• Connecting Global FinTech: Interim Hub Review 2017: Deloitte
• Amazon opens Echo hardware reference design to outside hardware developers
• GM to Build Facility for Self-Driving Cars with 1000 Employees in SF
• Denver-based startup Bext Holdings Inc. (Bext360) is harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and blockchain technology to make it easier for coffee farmers around the world to get paid a fair price for the coffee beans they grow and sell.
• Google Home can now track flight prices
• Tesla will unveil its electric semi truck in September
• a mobile device able to diagnose 13 health conditions while continuously monitoring five vital signs.
• Google’s AI has learned how to draw by looking at your doodles
• Cassini finds molecular hydrogen in the Enceladus plume: Evidence for hydrothermal processes
• Tiny bursts of electrical stimulation could help users feel walls and spaces in VR
• How Germany’s Otto uses artificial intelligence and machine learning: Its conventional data analysis showed that customers were less likely to return merchandise if it arrived within two day (The firm is using an algorithm designed for the CERN laboratory)
• With AI, Answers Are Cheap, But Questions Are The Future
• Apple gets permit to test autonomous cars in California
• Google’s parental control software Family Link hits iOS
• Let’s Watch It! allows friends to watch & react to videos together on iMessage
• Baidu is acquiring xPerception, a U.S. startup specialized in computer vision, the startup has its own module for object recognition and depth perception that can be deployed on robots and drones.
• Crowdfunding platforms take a data-driven approach to state political campaigns (“When we make projections about how competitive a race will be, we can look back and see if we were correct. We can see how much it costs to flip a race”)
• Facebook’s F8 plans include Camera Effects Platform, offline Instagram

 

 Star Wars: The Last Jedi Official Teaser 

 

• Main booster accounted for 80 per cent of the cost of  rockets (SpaceX)
• Jeff Bezos says lower launch costs will eventually ‘open the gateway’ for space entrepreneurs
• Jeff Bezos Says He Is Selling $1 Billion a Year in Amazon Stock to Finance Race to Space
• Uber’s open source data visualization tool now goes beyond maps
• On credit-scoring’s leading edge, financial-technology upstarts use artificial intelligence to analyze swells of unconventional data (1200 data points)
• Deep sleep may act as fountain of youth in old age
• a team of scientists at University of Manchester have developed a solution for efficiently turning salty seawater into potable H2O.
• How Self-Driving Cars Will Change Local Real Estate
• Tesla is now worth more than Ford after delivering a record number of cars for the quarter
• It’s getting harder and harder to tell Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter apart
• Utah becomes the first Power Five school to give scholarships to video gamers
• Lyft raises $500M round as Uber struggles
• Skype will now translate Japanese for you in real-time
• Netflix’s TV apps now have a screensaver to highlight original content
• Cortana will now help you set up a new Windows 10 PC with your voice
• People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware. Alan Kay (Twitter Source :  https://twitter.com/SuB8u)
  • Building an AI Chip Saved Google From Building a Dozen New Data Centers
  • Apple’s Making Its Own GPU to Control Its Own Destiny

• SpaceX Lofts Commercial Satellite With Reused Rocket In Historic Flight
• Lyft is turning cabs into fixed-route shuttles in its latest experiment
• Australia lays claim to the biggest solar farm in the world. (The solar farm will consist of 3.4 million solar panels and 1.1 million batteries which will be able to produce 330 MW (1 MW can power up to 1,000 homes) and store up to 100 MW.)
• The forthcoming video service, to be called go90, was a quarter-billion-dollar bet that Verizon could evolve from a staid telecommunications company into a hip, Netflix-like digital native — and everybody wanted a piece of the shiny new toy
• Apple’s $5 billion campus opens next month
• A team of Wall Street analysts think Amazon will be worth $910 billion by 2027 (Projection : AWS 76 B USD, Prime 450 mio subs. (100 mio subs currently)
• Silicon Valley: Season 4 Trailer (HBO)
• Facebook will reveal at its F8 conference a new class of group bots that work inside Messenger group chats. These group bots can keep users informed about real-time news such as a sports game’s progress, e-commerce deliveries and more
• Automated Robots Building Large Scale Renewable Energy Power Plants Likely Within the Next 30 Years
• Robots will be the next big utility, like electricity, expert Martin Ford says
• Why the United Arab Emirates Is Building a Space Program From Scratch
• WeChat 889 mio users
• Disney researchers have developed innovative technology that will allow people to charge their devices in a truly wireless fashion
• Ford Hires 400 BlackBerry Engineers  to Work on Connected Cars
• Canadian government said it would dedicate US$94 million in funding toward developing AI in Montreal, Toronto and Edmonton—cities with top universities.
• Amazon quietly launches its own social media influencer program into beta
• Square Boosts Global Payments Ambitions With U.K. Expansion
• Baidu’s AI group has grown to roughly 1,300 people, which includes the 300-person Baidu Research
• These AI bots created their own language to talk to each other
• Elon Musk launches Neuralink, a venture to merge the human brain with AI
• How AI and blockchain will change business organization

