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Techday NZ
2 days ago
- Business
- Techday NZ
How Norby the language robot is more than just a companion
Norby, an AI-powered language companion, highlights the exciting evolution of language learning through interactive and adaptive technology. Adrian Mullan, Founder and CEO of Norby, led the demonstration at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, highlighting the robot's ability to engage in natural conversations across multiple languages and contexts. Norby supports more than 30 languages, with new additions and updates rolled out through over-the-air software updates. Mullan said his motivation for developing Norby was rooted in his own experiences. "A few years ago, while helping my daughter with her homework, I noticed something troubling - she was bored and struggling to stay focused. Conventional learning materials simply couldn't hold her attention. That realization sparked the idea for Norby," he explained. Norby is designed to be more than just another digital assistant or educational tool. "Humans have an innate desire to connect, even with the things we create. We give objects human-like traits, attribute emotions to our pets, and name our digital assistants - it's part of who we are," Mullan said. "I didn't want another device that demanded my attention. I wanted a companion - something that helps me stay focused, in flow, and truly engaged. A companion that adapts to my personality, interests, and goals." During the demonstration, Mullan illustrated Norby's capabilities by asking it to greet the audience in various languages and accents, as well as to generate stories on demand. "Hey, Norby, can you do me a favour? Can you say hello to the journalists in the room?" Mullan asked. Norby responded with, "Hello everyone. I'd be happy to extend a greeting to the journalists present. I'm sure, Adrian, you'd like me to make a good impression, so I'll make sure to be as charismatic as possible on various projects, including sound checks and helping with your work on interactive voice companions." The device's multilingual proficiency is underpinned by a flexible architecture that allows Norby to select the best available models for different languages. Mullan explained, "We plug into a bunch of different providers for the speech recognition as well as the large language model inference, and effectively what we do is we built an architecture where we can send the responses to the best model at the time." "So an example would be OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, all the big US providers will be great when it comes to English, Latin based languages and so on, but they'll tend to struggle with Asian character sets, so Chinese, Japanese, Korean and so on. In that case, we can spin it off to the DeepSeek, or to Qwen , or whoever, the best provider is," he said. The hardware is intentionally designed to be approachable and engaging, resembling a character rather than a device, and is equipped with high-performance processing, a full-colour HD touchscreen, high-quality speakers, and expressive RGB LED lighting. Norby's software supports a variety of large language models and is continually enhanced through regular updates. Norby's applications go beyond language learning. "Our problem at the moment is we have more requests from people than we can sort of deal with. I would say language and speech therapy is a really big one on the consumer side. The next area that we're moving into is much more the agentic productivity side," Mullan said. He described using Norby at home to manage daily tasks: "My Norby unit at home actually does things. I checks my email. It'll summarise my emails. I can ask Norby, okay, what's important for the day. And then what it'll do is, it's connected to my inbox, but also to my LinkedIn, to my social feeds, to my calendar. It'll take all of that stuff, create a summarisation." Addressing the broader technology landscape, Mullan compared Norby's form factor with other AI devices. "If you have something that's like projecting onto your hand, like, what happens when you walk out in daylight, right? So I think that's in their case, a big problem." "In the case of rabbit, I think they're doing some interesting stuff. Again, though my issue is, is that I think the moment you make a device that's very similar to a phoney form factor, you're effectively competing with the phone. And then in order to be able to move forward, what happens is, your expectation is that people have to carry this device and also carry the phone." "So we've made a deliberate decision not to do that. We've gone after a form factor that's a bit more anthropomorphised," he explained. Norby's adaptability is reflected in its ability to switch between personalities and modes depending on user needs. Parents, for example, can select predefined personas for their children, and the robot adapts its lessons to maintain engagement. "As the kids interact with Norby, it will course correct. So an example would be, okay, any kid that's learning a language, one of the challenges is engagement, right? Because they find it hard and boring. If it knows that, okay, there's an eight year old boy named Billy who's really into Roblox and Spider Man, it will then start to recreate those lessons in that context," Mullan said. Discussing privacy and security, Mullan stressed, "We take privacy and security seriously. Norby has been designed to be COPPA compliant. Our closed-system architecture means no access to third-party app stores or social media." Looking ahead, Mullan outlined the expansion of Norby's functionality, including the introduction of features such as singing, laughing, and emotional intelligence analysis. "There's a version that we're working on now that will sing, laugh, cry, whisper, yeah. I've had a chance to interact with that one. It's not production-ready yet, but it will happen," he said. "We're thrilled to be at this stage, and we're excited about the potential for Norby to make a difference in people's lives."
