SoftBank Corp. said Wednesday its Pepper humanoid robots will staff a cellphone store in Tokyo for a week this spring. The firm said the static, talking machines will run the store from March 28 to April 3 in the city's upscale Omotesando shopping district. SoftBank already operates a separate store in the neighborhood. "I don't know how this will turn out, but it should be a quite interesting experiment," said SoftBank CEO Ken Miyauchi during a two-day exhibition called Pepper World. The telecoms giant said it will deploy five to six Peppers at the shop.

SoftBank Group is promising new services for its Pepper robot that will appeal to business users and help bring the humanoid to storefronts and reception areas. The company is developing a customer support package and a service that allows businesses to manage a fleet of Peppers, Fumihide Tomizawa, chief executive officer of SoftBank Robotics, said in an interview in Tokyo on Monday. The wireless carrier and Internet company investor will reveal more details of the service at the SoftBank World event July 30 and 31, he said. When Pepper went on sale to Japanese consumers on June 20, all 1,000 units sold out within one minute. SoftBank is targeting businesses to increase the robot's installed base which Tomizawa estimates would have to be in the hundreds of thousands to support a community of developers and an application store modeled on Apple Inc.'s.

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Computers are about to enter an age where they can perceive, act and even think for themselves, using a network similar to the human brain. The likes of Google and Facebook are already using the principles of neuroscience to develop artificial brains that they hope will be able to solve their data issues. Now, San Diego-based Qualcomm is planning to launch the first ever commercial chip inspired by the human brain. San Diego-based Qualcomm is planning to launch the first ever commercial chip inspired by the human brain. The chip, which the New York Times has reported will be launched later this year, will be able to automate tasks that currently require painstaking programming.

Samsung on Thursday unveiled a larger Galaxy S III smartphone in London, and said the phone would be sold in the U.S. this summer after launching in Europe on May 29. Samsung didn't name a U.S. wireless carrier or the price for the smartphone, but said the U.S. version will run over LTE and HSPA, an indication it could run on AT&T's or T-Mobile's network. A white version of the Galaxy S III was unveiled by Samsung's president of mobile communications, J.K. Shin, at a crowded London media event that featured a live orchestra and was also webcast. The Galaxy S III, will run Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and will have a 4.8-in. It includes an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 1.9-megapixel front-facing camera.

A cooing, gesturing humanoid on wheels that can decipher emotions has been unveiled in Japan by billionaire Masayoshi Son who says robots should be tender and make people smile. Son's mobile phone company Softbank said Thursday that the robot it has dubbed Pepper will go on sale in Japan in February for 198,000 yen ($2,100). Overseas sales plans are under consideration but undecided. The machine, which has no legs, but has gently gesticulating hands appeared on a stage in a Tokyo suburb, cooing and humming. It dramatically touched hands with Son in a Genesis or "E.T." moment.

An app offering real-time translations is to allow people in Japan to speak to foreigners over the phone with both parties using their native tongue. NTT Docomo - the country's biggest mobile network - will initially convert Japanese to English, Mandarin and Korean, with other languages to follow. It is the latest in a series of telephone conversation translators to launch in recent months. Alcatel-Lucent and Microsoft are among those working on other solutions. The products have the potential to let companies avoid having to use specially trained multilingual staff, helping them cut costs. They could also aid tourism.

TCP, the transmission control protocol, is one of the core protocols governing the Internet: If counted as a computer program, it's the most widely used program in the world. One of TCP's main functions is to prevent network congestion by regulating the rate at which computers send data. In the last 25 years, engineers have made steady improvements to TCP's congestion-control algorithms, resulting in several competing versions of the protocol: Many Windows computers, for instance, run a version called Compound TCP, while Linux machines run a version called TCP Cubic. At the annual conference of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Data Communication this summer, researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing will present a computer system, dubbed Remy, that automatically generates TCP congestion-control algorithms. In the researchers' simulations, algorithms produced by Remy significantly outperformed algorithms devised by human engineers.

Language barriers are starting to crumble. This month Japan's dominant mobile phone operator, NTT DoCoMo, introduced the world's first app for real-time voice translation. When a user with a DoCoMo smartphone places a call through the app, he speaks in Japanese and his words are promptly translated into English, Mandarin, or Korean. To complete the conversational circuit, the other person's words are translated from any of those languages back into Japanese. With this debut we've taken one step closer to building a mechanical Babel fish, the extraordinarily useful creature imagined by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

An independent Windows Phone developer has created an app for Microsoft's mobile platform that will attempt to outmatch Apple's intelligent voice-controlled assistant Siri. Ask Ziggy for Windows Phone is a free ad-free mobile app that can perform similar tasks to the iOS 5 voice assistant. "Ask Ziggy uses Speech Recognition to translate human speech into transcribed text, which is displayed in a speech bubble. The transcribed text is analyzed for patterns to detect commands or general queries. Commands are interpreted and routed to routine phone tasks such as emailing, texting, calling, social network updates, and getting directions," said Shai Leib, the app's developer, told WPcentral.