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.

SoftBank Robotics Corp. said Thursday it has expanded opportunities for app developers to use Google's Android platform for its humanoid robot Pepper. It hopes to encourage more programmers to develop apps for the device. An Android-ready Pepper model will go on sale in July, though only for developers, and on Thursday an Android development toolkit was made available for download, Fumihide Tomizawa, SoftBank Robotics chief, told a news conference at the firm's headquarters in Tokyo. Previously, there was a development platform specially designed for Pepper, but it was not based on Android. Tomizawa said the number of developers could increase 100-fold, as there are only several thousand Pepper app designers but hundreds of thousands of Android coders.