• China Is Losing to the U.S. in High-Stakes Battle for Artificial Intelligence Talent
  (With the resignation of Baidu chief scientist Andrew Ng, the ability of the country’s tech firms to retain top minds is in question)
• Ben Evans : The end of smartphone innovation
• The World’s Largest Artificial Sun Could Help Generate Clean Fuel
• In the search for a new revenue stream, Twitter is asking users in a survey whether they’d be willing to pay for premium features like analytics, timely news alerts, and tools for composing posts in TweetDeck, an advanced app that’s designed for following multiple streams on the platform.
• When Fingerprints Are as Easy to Steal as Passwords
  As hackers learn to imitate the body’s unique features, scientists might turn to brainwaves and genomics to verify people’s identities.
• AMC Networks planning to launch a commercial-free online video streaming service aimed at millennial TV subscribers
• Netflix will produce more than  70 shows this year.
• Tesla Model 3 will get a Performance version next year
• Tesla’s solar roof tiles will be available to order starting in April
• Facebook finally tests a GIF button for comments
• Amazon Buys Souq
• Why American jobs have a higher risk of automation than jobs in Germany, the UK, and Japan
• Tencent leads the top 25 public game companies with $10.2 billion in revenues
• Apple confirms acquisition of DeskConnect, the team behind automation app Workflow
• The AR Landscape
• Mashape, Creator of Top Open Source API Management Tool Kong, Raises $18M
• Zenreach raises $30M to help businesses boost their marketing with free Wi-Fi
• This chart shows how much more expensive ‘brand-safe’ video ads are versus YouTube videos
• Amazon’s Prime Air make its first public U.S. drone delivery
• How to use iOS Workflow App

• The U.S. Air Force picked Elon Musk’s SpaceX to blast a second Global Positioning System satellite into orbit
• Online grocery market in China in 2016 – $13.1 billion.
  Increase from 2015 – 86%
• Google’s DeepMind reduced energy needed for cooling its data centres by 40%. Now in talks with UK’s National Grid.
• It Begins: Bots Are Learning to Chat in Their Own Language
• Slideshare : AI & The Future of Work
• Google Tests Waters of Voice Ads on Speaker
• The 12 Different Ways for Companies to Innovate
• Google reduces JPEG file size by 35%
• Chrome 57 restricts background tabs to 1% CPU, prolonging battery life
• Magnetic storage reaches the atomic level
• Amazon is invading Apple and Google’s home turf in the war over the future of computing
• SpaceX is pushing hard to bring the internet to space
• MuleSoft prices IPO above expected range at $17 per share
• Netflix is replacing five-star ratings with thumbs up or down
• Apple gives indie gamers a permanent home on the App Store
• Tizeti is bringing wireless internet to urban Africa
• Uber’s autonomous cars drove 20,354 miles and had to be taken over at every mile, according to documents
• The Growing Importance of Storytelling in the Business World
• Nintendo is reportedly doubling Switch production all the way up to 16 million for 2017
• Netflix’s new button lets you skip your show’s intro sequence
• Report: Spotify finally gives in, limits some albums to Premium users only
• Netflix is changing its star ratings to a thumbs up/down system

 

• Microsoft to Unveil Version of Windows Server Running on ARM Chips
• Google Cloud ...Google must build more credibility among corporations wary of running their businesses on the servers of an internet-search company with little experience supporting the technology needs of big companies, other than its own….
• PS4 4.5 Update Out
• Blockchain is only as valuable as it is secure.
• Twitter : No. of companies licensed to trial driverless vehicles in California :
  2015 : 7
  2017 : 27
• Future of transport
• The Chinese search giant’s Deep Voice system learns to talk in just a few hours with little or no human interference.
• Slideshare:  Design in Tech Report 2017
• Slideshare: Blockchain Trend Report, 2017
• Storing data in a single atom proved possible by IBM researchers
• Facebook Messenger’s PM director Martinazzi leaves after launching Day
• Bitcoin drops 15% after the SEC rejects the Winklevoss ETF (Exchange Traded Fund)
• Twitter: Why voice is the future
• Twitter: Evan Spiegel is Facebook’s head of product.
• Facebook’s AI Chief: Machines Could Learn Common Sense from Video

