Yukai Engineering, the team behind the strangely adorable cat tail pillow, is back with a new quirky invention. Unveiled at CES 2023, the Fufuly is yet another anxiety-reducing cushion from the Japanese company, but this time featuring a gentle rhythmical pulsation as the main therapeutic tool. The idea is that when you're hugging a Fufuly, its life-like behavior stimulates your belly to induce slower and deeper breathing. Despite its thought-bubble shape (supposedly to evoke the image of a puff of air), the cushion felt more like a mellow creature dozing off in my arms. I even mistook the quiet mechanical noise as a cat's purr, to which CEO Shunsuke Aoki assured me this was purely a coincidence.

Back in January, we got to meet a smaller, more portable version of the Qoobo cat tail pillow, which is aptly named Petit Qoobo. I'm sure I'm not the only sucker for this sort of bizarre cute gadget, but much like its sibling, this tail-wagging robot is also designed as a therapeutic device for folks at senior care facilities, or just whoever needs a cuddly companion but aren't able to keep pets for various reasons -- be it allergy or accommodation rules. With this new version, the tail responds to sound as well as touch, and you can even feel a lifelike heart beat plus a faint "purring" from within the fluffy body. Today, Yukai Engineering announced that it will be using Indiegogo to take international pre-orders for the Petit Qoobo. The campaign will run from July 30th (this Thursday) until September 28th, and shipment will begin in December this year.

The time frame for this idea is 2 decades-plus. You will get out of the box thinking from me sometimes but it comes with a connecting thread running it -- which you will profit from. The thread here will run for decades. I'm going to talk about The Future, The Fear of it and Fixing those Fears. We have worries about the future. I'm talking about how to survive the big unknown about the future: Change and its impact on our lives -- jobs, health, safety and family. There's a joke from a startup guy who said, "I sleep like a baby, I wake up crying and needing to poop every couple of hours." On the spectrum of humans worrying, there's people like Buddha on one end, who does great - living his best life in the present. Not me, (I might be in danger of looking like the Buddha with my diet.)

You may not instantly recognize the name "Yukai Engineering," but you may have already come across its earlier products like the Necomimi brainwave cat ears or the Bocco "family robot" at some point. At CEATEC, the Japanese company unveiled its latest wacky product, the Qoobo "tail therapy" robot. This is essentially a cushion with a realistic cat tail that reacts to stroking and patting, such that it's able to comfort its "owner" like a real pet would simply through tail wagging. To make it more lifelike, Qoobo also wags its tail randomly when it is left alone for too long. As a cat owner myself, I was surprised by how realistic the tail moved, especially with how its wagging intensity increased as I petted it harder (my cat would eventually warn me with a bite).