South Korean telecom company KTF just announced a cleaning robot that can be controlled by a 3G cellphone. The Roomba can’t do that, now can it? The robot is called the CW100 and is the result of a collaboration with Microbot.

It’s a “smart” vacuum, like the Roomba. It can be controlled by phone, which the Roomba can’t, unless modded to do so. It uses an onboard video camera to send live images to the mobile phone, so if you see an untidy spot, the user can remotely control it using the keypad and clean it up.

Invented by a group of Silicon Valley engineers, the Readybot Robot is designed to clean up your kitchen. The goal of the project is to find out how much of an average kitchen the robot can clean. Right now, Readybot can take care of 30-40% of daily chores and the team believes that with more programming, they can get that up to 50% in another year. Eventually it will be at 80%. The prototype is more or less, a white enamel box with wheels, with two human-sized arms and chrome accents.

The robot fits in the same counter space as a dishwasher. After activation, he rolls out, deploys several antenna-type cameras, and raises itself up to human height, then gets to work. No info on availability yet, but very soon we are all going to have these in our home. I guess it’s a bit nice to know that now they can kill you dead, drag you into their dishwasher sized hole and clean up your disemboweled parts.

Someone had to do it eventually. The question is why? Because they can, is enough of a reason apparently. They took a simple 800dpi laser mouse with scroll wheel and combined it with a miniature vacuum cleaner. It’s got a power switch on the side for turning the vacuum function on and off. Problem is this mouse needs to be connected to a USB port in order to get enough power to run the motor.

The dust reservoir can be accessed in the back-end of the mouse, but being so small, you would probably need to empty it very often. If you are a real clean freak, this is the mouse for you. You’ll be able to clean your mousepad as you click.