By Paul Hochman
Gear and technology editor
TODAY
updated 5:03 p.m. ET May 30, 2007
In the next year, Bill Gates will manage one of the highest-profile transitions in American business history — he’ll leave his day job as chairman at Microsoft, the $300 billion company he co-founded 32 years ago, and will move full time into philanthropy.
But before he leaves, Gates has a few more high-tech projects to finish. Until this morning, one project — almost five years in the making and code-named 'Milan,’ — was top-secret.
In a TODAY exclusive, I had a chance to talk with Gates at Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., campus about a revolutionary new device Microsoft now calls “Surface.” (MSNBC.com is a Microsoft-NBC Universal joint venture.)
Microsoft unveils revolutionary device
M1A1 / M1A2 Abrams Main Battle Tank, USA
77 M1A2 tanks have been built for the US Army, 315 for Saudi Arabia and 218 for Kuwait. For the M1A2 upgrade programme, over 600 M1 Abrams tanks are being upgraded to M1A2 configuration. Deliveries began in 1998.
In March 2004, the Australian Army announced the purchase of 59 US Army M1A1 tanks to enter service from 2007. The contract was signed in November 2005 and the first five were handed over in February 2006 at GDLS in Lima, Ohio. The first 18 tanks were delivered to the Australian Army at the School of Armour in Victoria in September 2006. The remaining 41, to be based in Darwin, were delivered in March
In June 2006, Saudi Arabia requested the foreign military sale of 58 M1A1 tanks and the upgrade of these and the 315 M1A2 already in the Saudi inventory to M1A2S configuration. The upgrade involves rebuilding to a 'like new' condition, similar to the US Army Abrams Integrated Management Program (AIM).
In August 2007, Egypt requested the foreign military sale of an additional 125 M1A1 tanks, which would bring the country’s fleet to 1,005 M1A1 tanks.
Tiger Attack Helicopter, Germany
The EC665 Tiger helicopter is being developed for France and Germany in three configurations, UHT multi-role fire support for the German Army and HAD multi-role combat and HAP combat support for the French Army. Tiger is being built by Eurocopter, a subsidiary of the EADS (European Aeronautics Defence and Space) company formed by DaimlerChrysler Aerospace of Germany, Aerospatiale Matra of France and CASA of Spain.
The first flight of the aircraft was in 1991. Serial production began in March 2002 and the first flight of the production Tiger HAP for France took place in March 2003. France has ordered 80 aircraft (40 HAP combat support and 40 HAD multi-role combat). The first HAP version was delivered in March 2005. Germany has ordered 80 combat support aircraft and the first UHT Tiger for Germany was delivered in April 2005. Total procurement is planned to be 120 for France and 120 for Germany.
In December 2001, Eurocopter, with the Tiger ARH (armed reconnaissance), was awarded the contract for the Australian Army’s Air 87 requirement for 22 helicopters. The Tiger ARH is a modified version of the Tiger HAP with upgraded MTR390 engines, a laser designator incorporated in the Strix sight for the firing of Hellfire II air-to-ground missiles and M299 "smart" launchers.
The first Tiger ARH took its maiden flight in February 2004 and deliveries began in December 2004. It is scheduled to enter service in mid-2008. Certification of the Hellfire II missile is underway and should be completed in September 2005.
Australian Aerospace (a subsidiary of Eurocopter) has set up a local production facility for assembly of the helicopters and the manufacture of parts for the entire programme. ADI Ltd is a major subcontractor, responsible for customising the mission and communications systems.
In September 2003, Spain selected a version of the Tiger HAP combat support helicopter, to be called the HAD, which will be armed with the Rafael Spike-ER anti-armour and Mistral air-to-air missile systems. 24 helicopters will be ordered which will also have an uprated Enhanced MTR390E engine and a heavier payload. Six helicopters in the HAP version will be delivered to Spain in 2007, which will later be converted to HAD. The first three were delivered in May 2007. 18 HAD versions will be delivered between 2010 and 2014.
France originally placed an order for 70 HAP and ten HAC, an anti-tank variant but this was changed to 40 HAP and 40 HAD variants in December 2005. Spain and France signed the development contract for the helicopter in December 2004. The production HAD made its maiden flight in December 2007.
Giving robots a human face
Hertz isn't really a she, but rather an it, an animated robot head built in about nine months by "sculptor roboticist" David Hanson.
