With luck there will be many more robotic devices to do not just dirty and dangerous jobs, but also tiresome but necessary ones, such as fetching and carrying for bedridden people. Robots can do some of these jobs better and more cheaply than humans can. But the technology’s spread also brings worries.

Ever since Karol Capek, a Czech playwright, used the term in the early 1920s to describe artificial people, robots have usually appeared in popular culture with human characteristics and made by big companies. There was the Model B-9 Environmental Control Robot in Lost in Space; Rosie, the robot maid in The Jetsons; C-3PO in Star Wars; and the future Governor Schwarzenegger as The Terminator.

In the real world, however, things took a different turn. The number of robots has grown rapidly, but they are not humanoid. After the first Unimate robot-arm began work on a General Motors assembly line in 1961, industrial robots of all shapes and sizes invaded the factory floor: there are now about 1m of them worldwide, around half in Asia. There are also hordes of service robots, vacuuming floors, trimming the grass on golf courses and soon — with luck — doing the ironing. Specialist robots can creep inside a patient’s chest cavity to attach electrodes to a pacemaker or along sewer pipes looking for cracks. Robots have also joined the armed forces: some 4,000 are said to be in action in Iraq and Afghanistan doing things such as clearing mines or, as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), flying reconnaissance and even combat missions.

Companies experiencing rapid growth—no matter how complex—usually share the same problem: They are so focused on coping with fulfilling sales and streamlining processes, they lose sight of the customer and become difficult to do business with. Does this sound like your company? Use the comments below to tell us what’s going on in your market.

Technology has smoothed many a rocky playing field. Whether powering marketing, external delivery systems or internal processes, we all turn to technology to make it easier. But as we layer system over system, we have to stop and ask, have we made it harder to do our business and for our customers to do business with us? Listen to an excerpt from our recent conversation with Oracle VP Mark Johnson who diagnoses the problem for us.

You might think it odd that a site devoted to the mid-sized growth company would turn to one of the technology giants for some insight. What does a technology giant have to tell us beyond a sales pitch?  GrowingBusinessLink readers know that our launch has been sponsored by Oracle; not because of some CPM ad buy but because people like Oracle VP Mark Johnson have been grappling with the infrastructure questions we all face and they can reflect the experiences of companies they’re working with to help us.

Until it was acquired by Oracle three years ago, Mark’s own business was a high-growth mid-market firm. He says you’ve got to identify what phase of growth you’re in and how quickly you can anticipate the challenge of the next phase.

Learn more listening to the full interview we did with Mark – We’ve titled it Sustaining Profitable Growth and you can download it today from the Resource Center.

People talk. A lot. 

Global chatter on the phone making international calls for over 298 billion minutes (equivalent to well over half a million years) in 2006, according to TeleGeography, a research company. Telecoms firms are increasingly using Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) instead of traditional networks to carry calls.

Voice traffic transported by both methods has increased by 10% since 2005, the slowest growth rate for 20 years. But the talking hasn’t stopped. Much of this slowdown can be attributed to the uptake of computer-to-computer VOIP services such as Skype. Some 14.1 billion minutes of calls were made using Skype last year.