Bitcoin and other digital currencies are surging as the market continues to recover. The price of every big digital currency has risen by significant amounts. Bitcoin, the biggest of them, has risen nearly 13 per cent over the last day and is nearly at $10,000. Cryptocurrencies are continuing to make back many of the losses sustained when the market plunged in recent weeks. They are still far from the heights of December – when bitcoin nearly hit $20,000 – but are a long way from the dramatic lows hit when the price dropped after that.

So when the three co-founders of Dubai-based Derq, a traffic-safety startup, need to get to the carmaking capital of the U.S., they take a connecting flight on Air France through Paris or on Emirates through Boston. That typically means a four-leg, 32-hour round-trip for at least one of them once a month. It would be unthinkable for the startup, which uses artificial intelligence to predict and prevent car accidents, not to have a presence in the Motor City. So after securing a $1.5 million round of funding in October, the company opened a satellite office in Detroit. But although two of Derq's three co-founders were educated in the U.S., they aren't interested in basing their whole operation there.

OSAKA – With a track record of overcoming past crises by adapting to changing business environments, major electronics maker Panasonic Corp. marked its 100th anniversary last Wednesday. The company was launched by the late Konosuke Matsushita, a legendary corporate manager, together with his wife and his brother-in-law, Toshio Iue, who later founded Sanyo Electric Co., now a Panasonic unit. Panasonic, which in 2008 changed its name from Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., has grown to be a giant corporate group with over 270,000 employees. "We've continued business while adapting to different times," said Akio Tanii, Panasonic's fourth president, who took the helm for seven years from 1986. The company's story began on March 7, 1918, when Konosuke Matsushita established Matsushita Electric Housewares Manufacturing Works at his home in Osaka.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Fusionex, a multi-award-winning, leading data technology provider specializing in Analytics, Big Data, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence (AI), has commenced a digital insurance initiative for leading Takaful insurance company STMB. Takaful Malaysia's online sales portal "Click for Cover" was launched at a grand ceremony and signalled the digital transformation of their business processes with Fusionex technology. The launch ceremony was officiated by Datuk Seri Johari Abdul Ghani, Finance Minister II, and marked the beginning of a seamless customer experience in purchasing and renewing insurance policies online via data-centric approach. Leveraging Fusionex technology, Takaful's digital insurance initiative is able to help customers process their applications, issue quotations, perform underwriting, send cover notes and e-documents via a customer-focussed and seamless online platform. The platform focuses on providing the best service to its customers, with the ability to understand each customer in a more personalized way.

Capable of cognitive tasks such as reasoning, inference and retrieval, using data collected from multi-modal sensor inputs, saal.ai "Saal's mission is simple; it aims to make technology think and learn, creating exponential growth opportunities for humanity," said Dr. Saleh Al Hashemi, Chief Executive Officer of Algorythma. "With a framework able to augment human capabilities beyond imagination, and facilitate opportunities to solve some of the world's most pressing issues, Saal endeavors to play a significant part in the realization of the United Arab Emirates' AI ambitions, taking them to the global scale." With several products born of its framework – in the education and knowledge field, saal.ai's Saal, which has been incubated at Algorythma for the past 24 months, brings together a passionate team of computer science, data science, neuroscience, industry and psychology experts.

Opinions are divided when it comes to AI -- artificial intelligence. On one side, we have the supporters of AI -- investing in huge companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Baidu, and so on. The UAE is the only country with a Ministry of AI. China has recently invested $150 billion in order to become the leading AI country by 2030. And, on the other side of the aisle, there are people like Elon Musk, who warned that AI can be a threat to human civilization.

Is human resources (HR) in trouble? Will technology replace people in HR? Will artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and automation change how it functions -- from hiring to managing people? At a time when a Tesla Roadster is hurtling through space, it is difficult to predict the effect of technology. But there are indications that workplace will fast-forward to a future where HR will cease to be what it is. The transformation of HR is at a nascent stage now.

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IoT (Internet of Things), the convergence of IT and OT, rapid application development, digital twin simulation models, cyber-physical systems, advanced robots and cobots, additive manufacturing, autonomous production, consistent engineering across the entire value chain, thorough data collection and provisioning, horizontal and vertical integration, the cloud, big data analytics, virtual/augmented reality and edge computing amidst a shift of intelligence towards the edge (artificial intelligence indeed): these are some of the essential technological components of the fourth industrial revolution. Those are quite a lot of terms and components indeed. Yet, Industry 4.0 is a rather vast vision and, increasingly, vast reality that also stretches beyond merely these technological aspects. It is an end-to-end industrial transformation. What makes it all the more fascinating (and at first sight complex) is that convergence of two worlds which have been disconnected thus far: Information ...

And they have changed dramatically over the last three decades. First it was the military. Today, another chapter begins: massive funds, with billions to spend and often linked to governments, are technology's new masters. The undisputed leader is Japan's SoftBank, which counts Uber, WeWork, Alibaba and Nvidia among its investments. Its companies make awe-inspiring robot dogs (Boston Dynamics) and offer dog walking as a service (Wag) for real canines.