Hanson and other robot makers believe social robots will one day serve a variety of functions: tutor, companion, even security guard.
But should they look human?
Hanson, who has worked as a designer, sculptor, and robotics developer for Walt Disney Imagineering, Universal Studios and MTV, thinks precise human looks are a must if people are going to effectively communicate with robots. 
Like his previous project, K-bot, Hanson sculpted Hertz to resemble his girlfriend. It's sheathed in a high-tech polymer Hanson invented called "f'rubber," which resembles human skin. The face is embedded with tiny electronic motors, so Hertz can smile, frown or wrinkle its forehead.
For now, Hertz is a face mounted to a wooden stool, its disembodied brain a laptop computer. It has no arms, legs or body, although Hanson is planning those enhancements someday.
Hertz's eyes have video cameras, enabling it to gaze at a human face and follow you around, provided you don't move too quickly or beyond its limited field of vision. That and the limited speech skills are the extent of Hertz's abilities.
Despite the embryonic state of his work, Hanson insists he's on to something.
"Most people doing social robots believe that human faces will turn people off and will disturb them. I think that's ridiculous," Hanson said. "The human face is perhaps the most natural paradigm for us to interact with."
Most experts disagree. They cite one of the principles of social robotics, the so-called "Uncanny Valley" theory.
First described by pioneering Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, the theory goes like this: humans have a positive psychological reaction to robots that look somewhat like humans. But if a robot is made to look very realistic but somehow isn't quite right (it has an odd smile, or it doesn't blink, for example) it seems grotesque instead of comforting.
"Our experience has shown that people quickly lose the suspension of disbelief needed to interact with these creations once they start interacting with them for any length of time, because the artificial intelligence is not capable of producing human-level behavior," said Reid Simmons, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. "I strongly believe that this problem would be exacerbated by having a more humanly realistic robot."
Science fiction has long taken different approaches to imbue robots with personal appeal.
In Star Wars, the blinks, blurps and beeps of R2-D2 were enough to give the trashcan-shaped machine a wide range of human emotions such as fear and excitement. There was the strikingly human, but emotionally clueless, Data from Star Trek: Next Generation. And in 2001's Artificial Intelligence: AI, unblinking robot boy David Swinton yearned to become real so his flesh-and-blood mother would love him.
Hanson apart, most of today's roboticists are taking Mori's theory into consideration.
Sony Corp.'s QRIO robot looks like a young boy in a space suit, but Sony researchers say they didn't want to make it too similar to a human.
"If your design is too close to human form, at a certain point it becomes just too uncanny," Toshitada Doi, head of Sony's Intelligent Dynamics Research Institute, says on Sony's Web site.
Others include GRACE, short for Graduate Robot Attending a ConferencE. Built by Simmons and researchers at several other schools, GRACE's "face" is a flat-screen television capable of displaying a range of emotions.
Kismet, a product of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Humanoid Robotics Group, has exaggerated, fuzzy eyebrows, big blue eyes and floppy ears but its face is mostly metal and plastic.
Inventor and author Ray Kurzweil thinks Hanson's work is significant because realistic facial movement will play an important role in the way future androids respond to humans.
First, however, robots will have to become significantly more intelligent, able to gauge the expressions of the people they encounter. Kurzweil estimates that we'll begin to see this human level of artificial intelligence around 2029. Until then, he believes less-realistic robots will be more successful.
"If a robot has a face that is not human, then we are more accepting of less-than-human behavior, as we would with an animal or doll," he said. "Intelligence significantly below that of normal humans stands out more with a robot that looks strikingly human. This creates the impression of a human with impaired intelligence, which may strike some as disturbing."
For now, Hanson is taking a semester off from pursuing his doctoral thesis at the University of Texas-Dallas so he can tinker with his bots.
Most of the work on Hertz was done in his apartment and funded mostly with student loans. Last summer, Hanson formed a company, Human Emulation Robotics, with the hopes of raising venture capital.
"This is like a first step," he said. "This looks like a monster because it is a severed head. But once you get used to it, it's not. I haven't proven that it's not disturbing yet, but I have shown that it is captivating."
No matter what, we can expected future social robots to be more alien than human, said Will Wright, creator of The Sims video games and a robot enthusiast.
"The fact is, I will share much more evolutionary history, and hence, brain circuitry and behavior, with my cat than I ever will with a machine intelligence," he said. "The AIs we will be inventing soon will almost certainly be the first true alien intelligences humans will meet."
