After a lackluster year for enterprise technology venture capital investments, 2017 kicked off with a record breaking quarter for enterprise technology startups. Following 4 straight quarters of decreasing investment, investors poured a record-breaking $5 billion dollars into enterprise technology startups in the first quarter of 2017 alone – a nearly 80% increase from the previous quarter – across a record number of 237 deals. These enterprise startups – solving problems for world's largest companies around data & analytics, cloud-native infrastructure, cybersecurity, and AI-powered business applications for the future workplace – are building businesses by capturing some of the close to $3.5 trillion that the Global 1000 and Fortune 500 spend every year on software and technology. Coming on the heels of Cisco's massive $3.7B acquisition of AppDynamics right before their public offering earlier this year – and MuleSoft's 45 percent pop on their first day of trading two weeks ago – enterprise is clearly in vogue. With Alteryx's IPO last week, there's still a robust lineup of enterprise exits coming down the pipeline, including Presido, Okta, and Yext, who have all filed S-1s in preparation of an IPO, and speculation from many more including Cloudera, DocuSign, Domo, and Tenable Network Security.

Mark Zuckerberg kicked off Facebook's F8 developer conference this week with a keynote detailing a number of his grand visions of the future. Augmented reality, chat bots and a rather grim-looking social VR app called Spaces are the next-generation products Mr Zuckerberg will use to keep us glued to our screens. While the social network is a handy tool for staying in touch with friends and organising events, it's become bigger and far more powerful than the site many of us originally signed up to. Facebook can be and has been called out for a wide range of perceived misdemeanors. In some circles, it's long been viewed as a rather sinister threat to privacy and criticised for its tax practices, but more recent issues, such as the spread of fake news, the site's approach to illegal content and incredibly disturbing uses of Facebook Live are particularly troubling.

If you're freaked out a bit by artificial intelligence, here's a robot with a potentially reassuring message. A service robot called REEM can tackle the question: "Should I worry about AI?" (Recent concerns along these lines have touched on everything from killer robots to job-destroying automatons.) "The short answer is you do not need to worry about artificial intelligence for many years," the robot says. "Artificial intelligence requires a body to interact with the world. And we are very far from creating an artificial body with a brain that is smarter than a very basic animal."

SYS-CON Events announced today that Ocean9will exhibit at SYS-CON's 20th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Ocean9 provides cloud services for Backup, Disaster Recovery (DRaaS) and instant Innovation, and redefines enterprise infrastructure with its cloud native subscription offerings for mission critical SAP workloads. Available on AWS and Azure, Ocean9 solutions de-risk and accelerate digital transformation initiatives with instant provisioning, full elasticity, strict security, right sized systems and high availability of up to 99.99%. Ocean9 is also first to market with heavy state container technology: Our customers can therefore deploy the heavy state SAP HANA in-memory database in a production grade container environment with the ability to seamlessly fall back to a virtualized environment within minutes. Learn more about how Ocean9 redefines cloud enterprise infrastructure at www.ocean9.io.

Tucked away in western Wisconsin, not terribly far from Minneapolis, sits a factory full of babies. This factory produces each baby in just 15 minutes, and sells them for $649 apiece. Many of them are given to teenagers, in a bid to keep them from having babies of their own. These'bot babies teach would-be parents and medical types how to care for a newborn, and let teenagers experience being awakened in the wee hours by a wailing infant so perhaps they'll think twice about pregnancy. Realityworks calls them RealCare babies and started producing them in 1994, when the dolls went by the name Baby Think It Over.

A'paedophile-hunting' group has decided to stop posting stings to Facebook Live, following an incident on Easter Sunday. The Hunted One, which has over 70,000 Likes on the social network, live streams video footage of groups of vigilantes confronting suspected sex offenders. Its latest stream was posted on 16 April, and saw a group confront a man at Bluewater Shopping Centre, in Kent. It led to a brawl, which was also caught on film, and in a later update, The Hunted One claimed that the man was subsequently "charged with online grooming and attempting to meet a child for sex". The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.

When most people think about artificial intelligence, their minds turn to glorified fights to save the human race from rogue robots, a familiar story played out on Hollywood screens in decades gone by. While machine intelligence is still far from resembling human consciousness, an AI fight is playing out in real life, not between robots and humans, but rather among the businesses vying to lead an increasingly lucrative market. The origins of AI stretch back to 1950, when computer science pioneer Alan Turing published a paper speculating that machines could one day think like humans. Last year, research firm IDC valued the market at $8 billion, forecasting a rise to $47 billion in 2020. Between Turing's landmark paper 67 years ago and today's wild market valuations, most major AI developments have either fallen in the realms of research and academia or involved computers beating people at human games.

When "The Handmaid's Tale" was published in 1985, reproductive rights were under siege and acid rain was corroding the forests and rivers. The Canadian writer Margaret Atwood reasoned that if you took all this to its logical end, you could wind up with a theocracy, not a democracy, and a population rendered sterile by its own poisons. So her novel of speculative fiction imagined a hyper-religious nation where young women who were still fertile were rounded up and confined to the human equivalent of puppy mills, forced to bear the children of powerful men. Well, here we are in 2017, and women's rights to control their own bodies are at risk again, the environment is threatened again -- and "The Handmaid's Tale" is more popular than ever. It became a feature film in 1990, and this April 26, Hulu launches "The Handmaid's Tale" as a 10-episode series. Why is this book, like George Orwell's "1984," finding a new and large and attentive following?

Police Scotland this week held a conference with the UK's major broadcasters to discuss ways to approach the issue of so-called "fully loaded" media players. Police Scotland has claimed that "criminal gangs" have now started selling the players, because they see it as a less risky area of crime. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

OSAKA – Sharp Corp. is considering a joint bid with parent company, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., to invest in embattled Toshiba Corp.'s memory chip business, a Sharp executive said Wednesday. By teaming up with the Japanese electronics firm, Hon Hai, the Taiwan-based main assembler for Apple Inc., may be attempting to avoid a possible scenario in which the Japanese government blocks the deal out of fear that a sale of Toshiba Memory Corp. to a foreign company could undermine national security. While the chip industry is vulnerable to swings in demand, the business can still be an important asset in the age of the internet of things, the Sharp executive told reporters Wednesday. "We still think it's a good investment. We're not going to make profits by keeping our cash at banks," the executive said.