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Vincent Padois, head tutor at the Pierre and Marie Curie University who teaches robotics and is babysitting the Paris ICub, makes a demonstration with ICub robot, a ?hybrid embodied cognitive system for a humanoid robot" about 1 metre (3.2 feet) high, at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris September 4, 2009. Six versions of ICub exist in laboratories across Europe, where scientists are painstakingly tweaking its electronic brain to make it capable of learning, just like a human child and hoping it will learn how to adapt its behaviour to changing circumstances, offering new insights into the development of human consciousness.   REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer

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    SanDisk flash drive to offer automatic Web storage

    LOS ANGELES
    Wed Jan 2, 2008 3:06pm EST
    SanDisk's Cruzer Titanium Plus USB flash drive in an undated handout photo. SanDisk Corp introduced a new flash storage drive on Wednesday that also automatically backs up data to the Internet. REUTERS/SanDisk/Handout

    LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - SanDisk Corp introduced a new flash storage drive on Wednesday that also automatically backs up data to the Internet.

    Technology  |  Stocks

    When consumers store documents, photos and music onto SanDisk's new Cruzer Titanium Plus USB flash drive, it will back up that digital information to a Web service offered by a start-up company called BeInSync, which stores data onto Amazon.com Inc's computers.

    The new storage drive, which SanDisk believes is the first of its kind, is the latest in a wave of devices that link up with the Internet to offer new features to products that were previously considered stand-alone, or offline, devices.

    For example, Amazon's new electronic book reader, Kindle, comes with wireless access, allowing users to directly download books, newspapers and blogs. Sony Corp's competing reader does not have a wireless connection and requires users to link to a computer to upload books onto the device.

    The Cruzer, which retails for $59.99 and goes on sale in March, will come with four gigabytes of storage and provide six months of free online backup, After that period, a user pays $29.99 a year to continue the online storage service.

    After an initial registration, when the user is online and the drive is plugged in, the information will sync automatically with an online storage account.

    BeInSync uses Amazon's S3 storage service, which charges companies and developers a fee to store data on the online retailer's computers. It is part of a set of pay-as-you-go services offered by Amazon to allow companies to build and run Web applications without buying expensive computer equipment.

    (Reporting by Daisuke Wakabayashi, editing by Gerald E. McCormick)



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