely a lot of privacy issues to deal with there, however.

Update 2006/06/13: I just saw this very thing floating near where I work. It's run by Blimp Pics, and they provide low altitude aerial photography. Check out their site at http://www.blimppics.com/