Amazon's best-known side ventures have been consumer electronics devices like the Echo and Fire, but the online retailer is potentially looking into a redo of a product at which it has failed: smartphones. Amazon is developing a smartphone series named Ice, Gadgets360 reports. The series will be powered by Google Android and intended to be a low-cost model for developing markets like India. Internally, the phone's specifications are expected to fit this mold. As Gadgets360 noted, one of the phones potentially will include a 5.2-inch to 5.5-inch display.

In late February, the UN-Secretary General held a press conference, highlighting the risk of starvation in East Africa and the necessity to raise funds to address the emergency situations in Somalia and South Sudan. Drought has been back in these countries and their neighbours since 2016, leading to a huge current food crisis. While governments are trying to handle the situation, how could technology innovations help prevent starvation and improve agriculture management in the future? We met with Laurent Rivière, a French 30 years-old entrepreneur, who shared with us his view on the subject with a combination of engineer pragmatism and changemaker idealism . Founder and CEO at Sunbirds for two years, he explained to us how his "bird of the sun," his solar drone, is addressing the agriculture challenges of the 21st century.

– Last Sunday I was at big retail store in Harare and it was a very busy day due to the fact it was month end and people got paid. Grocery shopping was in full swing, I also bought some groceries for my self. When I was in the queue for payment and collection, I saw almost every one making payment either by swiping the magic plastic card or struggling on their mobile handset by punching few numbers etc. The electronic payment queue was moving fast compared to the cash payment queue where I saw only a handful of people with just one/two small item/items. The thought came to my mind out of this whole picture was "Whats happening here besides the payments through mobile and plastic"?

To meet the growing demand for AI expertise, companies are offering online education courses to prepare the workforce for the future. Increasingly, computers and devices learn and act on their own using software algorithms, the building blocks for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Getting smartphones to understand voice commands, smart home sprinkler systems to change with the weather and online services to predict what people want requires programmers skilled in AI and ML. Demand for these coding skills is skyrocketing. Making devices smart and proactive remains controversial to anyone who fears that automation will lead to human job loss.

Two telepresence robots roll into a human-computer interaction conference. Sounds like the beginning of a very nerdy joke, but it really happened (#2017). A few weeks ago in Denver, Colorado, a robot I was piloting over the internet from my computer in Idaho stood wheel-to-wheel with a similar'bot in a pink skirt controlled by a researcher in Germany. We introduced ourselves by yelling at each other's screens. Given the topic of the conference, this particular human-computer interaction was a little too on the HD touch-screen nose.

The interdisciplinary field of computational sustainability is using machine learning algorithms to analyse and extract valuable insights from sets of Big Data gathered from environmental fields. It's not just about having large data sets or advanced pattern finding algorithms – it's how we use them. The following projects highlight how Machine Learning and Big Data are helping conservation efforts of all kinds. The ambitious Earthcube project has been in development the past five years and aims to produce a living 3D replica of Earth to serve scientists of different disciplines. It has been built upon interconnected projects that use computer science, big data, and geoscience among various other branches of learning.

This week we find out what's really going on behind the selfie with Gary Willmott and Anton Moulder, co-founders and managing partners of Cape-based digital product studio, Urbian... Inspired by the imagination of children, Net#work BBDO and visual effects and animation agency Sinister Studio applied technology to advertising to create a virtual reality (VR) campaign for Mercedes-Benz South Africa...

Another big part of the food supply comes from ranches and farms that raise and slaughter various livestock. While ranching is sometimes bundled with agriculture, I discussed farming in Big Data in Agriculture, so we'll focus on ranching this time around. Somewhat surprising is that big data usage in ranching appears more limited than in farming. That said, there are a number of novel uses of technology and data in animal husbandry. At a high level, the goals of ranching and farming are the same as any business: increase yields and lower costs. Production maximization has long played a role in large operations.

The global text analytics market size is estimated to grow from $3.97 billion in 2017 to $8.79 billion by 2022, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 17.2%. The customer experience management (CEM) is expected to hold the largest market share during the forecast period. Among the various applications in the text analytics market, the CEM application is expected to hold the largest market share during the forecast period. Text mining is the most traditional application in customer service and is frequently utilized to improve customer experience through various information sources. Today, text analytics is implemented to offer quick, computerized feedback to the clients, which significantly reduces dependency on executives for resolving issues.

Together, the last two responses add up to 71 percent of respondents, and Accenture reports that insurers are investing in AI in several areas of the business, including distribution, claims and underwriting. They are looking to empower agents, brokers and employees to enhance the customer experience with automated personalized services, faster claims handling and individual risk-based underwriting processes, Accenture said in a statement. Separately, Carrier Management interviewed representatives of four global insurance groups--XL Catlin, Allianz, QBE and Zurich--who described some of the AI initiatives already underway at their firms. They range from condensing lengthy engineering reports for swifter underwriting, reassigning some of the claims administrative services handled by offshore humans to robots, interpreting crop risk information delivered by drones, and deciphering communications from customers with heavy accents using natural language processing. Also detailed is Zurich's use of a multilingual natural language processing product called Cogito from Expert Systems that mines complicated, voluminous claims data to rapidly provide more refined information to claims adjusters for faster decision-making.