• Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide (June 2017) (Amazon and Microsoft are the leaders)
• How An Entire Nation Became Russia’s Test Lab for Cyberwar (Wired)
• Exoskeletons don’t come one-size-fits all yet…”An idealized exoskeleton needs to be both easily accessible and personalized…From a data standpoint, humans are noisy, says Katherine Poggensee, a biomechatronics researcher at Carnegie Mellon. Plus, “they have brains, so they adapt over time.” And although humans generally find the easiest way to do any motion, very few people have the physical and spatial awareness to explain why one stride feels easier than another. That’s why researchers are turning to algorithms to make exoskeletons more efficient…”
• How Scott Forstall Selected The People Who Would Create The iPhone’s Software
  “The key attribute that was required for acceptance into “Project Purple?” The ability to do new things rather than do the same thing over and over…Your boss, Steve Jobs, has ordered you to assemble a team of software engineers to create–in a matter of months–what would become the first iPhone. Quick! How do you pick the right brains for the project?…During all the interviews for the team, we screened for people who were growth mind-set,” Forstall told me…”  Video link
• Tesla is talking to the music labels about creating its own streaming service
• The industrial robotics market will nearly triple in less than 10 years
• Amazon’s Nike deal took a billion dollar bite out of competing retailers
• YouTube TV expands to 10 more U.S. markets, adds more YouTube Red series
• Venmo is testing its own physical debit card
• SpaceX successfully launched and landed its second recycled rocket
• Amazon’s idea for a massive drone dock looks like a cross between a beehive and a spaceship
• McDonalds Is Replacing 2,500 Human Cashiers With Digital Kiosks: Here Is Its Math
• World’s First Cable-Free Elevator Zooms Horizontally and Vertically Using Maglev Tech
• How Do Genome Sequencing Centers Store Such Huge Amounts of Data?
• Stephen Hawking Proposes Nanotechnology Spacecraft to Reach ‘Second Earth’ in 20 years
• One coder recreated the first level of ‘Super Mario Bros’ in augmented reality and played it in Central Park
• Facebook has a new mission statement: ‘to bring the world closer together‘

• Box is releasing a tool to make it easier for large companies to shift workloads to the cloud
• The New York Times is expanding comments with the help of Google’s AI
  Until now, comments have been enabled on only 10 percent of articles. By the end of the year, the Times plans to get that up to 80 percent
• Snapchat quietly revealed how it can put AI on your phone
  With these tweaks, Snap claims to fit its algorithm into just 5.2 MB—about the size of a standard song in MP3—with accuracy that just edges out Google’s latest research attempt to scale down its mobile AI. With both networks taking that same 5.2 MB space, Snap scored 65.8% accuracy while Google scored 64.7% on a standard image recognition task, according to the paper.
• Forget Police Sketches: Researchers Perfectly Reconstruct Faces by Reading Brainwaves
  The values of each dial were so predictable that scientists were able to recreate a face the monkey saw simply by recording the electrical activity of roughly 200 brain cells
• New ‘Industroyer’ Virus Is Designed to Take Down Power Grids
• Chatbots are dumb, but wait until they learn how to negotiate for you
  “…According to a new study from TiVo out this morning, 77.3 percent now want “a la carte” TV service – meaning, they want to only pay for the channels they actually watch...”
• Google will  buy 300 apartment units from Factory OS, a modular-home startup, in a building likely to serve as short-term housing for Google employees, according to executives from both companies.
• Spending on paid enhancements most often encountered in free mobile games hit $71 billion in 2016
• How do you draw a circle? Analyzing 100,000 drawings to show how culture shapes our instincts
• More people now subscribe to Netflix than cable TV in the US (50,8 milion vs 48.61 million)
• Amazon Prime members can upload their outfits and get a fashion expert’s opinion — here’s what it’s like to use in person
• SpaceX is also ramping up hiring. It had 473 open positions in March and 487 as of this posting, and many are dedicated to the company’s Mars-exploration efforts.
• New Energy Outlook 2017
• Amazon might buy Silicon Valley darling Slack for $9 billion
• An Artificial Intelligence Developed Its Own Non-Human Language.
  When Facebook designed chatbots to negotiate with one another, the bots made up their own way of communicating.
• U.S. Invests $258 Million in Supercomputing Race With China
• “…Chinese scientists have succeeded in sending specially linked pairs of light particles from space to Earth, an achievement experts in the field say gives China a leg up in using quantum technology to build an “unhackable” global communications network…“
• Quantum Computing Technologies markets will reach $10.7 billion by 2024
• Spotify has guaranteed to pay big music labels billions over the next two years.
  The streaming service posted revenue of $3.3 billion last year.
• Lyft sets goal of 1 billion autonomous electric rides per year by 2025

• Recode summary : WWDC 2017: Everything important Apple announced at its big event
• SoftBank unit buys robotics businesses (Boston Dynamics and Tokyo-based Schaft)  from Alphabet Inc. Google acquired 9 robotics company in 2014.
• External Graphics Development Kit
  macOS High Sierra brings support for external graphics processors to the Mac for the first time. The External Graphics Development Kit enables you to develop and test demanding graphics-intensive apps, including VR content creation, on any Mac with Thunderbolt 3 connectivity.
• Siri is set to play a much larger role in the Apple’s products.
• Apple plans micro-LED displays for wearables: sources. The technology could cut reliance on Samsung and come as soon as 2018
• QR code changed China’s social habits, …It’s being used to encourage tipping at restaurants, receive cash gifts at weddings…
• Apple announced the future this week (VRKit, ARKit, HomePod)
• The U.K. has the fastest mobile speeds, with an average of 26 megabits per second, according to the latest State of the Internet Report by content delivery company Akamai.
• Pinterest raised another $150 million and is now valued at more than $12 billion
• Lyft is working with a third self-driving tech company
  …It’s a smart strategy for Lyft. Instead of spending money and time trying to build its own autonomous tech the way Uber is, Lyft is left with plenty of resources to pour into perfecting the efficiency of its network as well as user experience…