Japanese robots enter daily life
TOKYO — At a university lab in a Tokyo suburb, engineering students are wiring a rubbery robot face to simulate six basic expressions: anger, fear, sadness, happiness, surprise and disgust.
Hooked up to a database of words clustered by association, the robot — dubbed Kansei, or "sensibility" — responds to the word "war" by quivering in what looks like disgust and fear. It hears "love," and its pink lips smile.
Robots are already taken for granted in Japanese factories, so much so that they are sometimes welcomed on their first day at work with Shinto religious ceremonies. Robots make sushi. Robots plant rice and tend paddies.
There are robots serving as receptionists, vacuuming office corridors, spoon-feeding the elderly. They serve tea, greet company guests and chatter away at public technology displays. Now start-ups are marching out robotic home helpers.
They aren't all humanoid. The Paro is a furry robot seal fitted with sensors beneath its fur and whiskers, designed to comfort the lonely, opening and closing its eyes and moving its flippers.
For Japan, the robotics revolution is an imperative. With more than a fifth of the population 65 or older, the country is banking on robots to replenish the workforce and care for the elderly.
In the past several years, the government has funded a plethora of robotics-related efforts, including some $42 million for the first phase of a humanoid robotics project, and $10 million a year between 2006 and 2010 to develop key robot technologies.
The government estimates the industry could surge from about $5.2 billion in 2006 to $26 billion in 2010 and nearly $70 billion by 2025.
Besides financial and technological power, the robot wave is favored by the Japanese mind-set as well.
Robots have long been portrayed as friendly helpers in Japanese popular culture, a far cry from the often rebellious and violent machines that often inhabit Western science fiction.
This is, after all, the country that invented Tamagotchi, the handheld mechanical pets that captivated the children of the world.
Japanese are also more accepting of robots because the native Shinto religion often blurs boundaries between the animate and inanimate, experts say. To the Japanese psyche, the idea of a humanoid robot with feelings doesn't feel as creepy — or as threatening — as it might do in other cultures.
Still, Japan faces a vast challenge in making the leap — commercially and culturally — from toys, gimmicks and the experimental robots churned out by labs like Takeno's to full-blown human replacements that ordinary people can afford and use safely.
"People are still asking whether people really want robots running around their homes, and folding their clothes," said Damian Thong, senior technology analyst at Macquarie Bank in Tokyo.
"But then again, Japan's the only country in the world where everyone has an electric toilet," he said. "We could be looking at a robotics revolution."
That revolution has been going on quietly for some time.
Japan is already an industrial robot powerhouse. Over 370,000 robots worked at factories across Japan in 2005, about 40% of the global total and 32 robots for every 1,000 Japanese manufacturing employees, according to a recent report by Macquarie, which had no numbers from subsequent years.
List of mergers and acquisitions by Microsoft
Microsoft is an American multinational computer technology corporation based in Redmond, Washington. Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded the company in Albuquerque, New Mexico on April 4, 1975 after Gates went on leave from Harvard University.[1] Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the company that created the Altair 8800 microcomputer, was based in Albuquerque. Gates visited MITS to show them his implementation of the BASIC programming language using their system.[2] Microsoft moved its headquarters to Bellevue, Washington on January 1, 1979,
and then to Redmond on February 26, 1986, where it still remains.[3] The company's initial public offering was held on March 14, 1986. The stock, which eventually closed at US$27.75 a share, peaked at $29.25 a share shortly after the market opened for trading. At the time, Gates owned 45%[4] of the company's 24.7 million outstanding shares, and Allen owned roughly 25% of the shares. After the offering, Gates was worth $233.9 million and Microsoft had a market capitalization of $519.777 million.[5] Microsoft has acquired 128 companies, purchased stakes in 60 companies, and made 24 divestments. Of the companies that Microsoft has acquired, 99 were based in the United States. Microsoft has not released the financial details for most of these mergers and acquisitions.
