Place and cultural differences are also important when designing new technologies, which goes back to using hometown, state, or country to your advantage. For example, in the world of chat bots and natural language technologies, we've talked before with Baidu USA's Adam Coates about the differences between mobile users in the U.S. and those in China. Tak Lo, an investor with Hong Kong-based Zeroth.AI, mirrored this idea: "People interact with messenger applications (in Asia) very different than in the West...a lot of people in, say, China actually speak...it's a very different interface...chat bots can take off in Asia, but people trying to solve chatbots in Asia need to think differently," he said.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has claimed that the streaming giant's biggest rivals aren't Amazon, YouTube or even traditional broadcasters. According to Mr Hastings, our need for sleep is actually its main barrier. "You know, think about it, when you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night," he said. Mr Hastings stopped short of announcing a new technology capable of helping us recharge without snoozing, though he did go on to make some surprising comments about downloads. The company bowed to pressure by launching the much-requested offline viewing feature last year, but Mr Hastings doesn't think much of it.

Marib, now under the control of President Abd-Rabu Mansour Hadi's internationally recognized government, is one of several regions where Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and its local affiliate, Ansar al-Sharia, operate and is east of the capital Sanaa - controlled by the dominant Houthi group.

Years ago, science fiction movies used to seem very futuristic to us - making us feel detached from the remarkable innovations we saw from scene to scene. However, what once seemed impossible is now a reality and we're slowly but surely learning to live with disruptive technologies. This quote perfectly encapsulates this: Figure 1: What does AI mean for legislation? The EU are moving fast. "humankind stands on the threshold of an era when ever more sophisticated robots, bots, androids and other manifestations of artificial intelligence ("AI") seem poised to unleash a new industrial revolution, which is likely to leave no stratum of society untouched" This could well be the introductory "Star Wars style" text of a science fiction film that is shown to the audience to understand the context of the movie.

Amazon's IoT Strategy: A Force to Be Reckoned With Amazon has gradually rolled out parts of its IoT offerings in the last year, but these are just the tip of the iceberg. In addition to optimizing their back-end AWS offerings, Amazon is laying the ground work to be a major force in IoT - especially in the connected home and office. Amazon is extending its reach by building on its dominant Cloud IoT platform, its Dash Button strategy, recently announced Replenishment Services, the Echo/Alexa voice recognition control platform, the 6-7 strategic investments of its Venture group, strategic partnerships with 50 major consumer package goods companies and the 50-70 million current Prime customers to become a dominant force in IoT. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Chris Kocher, founder and managing director of Grey Heron, discussed how Amazon does not just want to dominate the back-end cloud storage, compute and analysis capabilities for IoT data. This is not an incremental, small potatoes effort.

Many have proclaimed that 2017 will be "the year of artificial intelligence (AI)", with a 300% increase in investment in its technologies predicted compared with 2016. Start-ups with AI at the core of their business in particular will be looking to benefit from this surge in investment capital, as they did last year when 550 raised $5 billion in funding. Oisin Merrins, editor at FinTech Futures Series (Banking Technology's sister company), explores. While efforts at embedding human intelligence into machines has a long history, recent years have seen a rapid evolution of the technologies captured under AI, spurred on by decreasing costs in computing power, advances in memory capacity and cloud computing, and the necessity borne of the generation of evermore quantities of structured and unstructured data. Naturally, the ability to quickly and automatically process this data and derive actionable insights is creating a lot of excitement across multiple industries, yet there remain a number of obstacles to AI adoption; many business leaders cite the lack of a defined business case or required skills, or the need to first modernise internal data management platforms.

The 2017 Global Future Network Development Summit was held on April 17. Artificial intelligence based on big data will play an important role in the future network, besides SDN & NFV, Liu Yunjie, academician of Chinese Academy of Engineering, director of Chinna Unicom Science & Technology Commission, and president of Jiangsu Future Networks Innovation Institute noted at the Summit. "SDN gives the Internet a'brain', and artificial intelligence makes the brain smarter", Mr. Liu said," We see great challenges in this."

Hoping to get self-driving vehicle companies to share a common platform rather than design from scratch, Baidu said Tuesday it would offer its technology for autonomous driving to other companies, while also partnering in the sourcing of components and hardware. Baidu will offer a vehicle platform, hardware platform, software platform and cloud data services, and will open source code and capabilities in obstacle perception, trajectory planning, vehicle control, vehicle operating systems and other functions, as well as a set of testing tools, it said in a statement. The project called Apollo, after the U.S. moon missions, could help speed up the development of self-driving cars, making the technology available sooner to smaller car makers and users at a more competitive price. Until now car makers and tech companies have been pursuing the development of self-driving cars independently or in close-knit alliances, guarding their inventions protectively as the ongoing lawsuit between Alphabet's Waymo and Uber Technologies indicates. "An open, innovative industry ecosystem initiated by Baidu will accelerate the development of autonomous driving in the U.S. and other developed automotive markets," said Qi Lu, Baidu's group president and chief operating officer in a statement.

A employee uses his mobile phone as he walks past the company logo of Baidu at its headquarters in Beijing, August 5, 2010. The project is named Apollo after the lunar landing program, the Chinese search giant said, adding it would work with partners who provide vehicles, sensors and other components for the new technology. As part of its push into artificial intelligence (AI), the company in January named former Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) executive Qi Lu as chief operating officer. Two months after the appointment, Baidu's chief scientist Andrew Ng, who led AI and augmented reality (AR) projects, said he would step down. The company also launched a $200 million fund in October to focus on AI, AR and deep learning, followed by a $3 billion fund announced in September to target mid- and late- stage start-ups.

Baidu says it will share software technology it is developing for self-driving cars in a bid to catch up with competitors including General Motors and Waymo, the self-driving unit of Google-parent Alphabet Inc. Fox News is preparing to cut ties with its biggest star, Bill O'Reilly, according to people close to the situation. The New York attorney general's office said it reached a $40 million settlement with an Alabama investment firm over the failure of members of an investment management company it sponsored to pay millions in New York state taxes. A consortium of investors including private-equity firm KKR and Australian bank Macquarie Group made an all-cash offer to buy Australian wagering firm Tatts Group, which already agreed to merge with rival Tabcorp Holdings. PetSmart agreed to buy pet products site Chewy.com. Private-equity firms KKR & Co. and Stone Point Capital, in a bet that more investors will want advice from independent financial advisers and less from Wall Street's traditional brokers, will pay $2 billion for a majority stake in Focus Financial Partners.