  The industry has yet to determine what will become the most important part of the self-driving ecosystem, though many experts have their thoughts. For Lyft, the ideal outcome is that the auto industry will eventually look a lot like airlines where customers know and make decisions based on the network — Delta, JetBlue, etc. — rather than the make and model of the plane itself…

• Snap just acquired Placed, a company that tracks whether online ads actually lead to offline purchases. Google also announced this feature last month.
• Domino’s Pizza shares have risen by around 1,500% since its IPO in 2004
• Apple finally made it easy to share WiFi passwords
• …today’s turbines are more cost-effective, more reliable, and generate vastly more electricity— 22 times more electricity than an average turbine installed in 1990…
• What Marketers Should Expect from Search in the Future
• IKEA to try selling through third parties
• Sony’s PlayStation VR headset sales top one million units
• Amazon Imagines a Future of Infinite Computing Power
  …When David Limp thinks about the future of Alexa, the AI assistant he oversees at Amazon, he imagines a world not unlike Star Trek—a future in which you could be anywhere, asking anything, and an ambient computer would be there to fulfil your every need.
• Amazon Patents A Shipping Label With Built-In Parachute For Dropping Deliveries From Drones
• Charlie Rose: Patrick Collison, the co-founder and C.E.O. of digital payment company, Stripe.
• iOS 11 can automatically delete apps to save space
• This Email Startup Wants You To Go Shopping In Your Inbox
• Consulting firm to Wall Street: Don’t worry about blockchain’s cost — just start working with it
• This Robot Can Complete a 2-Hour Brain Surgery Procedure in Just 2.5 Minutes

“…In 1979, General Motors employed more than 800,000 workers and made about
2:0511 billion U.S. dollars. In 2012, Google made about 14 billion U.S. dollars while
employing 58,000 people…”

• Mary Meeker Internet Trends 2017 (You can reach presentation from the below, or watch 32 minutes of video from this link)

• Summary
  • Global Internet Users = 3.4 Billion / %46 Penetration
  • Global Smartphone Unit Shipments = Continue to Slow…
  • Global Smartphone Installed Base = 2.8B
  • Internet Usage (Engagement) = Solid Growth…+4% Y/Y…
    Mobile >3 Hours / Day per User vs. <1 Five Years Ago, USA
  • Ad Growth =Driven by Mobile
  • Online Advertising = Growth Accelerating, +22% vs. +20% Y/Y…
    Mobile $ > Desktop (2016) on Higher Growth, USA
  • Advertising $ = Internet > TV Within 6 Months, Global
  • Google + Facebook = 85% (& Rising) Share of Internet Advertising Growth, USA
  • Ad Measurability =
    Can Be Triple-Edged…
    When Things Are Measured =
    People Don’t Always Like What They See…
    Users Don’t Always Like Data Collected
  • Leading Platform Ad Offerings =
    Rapidly Improving with Back-End Data + Front-End Measurement Tools + Targeted Delivery of Ads Users Increasingly Want
  • A lot of the future of search is going to be about pictures instead of keywords. – Ben Silbermann, Pinterest Founder / CEO, 4/17
  • Google Assistant-  Nearly 70% of Requests are Natural / Conversational Language, 5/17
  • 20% of Mobile Queries Made via Voice, 5/16
  • Amazon Echo
    Echo = Shopping + Media
    Echo Look = Shopping + Recommendations
    Echo Show = Video + Voice Calls
  • …eCommerce Growth = +15% Y/Y… Accelerating, Again, USA…
  • Amazon Subscription Store = Central Hub for Monthly Services, 4/17
•  Video: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings onstage at Code Conf
• Code Conference 2017 other videos
• Google Home now available for pre-order in Canada
• Alphabet’s Waymo is also exploring self-driving trucking
• Google plans to clean up the web with Chrome ad blocker next year
• LG launches a mobile payment service in Korea
• Intel CEO explains why he spent $15 billion on Mobileye (the Israeli auto startup,  the leader in computer vision for autonomous driving technology
• The experts predict that AI will outperform humans in the next 10 years in tasks such as translating languages (by 2024), writing high school essays (by 2026), and driving trucks (by 2027).
• According to internet consulting firm iResearch, payments made via mobile devices by Chinese consumers last year reached 38 trillion yuan (US$5.5 trillion, HK$43 trillion), more than half the nation’s GDP
• Hyperloop transportation test facility opens in the Netherlands
• Google Sheets is getting smarter today. After adding the machine learning-powered “Explore” feature last year, which lets you ask natural language questions about your data, it’s now expanding this feature to also automatically build charts for you
• Nutella employed an algorithm to design its packaging
• Watch: Ray Kurzweil Predicts When We’ll Be Able to Program Matter
• Intel predicts a $7 trillion self-driving future
• …There’s already an argument that being able to interrogate an AI system about how it reached its conclusions is a fundamental legal right. Starting in the summer of 2018, the European Union may require that companies be able to give users an explanation for decisions that automated systems reach…