Microsoft's first acquisition was Forethought on June 29, 1987, which was founded in 1983 and developed a presentation program that would later be known as Microsoft PowerPoint.[6] On December 31, 1997, Microsoft acquired Hotmail for $500 million, its largest acquisition at the time, and integrated Hotmail into its MSN group of services.[7] Hotmail, a free webmail service founded in 1996 by Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia,[8] had more than 8.5 million subscribers earlier that month.[9] Microsoft acquired Seattle-based Visio Corporation on January 7, 2000 for $1.375 billion. Visio, a software company, was founded in 1990 as Axon Corporation, and had its initial public offering in November 1995.[10] The company developed the diagramming application software, Visio, which was integrated into Microsoft's product line as Microsoft Visio after its acquisition. On July 12, 2002, Microsoft purchased Navision for $1.33 billion. The company, which developed the technology for the Microsoft Dynamics NAV enterprise resource planning software, was integrated into Microsoft as a new division named Microsoft Business Solutions,[11] later renamed to Microsoft Dynamics.[12] Microsoft purchased aQuantive, an advertising company, on August 13, 2007 for $6.333 billion, Microsoft's largest acquisition. Before the acquisition, aQuantive was ranked 14th in terms of revenue among advertising agencies worldwide. aQuantive had three subsidiaries at the time of the acquisition: Avenue A/Razorfish, one of the world's largest digital agencies,[13] Atlas Solutions, and DRIVE Performance Solutions.[14] Microsoft acquired the Norwegian enterprise search company Fast Search & Transfer on April 25, 2008 for $1.191 billion to boost its search technology.[15]
Since Microsoft's first acquisition in 1987, it has purchased an average of six companies a year. The company has purchased more than ten companies a year since 2005, and acquired 18 in firms in 2006, the most in a single year, including: UMT-Software and IP Assets, MotionBridge, Seadragon Software, Apptimum, Onfolio, Lionhead Studios, AssetMetrix, Massive Incorporated, Vexcel, DeepMetrix, ProClarity, iView Multimedia, Winternals Software, Whale Communications, Gteko, DesktopStandard, Colloquis, and Accipiter Solutions. Microsoft has made four acquisitions worth over one billion dollars: aQuantive, Fast Search & Transfer, Navision, and Visio Corporation. Microsoft has also purchased several stakes valued more than a billion dollars. It obtained an 11.5% stake in Comcast for $1 billion, a 22.98% stake in Telewest Communications for $2.263 billion, and a 3% stake in AT&T for $5 billion. Among Microsoft's divestments, in which parts of the company are sold to another company, only Expedia, Inc. was sold for more than a billion dollars; USA Networks purchased the company on February 5, 2002 for $1.372 billion. On August 17, 2006, Microsoft acquired 7.92% of its own common stock for $20 billion.
Experience Microsoft Surface
There are many innovative gadgets in the market. Software and hardware, now offer a lot of excitement. Imagine the ideal combination of hardware and software. The result – Microsoft Surface. You may go though the many videos on Internet to experience Microsoft Surface features. These videos released by Microsoft deal with real life applications and not simple PowerPoint presentations. Seeing is believing.
customers.
Intelligent tables? Yes. They will be. Imagine you going to a restaurant and place a wine glass on the table which is actually a Microsoft Surface. The wine menu appears. You select the wine of your choice and the order is received by the staff, without a single word of verbal communication. And only one needs to order? No. This accepts multiple ‘touch’ and many people may select the item on the menu and drag the item they want to order with their fingers to place the order. Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide has tied up with Microsoft to enable you to experience Microsoft Surface in their place.
Another demo shows how to experience Microsoft Surface by comparing two mobile phones. Just place a mobile phone on the Microsoft Surface. The system identifies the same (probably with a special barcode?) and displays the specifications and prices. You place another mobile phone on the Microsoft Surface. The specifications for this are also shown. When you slide the mobile phones together, a comparison of both is shown, to enable you to decide to buy the one that suits you.
Today’s computers allow you to have multiple applications in multiple windows. But they may have only one key board and one mouse. And only one person can operate at a time. If you want to watch photo album on your computer along with three or four of your friends, just imagine every one trying to see them. Microsoft Surface allows people to sit across in different positions and watch the images. Spread the photos across the Microsoft Surface and any one can pull photos towards them like you pull physical photos, with fingers. Turn them as you like. You can zoom in or zoom out just by pulling the opposite corners of the image with your hands. Can you wait to experience Microsoft Surface? You can even play multiple videos on the surface just by tapping the video file with your finger, like we do now with a mouse!
In future, you can experience Microsoft Surface even with your digital camera. You take pictures on your digital camera. There will be no need to connect the USB cable or upload through Bluetooth or wireless. Just place the digital camera on the Microsoft Surface and watch the images on the surface. We bet you are eager to experience Microsoft Experience.
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