Ugobe has finally hatched its baby dinosaur in time for this Christmas rather than last, but can Pleo fulfill its potential as the biggest robotic toy since its Furby forefather?

Ugobe sent me a review unit to play with for two weeks and, while I found it to be a marvel of engineering, I was not convinced the toy would have mass appeal.

The price will certainly be an obstacle to many parents buying Pleo for their children. It costs $349, $150 more than envisaged when Pleo was first unveiled almost two years ago.

The packaging and the quality of the build seem to justify the price though. Ugobe, based in Emeryville in the Bay Area, has former Apple employees on its staff and the box that Pleo comes in is well-designed as is the battery-charging accessory inside.

Pleo himself is the most advanced robotic toy to date. He initially needs to be awakened in a birthing process, aimed at helping you to bond with the toy. By gently shaking him, the dinosaur gradually unfurls, opens his eyes and gets to his feet.

Everyone in the office was wowed by the cuteness and realism of this baby camarasaurus as it walked around without the need for a remote control, exploring its environment and emitting plaintive dinosaur cries.

However, disconcertingly, the novelty of Pleo soon wore off and he was left to wander around unattended.

It was the same story at home with my nine-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter. They were initially fascinated with Pleo – how he would avoid walking off the ends of tables, enjoy being tickled, hate being held by his tail and would munch on a leaf or engage in a tug of war.

But he was slow and still “didn’t do enough things”, they said, retiring to their video games after a few minutes. My daughter has grown out of Bratz dolls and my son prefers remote-controlled cars to shuffling dinosaurs, so perhaps they were not the ideal testers. But visiting friends soon got bored with Pleo as well.

The kids also thought the pet’s motors were too noisy and the speakers were not good enough quality.

They did not exploit the ability to program Pleo to do different things using an SD memory card and this feature is still being developed at Pleoworld.com.

I can imagine the Furby modding fraternity loving this aspect of the toy and creating different personalities and abilities for Pleo.

But as Ugobe’s first effort, Pleo seems like Version 1.0 of a robot that will take many more revisions before it can become the truly mobile, responsive machine that will engage children of today for more than a few minutes.

Until that is achieved, they will probably be happier racing remote-controlled cars and enjoying the alternate reality of Halo 3.

There’s a natural tendency in US business, when things go wrong, to reach for the lawyers. Now, the tech industry can also reach for the regulators.

Microsoft’s momentous loss before the European Court of First Instance in September always seemed likely to open the flood gates for other claims. As we wrote at the time, PSI, a mainframe computer maker that had already been battling Big Blue in the US courts, was an obvious candidate to turn to Brussels for redress.

That has now happened. PSI accuses IBM of "refusing to supply interface information relating to mainframe computers and refusing to license third parties." Opening up the mainframe platform, were it ever to happen, could have big repercussions for IBM, whose profits are still reputed to rest heavily on the technology most closely associated with its name.

Like last week’s complaint against Microsoft from browser maker Opera, this one is really asking the European regulators to test the limits. Does the EC want to get into the business of prising open all (dominant) closed technology platforms? Where does it draw the line? It’s hard to see Brussels wanting to take this fight to many new fronts, but that is where the logic of the Microsoft ruling points.

Ribbit’s claims to be Silicon Valley’s first phone company may be a bit of a stretch, but the start-up’s software could help a thousand internet phone companies bloom from virtual handset makers to vertical service providers.

Early examples include the chalkboard soft-phone, pictured left, developed by London design agency, Square Circle, and the Ribbit for Salesforce application that makes voice an object and provides speech-to-text transcriptions within a customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Ribbit should be a godsend to developers. It’s a platform that acts as a “SmartSwitch”, handling all the complexities of mobile, fixed and internet telephony and allowing developers to master just a few commands in Flash to introduce voice to any web page or web application.

It promises a complete matrix of connections, from mobile phones ringing up desktop widgets to an instant-messaging window calling a fixed-line phone.

Ribbit, which gets its official launch today, offers more possibilities and greater personalisation than the telephony buttons that services such as Skype and Jajah can add to web pages.

It says it can justify its Silicon Valley phone company tag with the processes, business model and innovations it is introducing.

Ribbit’s platform approach means it will offer services such as billing, customer support and quality-of-service assurance, just like a regular phone company, but it will leave it to a growing developer community to come up with applications for its technology.

The company plans a revenue-share arrangement with developers, but it is also proving it can make money from its own reference applications – the Salesforce app is worth $29 per month per user.

The Mountain View-based company is VC-funded by Alsop-Louie Partners, Allegis Capital and KPG Ventures and has recruited 600 developers since the developer community was launched in August.

New applications are being launched every week. “The bulk have been enterprise applications, but we think it will open up for consumer ones, when we provide a [reference] application,” says Crick Waters, vice president of business development.