Techday NZ
2 days ago
- Business
- Techday NZ
How Norby the language robot is more than just a compaion
Norby, an AI-powered language companion, highlights the exciting evolution of language learning through interactive and adaptive technology. Adrian Mullan, Founder and CEO of Norby, led the demonstration at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, highlighting the robot's ability to engage in natural conversations across multiple languages and contexts. Norby supports more than 30 languages, with new additions and updates rolled out through over-the-air software updates. Mullan said his motivation for developing Norby was rooted in his own experiences. "A few years ago, while helping my daughter with her homework, I noticed something troubling - she was bored and struggling to stay focused. Conventional learning materials simply couldn't hold her attention. That realization sparked the idea for Norby," he explained. Norby is designed to be more than just another digital assistant or educational tool. "Humans have an innate desire to connect, even with the things we create. We give objects human-like traits, attribute emotions to our pets, and name our digital assistants - it's part of who we are," Mullan said. "I didn't want another device that demanded my attention. I wanted a companion - something that helps me stay focused, in flow, and truly engaged. A companion that adapts to my personality, interests, and goals." During the demonstration, Mullan illustrated Norby's capabilities by asking it to greet the audience in various languages and accents, as well as to generate stories on demand. "Hey, Norby, can you do me a favour? Can you say hello to the journalists in the room?" Mullan asked. Norby responded with, "Hello everyone. I'd be happy to extend a greeting to the journalists present. I'm sure, Adrian, you'd like me to make a good impression, so I'll make sure to be as charismatic as possible on various projects, including sound checks and helping with your work on interactive voice companions." The device's multilingual proficiency is underpinned by a flexible architecture that allows Norby to select the best available models for different languages. Mullan explained, "We plug into a bunch of different providers for the speech recognition as well as the large language model inference, and effectively what we do is we built an architecture where we can send the responses to the best model at the time." "So an example would be OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, all the big US providers will be great when it comes to English, Latin based languages and so on, but they'll tend to struggle with Asian character sets, so Chinese, Japanese, Korean and so on. In that case, we can spin it off to the DeepSeek, or to Qwen , or whoever, the best provider is," he said. The hardware is intentionally designed to be approachable and engaging, resembling a character rather than a device, and is equipped with high-performance processing, a full-colour HD touchscreen, high-quality speakers, and expressive RGB LED lighting. Norby's software supports a variety of large language models and is continually enhanced through regular updates. Norby's applications go beyond language learning. "Our problem at the moment is we have more requests from people than we can sort of deal with. I would say language and speech therapy is a really big one on the consumer side. The next area that we're moving into is much more the agentic productivity side," Mullan said. He described using Norby at home to manage daily tasks: "My Norby unit at home actually does things. I checks my email. It'll summarise my emails. I can ask Norby, okay, what's important for the day. And then what it'll do is, it's connected to my inbox, but also to my LinkedIn, to my social feeds, to my calendar. It'll take all of that stuff, create a summarisation." Addressing the broader technology landscape, Mullan compared Norby's form factor with other AI devices. "If you have something that's like projecting onto your hand, like, what happens when you walk out in daylight, right? So I think that's in their case, a big problem." "In the case of rabbit, I think they're doing some interesting stuff. Again, though my issue is, is that I think the moment you make a device that's very similar to a phoney form factor, you're effectively competing with the phone. And then in order to be able to move forward, what happens is, your expectation is that people have to carry this device and also carry the phone." "So we've made a deliberate decision not to do that. We've gone after a form factor that's a bit more anthropomorphised," he explained. Norby's adaptability is reflected in its ability to switch between personalities and modes depending on user needs. Parents, for example, can select predefined personas for their children, and the robot adapts its lessons to maintain engagement. "As the kids interact with Norby, it will course correct. So an example would be, okay, any kid that's learning a language, one of the challenges is engagement, right? Because they find it hard and boring. If it knows that, okay, there's an eight year old boy named Billy who's really into Roblox and Spider Man, it will then start to recreate those lessons in that context," Mullan said. Discussing privacy and security, Mullan stressed, "We take privacy and security seriously. Norby has been designed to be COPPA compliant. Our closed-system architecture means no access to third-party app stores or social media." Looking ahead, Mullan outlined the expansion of Norby's functionality, including the introduction of features such as singing, laughing, and emotional intelligence analysis. "There's a version that we're working on now that will sing, laugh, cry, whisper, yeah. I've had a chance to interact with that one. It's not production-ready yet, but it will happen," he said. "We're thrilled to be at this stage, and we're excited about the potential for Norby to make a difference in people's lives."