• Twitch will start selling games and giving its streamers a cut
• PlayStation VR sales reach 915,000 units
• Google’s YouTube to Launch $35-a-Month Web-TV Service to carry more than 40 networks, including major broadcast and cable channels
• YouTube Tops 1 Billion Hours of Video a Day, on Pace to Eclipse TV
• YouTube ditches unskippable 30-second ads
• Scientists have found a way of growing human tissue on apples
• Facebook takes aim at Youtube with new standalone TV app
• Supersmart Robots Will Outnumber Humans Within 30 Years, Says SoftBank CEO
• MWC 2017: Google Home speaker to launch in UK by June
• Ford lets passengers stream live TV in-car with the 2018 Expedition
• Hyperloop One is in early talks with the Indian government
• How Are Retailers Using Artificial Intelligence? (Over a third use the technology in search efforts)
• Mozilla acquires Pocket to gain a foothold on mobile devices
• Apple Pay is now accepted by 36 percent of merchants in the U.S.
• Google quietly launches Meet, an enterprise-friendly version of Hangouts
• JPMorgan software does in seconds what took lawyers 360,000 hours
• #WSJCIO
• Self-Driving-Truck Startups Race to Take On Uber (Embark,Starsky Robotics and Drive.ai)
• Snapchat Shares Surge 44% in Market Debut
• Amazon Finds the Cause of Its AWS Outage: A Typo, (Amazon newsletter)
• Spotify reaches 50 million paying users
• Gold 2.0 (Bitcoin) Price Now Higher Than Gold 1.0 (Gold)
• Boston Dynamics’ Handle robot dominates parkour on wheels in new footage

• Tesla said Wednesday it is on track to begin production in July on the car, and announced plans to ramp up to 5,000 vehicles a week in the fourth quarter.
• Researchers at Alphabet unit, Dutch institute demonstrated ‘collision attack’ on cryptographic technology known as SHA-1, Google publicly broke one of the major algorithms in web encryption, called SHA-1. The company’s researchers showed that with enough computing power — roughly 110 years of computing from a single GPU — you can produce a collision, effectively breaking the algorithm. We’ve known this was possible for a while, but nobody has done it, in part because of the possible fallout.
• Google’s Waze Plans Expansion of Ride-Sharing Service
• Facebook is starting to put ads in the middle of its videos
• Around 40 light-years away, seven Earth-sized planets have been spotted orbiting closely around a small, ultra-cool star. It’s one of the largest solar systems that’s ever been discovered outside of our own, and it’s a particularly enticing find in the ongoing search for extraterrestrial life.
• Tesla will double the number of Supercharger locations in North America in 2017, the company revealed today in its quarterly letter to shareholders. The company currently has 2,636 Superchargers at 373 locations across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, and plans to have twice as many locations open by the end of 2017.
• Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is getting a digital release on March 24th
• WhatsApp Adds Snapchat-Like Story Feature Called Status
  Messaging app is latest Facebook property to crib popular feature from upstart rival, Snap Inc.
• Telegram hits 100m users
• Serious Cloudflare bug exposed a potpourri of secret customer data
• One vaccine to wipe out ALL mosquito-borne diseases? It’s in clinical trials
• Bees learn to play golf and show off how clever they really are
• The hidden new business opportunity in autonomous cars
• Amazon today announced that there are now more than 10,000 Alexa skills available on devices like the Amazon Echo. By comparison, there were roughly 130 skills available last January, and Amazon surpassed the 5,000 mark just last November.
• 40 years of personal computing
• Tesla wants to sell future cars with insurance and maintenance included in the price
• Bill Gates: the robot that takes your job should pay taxes
• An email fail made Google suspect Uber was copying its self-driving-car technology
• 7 amazing technologies we’ll see by 2030
• China Is Developing its Own Digital Currency

• 99.6% of new smartphones run iOS or Android; RIP Windows and Blackberry
• Google’s training AI to catch diabetic blindness before it’s too late
• Mark Zuckerberg wrote a nearly 6,000-word letter about the future of Facebook — here are the key points
• Project Loon : …it has implemented new algorithms powered by machine learning techniques to guide the balloons into clusters, taking advantage of wind pattern data and other factors. Project Loon balloons can now be sent to an area that needs internet access within weeks instead of months, X says.
• Spotify-backed startup has raised $22 million to crack open a new music streaming market
• Google built an AI that will play piano duets with you, video
• Recode : Video : Eddy Cue, SVP, internet software and services, Apple
• Monzo’s more than 100,000 users get access to a pre-paid Mastercard and accompanying iOS and Android app.
• The Alps could lose as much as 70% of snow cover by the end of the century
• Kenyan banks have joined forces to launch a mobile money rival to M-Pesa
• Kraft Heinz wants to buy Unilever to create the world’s largest food giant
• Available for free, Data Selfie is an open-source Chrome extension that helps you discover how machine learning algorithms track and process your Facebook activity, and gain insights about your personality and habits.
• Pixar teams up with Khan Academy for a free course on the art of storytelling
• Verizon just acquired a drone company
  The telecom giant announced last year that it would start providing data plans for drones, too.
• Former Cisco CEO John Chambers invests in counter-drone security firm Dedrone
• Now you can buy things from Costco, Whole Foods and other stores via Google Home
• Dubai is planning to launch autonomous, one-passenger drone taxis this summer
• What News-Writing Bots Mean for the Future of Journalism
• Walt the bot is here to paint your walls, and it can do it 30 times faster than humans
• Have your MVP Running in Prod within 15 Minutes with Serverless