Coolest consumer app to date is the virtual iPhone, powered by Adobe’s AIR technology, which sits on your desktop and acts just like the real thing, minus the roaming charges.

Intel’s Viiv brand, which heralded its offensive into consumer electronics two years ago, seems to be heading for early retirement.

At a Friday preview of its announcements due at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Intel said the Viiv brand would be undergoing changes in the first quarter.

Intel will no longer be doing its “works with Viiv” verification testing, which had made the brand’s sticker appear prominently on different kinds of consumer electronics devices.

It was also dropping its media server software stack associated with Viiv. “We will allow Windows Vista to deliver similar functionality,” said Jeff McCrea, vice president of the Digital Home group.

Viiv had always seemed a less than essential supplement to Window’s Media Center and Vista’s version of Media Center appears to have made it superfluous.

Part of the function of the Viiv brand was to prime the pump for a market where consumers would demand more PCs and consumer electronics devices that delivered media onto TV screens using Intel chips.

It also was associated with content partnerships with media companies, an initiative that is also being halted.

Mr McCrea said: “We didn’t see the need to continue to drive that,” referring to how the YouTube generation has grown over the past two years.

Viiv was launched at CES in January 2006. It will be know as Core 2 with Viiv in 2008 and emphasise performance.

Future plans would surround “Connect, Manage and Protect” features – allowing consumers to wake up their computers remotely and access files, enabling IT professionals to fix and administer PCs remotely and providing consumers with extra security.

Intel has never been keen to quantify the success of Viiv, leaving the impression that it has lived in the shadow of Window’s Media Center software and failed to achieve anything like the traction of Intel’s Centrino brand.

The ‘"is" at the beginning of Facebook’s status updates (as in, "Joe Bloggs is at work") has long been the social network’s equivalent of Apple’s one-button mouse: A nagging design feature that makes sense to a small group of devotees but infuriates nearly everyone else.

Facebook originally conceived of the status update as a way for users to relay timely messages like "Sally is at the gym" or "Billy is heading to the concert," rather than more general statements like "Billy likes U2." Users never really saw it that way, though, and their efforts to circumvent the dreaded "is" resulted in a long list of grammatical and stylistic shenanigans.

As recently as six weeks ago, the unofficial word was that the "is" wasn’t going anywhere. But on Thursday, advocates for self-expression (and fans of the English language generally) woke up to an early Christmas present: The "is" is now optional.

Facebook’s decision to bow to users over the status update followed a retreat over the site’s controversial Beacon advertising system last week. Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, "is eager to show that Facebook takes user feedback seriously."

Has Google’s OpenSocial arrived too late to stop social networking sites joining the stampede of developers to Facebook’s platform?

Bebo, number one in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand and the number three social networking site in the US, says its Open Application Platform is a straight use of Facebook’s application programming interfaces, the advantage being that, with the minimum of effort, developers of thousands of applications for Facebook could now make them available on Bebo as well.

In an entry on its developer wiki, Facebook announced the next step in the opening up of its platform, which began in May when outside developers were allowed to introduce applications to its service.

“Facebook is now making its platform architecture available as a model for other social sites,” it said.

Michael Birch, chief executive of Bebo, said at the launch of the Open Application Platform that he still supported Google’s OpenSocial initiative for a shared platform architecture for social networking sites, announced last month. But he had also been talking to Facebook and his developers had been focused on making Bebo Facebook-compatible.

He insisted Bebo would get round to adopting OpenSocial, but it seems Facebook’s first-mover advantage has created a critical mass of support from developers that could diminish Google’s efforts.

Facebook is giving away a major advantage in allowing its rivals to mirror its arsenal of applications. This suggests it is both confident of its leadership in innovation and worried about the threat of Google amassing an axis of opposing social networking forces.

MySpace seems firmly in the Google camp, basing its new open platform, due in the New Year, on OpenSocial. But it will be interesting to see whether the smaller players review their commitment to OpenSocial now that Facebook has responded with this giveaway.

For users, the benefits of the new interoperability between Bebo and Facebook include them being able to interact and play with one another.

Bunchball announced its Games and Avatars application, allowing Bebo and Facebook members to play a range of games with one another, while Webs.com said its popular WarBook game would be available to play across the two networks.

All the discussion about whether or not internet financing is in the middle of another bubble period tends to miss one very important point. Wall Street has not shown much sign of internet excess yet - and with the stock market swinging wildly this week, public market investors are showing no inclination to jump in.

