Imagine the horror of giving this toy to your child, and coming to find out that they don’t know who the first person to step on the moon was.

Even though I can’t understand a word they’re saying, it makes me want to buy some Cup Of Noodles and eat them immediately. The animation and special effects here are absolutely outstanding.

Why don’t have we have advertising like this in the U.S.?

Even though companies are making it easier to send someone a card to wish them a happy birthday or a random “hey you’re awesome”, greetgenie wants to make it easier for you by doing all of the work automatically.

The greetgenie service will make phone calls on your behalf for any occasion. It’s as creepy as it sounds.

By simply entering in an occasion along with the time and date you’d like greetgenie to call, your friend will get a call from a random number with background music and a voice reading your note that sounds kind of like Siri.

It’s either extremely lazy, or a better way to spend your time. It’s up to you to decide.

You have five wishes

When you sign up, greetgenie gives you five free phone calls to make. Once you’ve used up your free wishes, you can purchase up to 65 a year for just $9.99.

In all seriousness, it’s a cool parlor trick, but not something that should take the place of picking up a phone to wish someone warm regards for an event that has any meaning.

Simply choose the occasion, pick some background musak, and type in your message to be read by a robotic sounding voice.

If you choose to send your greegenie immediately, you can watch the process in real-time. The company uses dialing services from Twilio, so you’re given updates along the way. You’re told when the person answers the phone, and if your greeting has been delivered successfully or not. Unfortunately, you can only send wishes to those in the U.S. right now.

If you stick with the “it’s the thought that counts” line of thinking, then greetgenie is a perfect way to schedule personal greetings to people, especially if you’d forget about them anyway. Give your five free wishes a try, and tell us how your loved ones respond in the comments!

➤ greetgenie

Abu Dhabi is about to begin production on humanoid robots that could eventually completely replace human workers in malls and exhibition centers. The life-size robots are currently being developed by Barcelona-based PAL Robotics, a company under the umbrella of the Abu Dhabi based Royal Group.

With plans for a factory in which a dozen robots will be produced per month, PAL Robotics has already debuted the final product REEM, a 1.65m humanoid robot, at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Center, where an order for 20 robots has already been made.

PAL Robotics marketing manager Jorien Guijs told Arabian Business:

At the moment REEM is prepared for use at exhibition centres and shopping malls. In the future we will focus as well on the healthcare sector, airports, museums and other public spaces.

REEM comes equipped with a navigation system and a touch screen, and it can be used as a guide, with features including face tracking and recognition, and a small platform to transfer luggage and heavy objects, as well as the ability to conduct video calls through the robot’s touch screen. One REEM will set buyers back about €200,000 ($269,157) each.

PAL Robotics has published a set of photos showing REEM’s different features, and how it looks in its habitat:

The introduction of humanoid robots in Abu Dhabi has has been the cause of some debate, with the accusation that their use has more to do with PR than convenience or customer service, while others question the idea of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a robot that will essentially put someone out of a job, particularly low-skilled workers earning minimum wage.

To see REEM in action, check out PAL Robotics’ video below:

First let me just say that no, robots will not replace journalists. Robots will likely only replace jobs with particularly low cognitive loads. So, maybe press release re-writing bloggers, but not thinking, analyzing, interviewing, friendly journalists.

In an on-going experiment called “My Boss is a Robot,” an alliance of journalists and computer scientists aim to combine the distributed human brainpower of Amazon’s small-task outsourcing engine, Mechanical Turk, with a robot boss pre-programmed to absorb a myriad of discrete human-accomplished tasks into something resembling the work of a single person. Niki Kittur, a Carnegie Mellon assistant professor of Human Computer Interaction and freelance science and technology writers Jim Giles and MacGregor Campbell are heading up the experiment.

We’ve seen automated “robotic journalism” before. The NYTimes uses the semantic web to automate wedding announcements. Business Week used software to replace sports journalists. Infonic’s Sentiment software analyzes thousands of news stories to determine how a particular company is faring. And TV journalism could be replaced by a prototype of software that uses voice-over narration of a rapid-fire series of pre-taped stories, vidclips and images to present television news.

The Mechanical Turk has even written a simple encyclopedia entry about New York City. Based on this success, the scientists behind My Boss is a Robot believe Turkers (as the distributed workers on Mechanical Turk are called) could transform a research paper into a 500 word piece of original science journalism.

Are we confident that our experiment will work? Absolutely not. In fact, we’d be surprised if it did. But we think it will be interesting to try. Equally importantly, we hope that chronicling our progress here will trigger debate about the future of journalism and of crowdsourcing. We’d love to hear your thoughts on our plans and, later, our progress.

Where does the robot boss come in to it? The crowdsourced workers will be coordinated by an algorithm. If the process works, we will hand the algorithm a research paper and, perhaps a couple of days later, it will spit out a polished news article.

The deeper question Jim Giles and MacGregor Campbell hope to answer is whether or not the process of journalism or any other kind of knowledge-based work can be deconstructed and then restructured algorithmically.

If it works, the result will likely be something similar to AOL‘s Demand Media-style content generation efforts, also known as “The AOL Way.” But this “Bionic Journalism” will not be the future of media so long as human beings avoid falling into a meatspace existence and still enjoy reading thoughtful, creative and educated news stories on their iPads.

Non-mechanical fingers crossed.