Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn has said it will replace some of its workers in the next three years, replacing them with 1 million robots.
The company, most notably known for manufacturing iOS products among thousands of other devices, has 995,000 employees in the Chinese mainland, and another 200,000 elsewhere.
By replacing human workers with robots, the company will curb rising labor expenses and improve efficiency, says chairman Terry Gou (via xinhuanet).
Foxconn has been in the news in the past year due to a string of suicides by workers.
Average line workers at the factory make about 900 yuan ($140 USD) per month.
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Ubisoft, the game developer behind blockbuster franchises like Splinter Cell and Assassin’s Creed has said this week that its creativity is now being limited by the PS3 and Xbox 360’s hardware.
Says Yves Jacquier, Ubisoft’s executive director of production services at Ubisoft Montreal:
Our challenge with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox [360] is that we’re extremely limited in what we can do.
It’s a challenge for the engineers to provide nice graphics and nice AI and nice sound with a very small amount of memory and computation time.
Ubi hopes that they will be able to significantly improve on AI with the next-generation Xbox and PS4:
The challenge is that, if you see an AI coming, you’ve failed. And that’s a problem we have to overcome as we create the impression of flawless, seamless worlds. In general the industry expects that graphics will not be a strong feature any more… Obviously, graphics are better for marketing purposes because you can show things. AI you can’t show.
We think that the next generation of consoles won’t have these limits any more. Games might have more realistic graphics and more on-screen, but what’s the value of making something more realistic and better animated if you have poor AI?
Although unconfirmed, reports have stated that Sony is already preparing to launch the PS4 in early 2012.
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Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom predicts that Microsoft will capitalize on its $8.5 billion acquisition of the service.
“Skype’s full potential hasn’t been realized yet,” he said in an interview at the e-G8 forum underway in Paris. He suggests that Microsoft could push Skype into higher places if they expand it more into the mobile territory and if they make dramatic improvements to the quality of video calling on the Internet.
“I think that Microsoft has a huge opportunity to integrate it into a lot of their different services,” Zennstrom said. “Of course they have so many different assets. If they do a good job integrating Skype, the company can grow even more.”
Zennstrom will sell all of his shares in Skype once the Microsoft deal closes, and will no longer retain a management role at the company which he founded with Janus Friis in 2003. Skype has grown a lot since then, and touts 145 million users per month. eBay also owned Skype from 2005 until a consortium (of which Zennstrom was a part) bought it back in in 2009.
Microsoft can combine Skype services with many of its own existing products and services. One possibility is integrating it to the popular Outlook application so to provide video conferencing for business users. It will likely use Skype to boost its position in the mobile space however, after making several moves in the territory recently, such as partnering with Nokia.
“We still all travel a lot for meetings because you can’t match the intimate experience of seeing someone in person, even with Skype video calling,” he said. “There is a lot more work to do on the core technology to improve quality of video calls.”
