Home robots, anyone?

Just found out that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has extended its offering of its home robot wakamaru.  The company wanted to sell the talkative robot to 100 households in the Tokyo metropolitan area for 1.575 million  yen (about $13,000 at today's rate, excluding the service fee of  $90/month), by the end of October.  The Japanese website says that this was due to "request from customers that wanted some more time to consider the purchase."  MHI has teamed up with 6 other Japanese companies to sell and service the wakamarus and hope to start selling nationwide in the not so distant future, but it will be interesting to see how much demand there is for a robot that is priced as much as a car.  It can send an email to you at work "There's an intruder in the house!" when it's in security mode.