Business Wire
29-05-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Arrow Electronics Earns Dual Honors as Dell Technologies Partner of the Year
CENTENNIAL, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Global technology solutions provider Arrow Electronics has received two prestigious awards from Dell Technologies: 2025 OEM Solutions Partner of the Year and 2025 North America Distributor of the Year. The awards were announced at Dell Technologies World, held in Las Vegas in late May. 'These awards underscore the strength of our partnership with Dell Technologies and our shared commitment to driving innovation and empowering mid-market channel partners,' said Eric Nowak, president of Arrow's global enterprise computing solutions business. 'Arrow's ability to deliver end-to-end services at scale—from product readiness to market acceleration—enables us to create transformative solutions that meet the evolving needs of our customers.' Arrow Electronics' Intelligent Solutions business was honored as the 2025 OEM Solutions Partner of the Year, marking a significant milestone in its partnership with Dell Technologies. Previously recognized in North America for three consecutive years, this year's award underscores Arrow's growing impact in driving next-generation engineered systems worldwide. Through its differentiated technology and services stack, the Arrow-Dell alliance empowers OEMs and ISVs to accelerate innovation and bring cutting-edge products to market faster. Arrow's enterprise computing solutions business was named the 2025 North America Distributor of the Year, celebrating its dedication to driving digital transformation across key technology areas including AI, and significant growth through its community of resellers. Phil Sanginario, CEO of Redesign Group, a global technology and cybersecurity firm and longtime Arrow channel partner said, "Partnering with Arrow has enabled us to accelerate innovation and deliver cutting-edge technology to our customers. With Arrow's support, we've seen significant growth in both revenue and market reach, allowing us to better serve our clients and stay ahead in today's competitive landscape.' The Dell Technologies Partner of the Year Awards honor those organizations that demonstrate exceptional performance, growth, and commitment to delivering innovative technology solutions to customers and that showcase excellence aligned with Dell Technologies' core values. Arrow continues to strengthen its position as a trusted technology partner, empowering businesses to achieve their goals by simplifying the complexities of technology and transformation. To learn more about the Arrow-Dell Technologies collaborations, visit or Arrow Electronics (NYSE: ARW) sources and engineers technology solutions for thousands of leading manufacturers and service providers. With global 2024 sales of $28 billion, Arrow's portfolio enables technology across major industries and markets. Learn more at
Techday NZ
27-05-2025
- Business
- Techday NZ
Exclusive: How Dell's infrastructure promises simplified data centres
Dell Technologies is championing a brand new era of data centre architecture built on disaggregated infrastructure, a strategy designed to offer enterprises the best of both flexibility and simplicity as they navigate ever more complex IT environments. For years, organisations have faced a trade-off between flexible, modular systems and the simplified management of consolidated, hyper-converged infrastructure. Alyson Langon, Director of Product Marketing for Multicloud and as-a-Service at Dell, says the industry is now seeing "a convergence of the two approaches." "Historically, three-tier architecture gave a lot of flexibility, you could mix and match storage, compute and networking, and scale resources independently. But it came with complexity, requiring different teams and lots of management overhead," she explained during an interview at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. The alternative, hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), bundled everything into a single platform. "There's a ton of simplicity in that, especially with lifecycle management and automation built in," Langon said. However, this simplicity comes at the cost of vendor lock-in and limited flexibility. "You can't scale resources independently and you're locked into a single software stack," she added. A hybrid approach emerges Now, spurred by the dual drivers of artificial intelligence workloads and shifts in the hypervisor market, disaggregated infrastructure has come to the fore. "Disaggregated infrastructure is about combining the best of both worlds - flexibility meets simplicity," Langon explained. "It allows you to scale resources independently, as in traditional three-tier, but with added automation and simplicity via software. We're building more automation and observability into infrastructure over time." Dell's strategy is centred around its recently announced Dell Private Cloud and the Dell Automation Platform. These allow organisations to use Dell's flagship storage and compute technologies - such as PowerStore storage and PowerEdge servers, while benefiting from advanced software automation. "What differentiates us is the intrinsic security, deduplication, compression and software-driven automation built into both the hardware and software. The Dell Automation Platform takes this a step further, delivering full stack lifecycle management that traditionally wasn't available in a three-tier setup," Langon said. The result is an infrastructure stack that is easier to manage and more efficient to deploy. "We're automating a lot of tasks, so managing the stack is much more simplified," she added. Flexible procurement and customer choice Crucially, Dell's private cloud offering is designed to be flexible not just in its architecture, but also in how it is consumed. Langon noted, "Apex is about flexible consumption, pay-as-you-go and managed services delivered as an OPEX