In 2011, 45, 000 residents were evacuated from the city of Koblenz, situated on the Rhine and Moselle rivers, as bomb squads dealt with two bombs and a military fog-producing device that were dropped by American and British warplanes in the last years of the war.

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PetsCell inventor Canadian Cameron Robb is now director of PetsMobility, the Arizona-based company producing the device.

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Yang said Proview started producing a device called Internet Personal Access Device in 2000 that looks like a small ordinary PC and uses touch-panel technology.

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Even in an age of growing mass customization, producing a device, and in particular a device that needs to look designed, with no rough edges, has unavoidable startup and machining costs.

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The academic paper is still far away from producing a shipping device, although a Microsoft doctoral fellowship's partial contribution to funding the study indicates one direction the technology might go.

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Microsoft, a software company, ended up producing a hugely successful device in Xbox.

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Today, any company thinking of producing a new kind of digital device must seriously consider the risk that such a product's functionality can be matched by smartphone-resident apps and a potential accessory (a lesson more recently learned by mobile e-mail appliance maker Peek, which has refocused its business on software and cloud services for other handsets).

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Speaking to the BBC in 2003 Dr Jones said: "I found inventing the device the easy part but producing it, developing it, and selling it was the challenge".

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