She can smile, she can sing and this robot receptionist who started work in Tokyo on Monday never gets bored of welcoming customers to her upmarket shop.
"My name is ChihiraAico. How do you do?" she says in Japanese, blinking and nodding to customers in the foyer of Mitsukoshi, Japan's oldest department store chain.

Collaborative robots and intelligent machinery may have wowed the crowds at this year's Hannover Messe, but experts see German industry as having some way to go towards incorporating them on factory floors in what could become the fourth industrial revolution.
The undoubted star of the world's largest industrial trade fair which closed its doors in the northern German city on Friday was YuMi, a collaborative dual-armed robot made by Swiss-based automation technology group ABB.

Cybercrime has become as big a threat to Europe's security as terrorism, the head of the continent's policing agency warned Friday.
"The threat online is huge. It is now the number one security concern, alongside terrorism," Europol chief Rob Wainwright said.

Samsung has removed its corporate logo from its new smartphones sold in Japan, a company spokeswoman confirmed Saturday.
The name Samsung is missing on both the Galaxy S6 and its curved-edge variant, the Galaxy S6 Edge.

Facebook on Friday said that its war against fake likes is paying off so well that many 'bad actors' who built businesses on the tactic are closing shop.
Advances in technology for recognizing suspicious patterns of likes has enabled the social network to block such activity by malicious software, fraudulent accounts, and click farm operations that employ armies of low-paid workers.

Google has a new sheriff keeping watch over the wilds of the Internet.
Austrian-born Gerhard Eschelbeck has ranged the British city of Oxford; cavorted at notorious Def Con hacker conclaves, wrangled a herd of startups, and camped out in Silicon Valley.

Google is about to change the way its influential search engine recommends websites on smartphones and tablets in a shift that's expected to sway where millions of people shop, eat and find information.
The revised formula, scheduled to be released Tuesday, will favor websites that Google defines as "mobile-friendly." Websites that don't fit the description will be demoted in Google's search results on smartphones and tablets while those meeting the criteria will be more likely to appear at the top of the rankings — a prized position that can translate into more visitors and money.

Sony's hacking problems aren't over yet.
Whistleblower site WikiLeaks on Thursday put hundreds of thousands of emails and documents from last year's crippling cyberattack against Sony Pictures Entertainment into a searchable online archive. It's the latest blow for the entertainment and technology company struggling to get past the attack, which the company estimates caused millions in damage.

The European Union said Thursday it had filed anti-trust charges against Google to speedily resolve allegations that the tech titan abuses its search engine's market dominance.
EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said Google's preferential use of its own shopping product in its search engine could be harmful to consumers and competitors.

Netflix is enthralling viewers and investors alike as popular original programming such as "House of Cards" lure subscribers at a quickening pace.
Netflix said Wednesday that it gained 4.9 million subscribers in the first three months of the year, more than any other quarter since the video streaming service's debut eight years ago. About 2.3 million of the new customers were in the U.S., where Netflix's subscriber count surpassed 40 million for the first time.