model. With Dell Private Cloud, the underlying infrastructure can be consumed as a service through an Apex subscription, but it can also be purchased as CAPEX. You have that flexibility in how you procure the underlying hardware." This flexibility extends to software choices as well. Enterprises are increasingly seeking a multi-hypervisor strategy, particularly in light of industry shifts and the need for investment protection. "One of the key benefits of Dell Private Cloud, in addition to the simplicity and automation, is the freedom to bring your own cloud OS licences and choose your software stack," Langon said. "You're not locked in. We'll have blueprints for VMware, Red Hat OpenShift, Nutanix AHV and more, so customers can choose their preferred hypervisors." That also means underlying hardware can be reused or repurposed as business needs change. "If you want to deploy VMs today and then move to containers with Red Hat tomorrow, you can use the same hardware. Decommission and redeploy a new software blueprint—it's investment protection for customers wanting the flexibility to change their virtualisation strategy," she said. Automation and security at the core The push towards software-driven automation is a key pillar of Dell's disaggregated infrastructure. The company claims that with its automation platform, provisioning a private cloud stack now takes 90% fewer steps than manual processes, with clusters deployable in just two and a half hours. Alongside this, Dell is continuing to invest in cyber resilience and data protection, with enhancements to storage platforms and automated ransomware detection now featuring as part of its modern data centre portfolio. Langon sees this as a response to a rapidly changing landscape. "There's an increase in customers looking for multi-hypervisor strategies, but also a need for modern automation and security. We're responding by making these capabilities intrinsic to our infrastructure, not just bolt-ons," she said. A platform for innovation While Langon does not directly oversee Dell's AI solutions, she recognises the role that disaggregated infrastructure plays in enabling next-generation workloads. "We are looking to extend the capabilities of our automation platform to be able to do more with AI solutions, to help organisations scale and simplify, and build more automation in how they stand up those types of things," she explained. She is optimistic about what lies ahead, both for Dell and the broader industry. "We're at a really interesting time right now. There's so much opportunity with AI, and it's going to start permeating everything that we do. Looking forward, I'm excited to see how we continue to simplify things for customers and help them take on these new challenges," she said.
Malaysian Reserve
21-05-2025
- Business
- Malaysian Reserve
JetCool, a Flex Company, Launches New Liquid Cooling Systems Delivering 15% IT Power Savings Without Facility Upgrades
JetCool Showcases Self-Contained Liquid Cooling Solutions at Dell Technologies World 2025 LAS VEGAS, May 20, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — JetCool, a Flex (NASDAQ: FLEX) company specializing in direct-to-chip liquid cooling for AI and high-density compute, today announced its next-generation SmartPlate™ System, a self-contained liquid cooling solution, is available as an option on select Dell PowerEdge systems. JetCool's SmartPlate System is a fully sealed, direct-to-chip liquid cooling solution that delivers immediate performance and efficiency improvements without requiring any changes to data center infrastructure. Designed to simplify the adoption of liquid cooling, SmartPlate System eliminates the need for facility water. In third-party thermal testing, the system averaged total IT power savings of 15%—enabling more consistent performance and higher utilization, even in warm ambient temperature environments. 'With the new SmartPlate System, we're helping customers deploy more compute per rack in colocations and facilities that don't have water hookups, all while cutting power consumption and improving thermal performance,' said Dr. Bernie Malouin, JetCool Founder and Flex Vice President. 'Now part of Flex, we're enabling next-generation liquid cooling at any scale, anywhere on the planet.' JetCool now offers full-stack liquid cooling solutions, service, and support for select Dell PowerEdge servers, backed by Flex's global footprint, advanced manufacturing capabilities, and data center services. Customers can see JetCool's SmartPlate System technology in action at Dell Customer Solution Centers in Round Rock, Texas. Additionally, JetCool will be exhibiting at booth 724 during Dell Technologies World, May 20–23, 2025, at the Venetian Resort in Las Vegas. To see the SmartPlate System in action on the Dell PowerEdge servers, watch the joint video with Dell Technologies on YouTube. Additional information is available at About Flex Flex (Reg. No. 199002645H) is the manufacturing partner of choice that helps a diverse customer base design and build products that improve the world. Through the collective strength of a global workforce across 30 countries and responsible, sustainable operations, Flex delivers technology innovation, supply chain, and manufacturing solutions to diverse industries and end markets. About JetCool JetCool, a Flex company, is a global leader in advanced thermal management for compute-intensive applications. Trusted by top chipmakers, OEMs, and data centers, JetCool delivers a comprehensive portfolio of liquid cooling solutions that enhance performance, increase energy efficiency, and support sustainability goals. Engineered for the demands of artificial intelligence (AI) and next-generation computing, JetCool's liquid cooling technologies deliver reliable, scalable, and future-ready performance for data centers worldwide. ContactsMedia ContactsErin KnappMatter Communications for JetCoolJetCool@ Investors & AnalystsDavid A. RubinVice President, Investor Relations(408)
