This posting is yet again another tribute to the robot enthusiasts that have been flocking this blog recently, although I have to confess that I have checked the price of Robosapien and saw a brief demo while taking a few days off in Boston in early August with my wife (note: we were in Downtown Crossing, going over to Filene's when I decided to drop by Macy's nearby).  Must be deja vu from the MIT 2.70 contest...

Japan Today had a neat story on Epson's launch of the world's lightest flying micro robot.  According to Seiko Epson, this is an advanced successor to its original flying micro-robot which was the world's lightest and smallest (136 mm wide, 85 mm tall and a light weight of only 12.3 grams with the battery included).  The new "Micro Flying Robot" follows a flight-route program sent from a computer using Bluetooth wireless technology.

A description of the model reads more like one of those James Bond / 007 gadgets: "On board is a 32-bit microcontroller, a super-thin motor, a digital camera that sends blurry images and a tiny gyro-sensor that weighs less than one-tenth of a gram."

And besides being a great toy, what can be the applications for this Micro Flying Robot?  Actually, the AP story talks about real purposes for this miniature helicopter, including disaster rescue, security and even space exploration. 

Note: the Seiko Epson web page has a press release with a bigger photo available here.  There is also a link with a video of the flying mini robot. 

Update (20/08/2004): The above story was cross-referenced on Gizmodo!  That was really nice - an honor, in fact, given the popularity of the site and how it always carries stories on the latest cutting-edge gadgets.  As it turns out, this version of the mini-heli-robot (how about that for a shortcut?) is an improvement over the previous one, which was introduced last year.  Here is the older model (hat tip: Gizmodo).

We are inching closer to la grande finale of the symbol GOOG making it to the Nasdaq ticker.  Yesterday, the SEC gave the Mountain View, CA based search engine company the rubber stamp needed for initial public offering of the stock.  But Business Week claims that Google is still not out of the woods, and may still get a slap on the wrist from the Commision.

In the meantime, the company priced on Wednesday its IPO at $85 per share, at the low end of its already reduced price range.  So where will GOOG end up being in terms of valuation?  The smart money is saying somewhere between eBay and Yahoo!.  But we will see the results very soon.

As far as where the stock will trade in the aftermarket, I have discovered a good posting on Paul Kedrosky's blog.  It turns out Paul had saved the graph of a New York Times article explaining how Dutch style auctions work, so it is posted further below in order to make it easier to understand John Fitzgibbon Jr.'s analysis on the Francis Gaskins website (Francis is a renowned IPO analyst).  Here is what John has to say about the aftermarket price: