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Google Home works with eBay's ShopBot to price your stuff
RJ Pittman, eBay's chief product officer, has demoed an interesting Google Home feature at the tech titan's Cloud Next conference. He asked the speaker if he could speak to eBay, which activated the e-commerce company's shopping bot that's aptly named ShopBot. "Hi, I'm eBay," the speaker replied, "I'm the world's price guide. You can ask me what something is worth." eBay originally launched ShopBot for Facebook Messenger last year. But unlike the Messenger version, Home's seems to focus on helping you price goods you might want to sell instead of finding more stuff to buy.
eBay teams up with Facebook Messenger to launch shopping bot
Bots are one of the big buzzwords of 2016; Google, Microsoft and Facebook have all made them major parts of their strategy this year. Yes, they might not all be panning out quite as planned, but that doesn't mean bots are out of style yet. Take eBay: the company just launched a shopping bot for Facebook Messenger in beta appropriately called Shopbot.
Handibot Smart Tool hits Kickstarter, cuts in 3D with mobile controls (video)
While CNC routers are part-digital by their nature, they haven't really kept up with the times: they're often fixed in place and don't easily adapt to unique tasks. ShopBot Tools hopes to modernize these machines by crowdfunding its Handibot Smart Tool. The device is portable and cuts 3D shapes out of many flat surfaces, but its specialty is the accessible, app-driven control that the fundraising will support. Builders can give the Handibot a wide range of instructions through apps on PCs or (eventually) mobile devices, whether they need a few simple holes or large, ornate patterns. Those pledging support will need to spend at least $1,995 to get a Handibot this September, assuming ShopBot reaches its $125,000 goal; still, it may be worth the cost for any workshop enthusiast who feels limited by existing tools.
DIY iPhone boombox built with a ShopBot
The ShopBot is a sort of an electronic saw, a special setup designed to do some computer-aided cutting and carving work on big planks of board. It's quite useful for woodworking or making things like skateboards or surfboards. Odds are that you don't have one, but nevertheless, just such a device was used to make the plank above, a very basic but still elegant iPhone-powered boombox. I think this is a great idea, though it might be a little more hard to do than a lot of DIY projects. Fortunately, you don't really need a ShopBot to make a boombox similar to this one. You could still follow these instructions, substituting a body created in some other way for the ShopBot board, and use the iPhone dock connector, speaker, and battery pack to serve as the various innards. You can buy plenty of docks that do exactly the same thing, but I like the idea of making one as a DIY project; you can probably build something that matches your own tastes and does practically everything any dock off the shelf will do for you. Maybe this will spark some ideas out there. If you do think of (and make) something cool, definitely let us know.