A case in point on Wednesday: the withdrawl of an IPO for social networking company Classmates Media. This is a company assembled through a series of acquisitions over the last three years by United Online. Having welded together social networking site Classmates, online loyalty marketing company MyPoints and a couple of other ventures for a total of $200m, UOL hoped to turn around and sell a small slice of the venture to the public, netting more than $100m in cash and putting a heady valuation on the unit of some $720m.

If Classmates’ track record wasn’t enough to put you off - profits of just $1.7m on revenues of $140m in the first nine months of this year - there were several other red flags. The social networking site earned a "significant portion" of its advertising revenues from a deal that expired last month, and even if it finds a replacement for this it warned that any new arrangement is likely to produce less money. The site’s other main source of income, selling subscriptions, has come under the scrutiny of Federal regulators in the US, who don’t seem happy with its practice of automatically renewing memberships (and charging credit cards) each year. For good measure, there’s also a risk that its email marketing practices - the source of most of its user activity - could fall foul of US anti-spam regulations.

None of this might have mattered much back at the end of the 1990s. In the current climate, UOL has just pulled the offer because of what it called "general market conditions."

Silicon Valley is still trying to party like it’s 1999. But unless Wall Street joins in, the alcohol is likely to run out sooner rather than later.

It must have seemed a good idea at the time. Combine a company that produces an electronic programming guide with one that makes content protection technology, and you get an outfit that is perfectly positioned to help media companies navigate the challenging waters of internet-delivered TV. That is, if you don’t end up with a trainwreck first.

Macrovision’s proposed $2.8bn  purchase of Gemstar-TV Guide may survive the elevator pitch test, but it looks monumentally difficult to make work. For a start, Gemstar will be a very big and complicated dish to swallow. Some 55 per cent of its revenues don’t even come from electronic programming guides, but from the TV Guide magazine and cable channels. Unpicking the pieces, selling off unwanted assets and paying down debt may eventually leave the smaller Macrovision in a position to digest what’s left, but Gemstar has been a playground for intellectual property litigators for so long that it’s hard to imagine this turning out clean and simple.

The shares of both companies haven’t stopped falling since the deal was announced last Friday. Macrovision is down nearly 30 per cent and at $4.44, Gemstar is now trading 30 per cent below the original value of the cash-and-stock deal. For News Corp, which has put its 41 per cent stake in Gemstar behind the deal, it seems a fitting end to a disastrous investment. It’s also a reminder that assembling the next generation of media technology services companies out of today’s complicated patchwork of point-product vendors is likely to be a messy business.

Speaking of 3D, three-dimensional holograms could soon take the place of two-dimensional images in teleconferencing, according to Cisco Systems. "We may be in a room where if I walk around behind you I can see the back of your head," said Marthin de Beer, head of Cisco’s emerging technologies group, at the networking company’s annual analyst meeting at the Fairmont hotel in San Jose on Tuesday. "I won’t be able to shake your hand but it will be a 3D rendering."

The new hologram technology is the result of a collaboration between Cisco and Musion, a UK-based company specialising in 3D projection. John Chambers, Cisco’s CEO, and a holographic Mr de Beer demonstrated the technology before a rapt audience last month in Bangalore. You can see the YouTube video here:

Human Productivity Lab has more analysis here.
 

While 3D is being adopted by the movie industry as the technology that will put more bums on cinema seats, a new 3D camera being unveiled this week is designed to get people out of their chairs.

The ZCam, developed by the Israeli company 3DV Systems, represents a big advance on the motion-sensing technology currently being used to play video games by gestures rather than punching a controller.

Its array of sensors sends out infra-red pulses to bounce back off objects or a face, sending back information on their distance from the camera to an accuracy of around 5 millimetres and mapping the information to individual screen pixels.

This translates to a "heat map" kind of image where white is close, black is at a distance, while shades of grey create detailed 3D images and allow subtle movements to be picked up at 60 frames per second. Combined with a regular camera imaging chip, a user can pivot his or her face into a 3D colour profile and replace the black background with a movie of a palm-fringed beach or New York skyline, the same way TV weather presenters change their green-screen backgrounds.

3DV, which was founded 10 years ago,  sold a  few  3D cameras to broadcasters for $200,000 in its early days, to allow them to replace backgrounds. Now it expects cameras to appear for less than $100 in the second half of next year and be used as video game peripherals.

Zvika Klier, chief executive, showed me how I could fly a spitfire in a combat game and climb, dive and bank by just pushing my hands back, forward and sideways. Lifting my thumb triggered the machine gun.

Persuading publishers to write games specifically for the peripheral could prove difficult, but 3DV may benefit from a console maker adopting its technology.

Mr Klier sees video conferencing, automotive, security and robotics applications for the camera, but video gamers will benefit first from the total immersion and intuitive movements it makes possible.

3DV has more than 20 patents for its technology and backing from venture capitalists including the Valley’s Kleiner Perkins.