With the global luxury market collectively growing at 4 percent to an estimated $1.15 (€1.08) trillion in 2016, according to a recent "Bain & Company Luxury Study," coupled with optimistic forecasts that the luxury goods market will pick up this year, the hospitality industry is gearing up for elevated demand among both leisure and business travelers. This amid evidence that, despite widespread geopolitical uncertainties, luxury consumers are redirecting their spending toward new and more personalized high-end experiences like luxury travel, food and wine. "The luxury market has reached a maturation point," said Claudia D'Arpizio, lead author of the study. "Brands can no longer rely on low-hanging fruit. Instead, they really need to implement differentiating strategies to succeed going forward. We are already starting to see clear polarization when it comes to performance with winners and losers emerging across product categories and segments."

TOKUSHIMA – In another downside to rapidly graying Japan, the nation's active hunters -- in decline and aging -- are having a hard time keeping up with their hunting dogs that dash after their prey. That's a big headache for prefectural governments nationwide that need hunters to go after deer, boars and other animals that cause extensive crop damage. The small mountain town of Naka, Tokushima Prefecture, is hoping to solve the problem by using drones and tracking devices on dogs to help increasingly frail hunters bag their targets. In December, the town conducted an experiment using a drone to locate a hunting dog in the mountains. In the experiment, a portable tracking device showed the location of the dog more than 900 meters away on the side of a mountain.

Often seen as futuristic, and maybe a bit silly, robots are already changing urban life. Over the past couple of weeks, tech news outlets all seem to be talking about one thing – robots in our cities. Some of these are really interesting, and others a bit hype-filled. And then there are those robots that have been quietly transforming the city for decades. A 20 foot-tall Optimus Prime figure stands amidst the Hong Kong skyline at the Transformers movie premier in 2014.

When 27-year old Mayank Ranka is looking for love, he turns to a chatbot. "It instantly finds me a match which is all I need at the end of the day. The even better part is I can end the conversation anytime I want and not chat ever again," says Mumbai-resident Mayank, who works with an event company in Mumbai. Tech-savvy singles like Mayank don't blink before using a speed-dating chatbot like Neargroup which helps them zoom into the right date. The chatbot's in-built AI helps the user to find the right match based on nearby locations, interests and also conversations.

Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) will soon be at the heart of every major technological system in the world including: cyber and homeland security, payments, financial markets, biotech, healthcare, marketing, natural language processing, computer vision, electrical grids, nuclear power plants, air traffic control, and Internet of Things (IoT). While A.I. seems to have only recently captured the attention of humanity, the reality is that A.I. has been around for over 60 years as a technological discipline. In the late 1950's, Arthur Samuel wrote a checkers playing program that could learn from its mistakes and thus, over time, became better at playing the game. MYCIN, the first rule-based expert system, was developed in the early 1970's and was capable of diagnosing blood infections based on the results of various medical tests. The MYCIN system was able to perform better than non-specialist doctors. While Artificial Intelligence is becoming a major staple of technology, few people understand the benefits and shortcomings of A.I. and Machine Learning technologies. Machine learning is the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed. Machine learning is applied in various fields such as computer vision, speech recognition, NLP, web search, biotech, risk management, cyber security, and many others.

Welcome to the Coupa Software Fourth Quarter and FY '17 Earnings Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Miss Cynthia Hiponia. This is Cynthia Hiponia, Coupa Investor Relations and I'm pleased to welcome you to Coupa Software's fourth quarter earnings conference call. The primary purpose of today's call is to provide you with information regarding our FY '17 fourth quarter performance, in addition to our financial outlook for our FY '18 first quarter and full year. Just a reminder that our remarks today include forward-looking statements about our guidance and future results of operations, business strategies and plans, market size, products, competitive position and potential growth opportunities. Our actual results may be materially different. Forward-looking statements involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions that are described in our earnings release and our Form 10-Q filed with the SEC on December 9, 2016. These forward-looking statements are based on our beliefs and assumptions today and we disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statement. If this call is replayed after today, the information presented during this call may not contain current or accurate information. During the call, we'll also present both GAAP and non GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP measures is included in today's earnings release which you could find on our Investor Relations website. A link to the replay of this call will also be available there and if you prefer to access the replay via phone you can find that information in the earnings release as well. Unless otherwise stated, gross comparisons made on this call are against the same period of the prior year. On behalf of my colleagues at Coupa, I'd like to start by thanking our customers. We thank them for their enthusiasm and embracing our game-changing value as a service approach. Together, we're doing things never before done in our industry in terms of time to value, teamwork, agility and the attainment of measurable results. I'd also like to thank our fast growing list of global Partners, who work with us and our customers hand in hand with the relentless customer success orientation. And last but certainly not least, I'd like to thank all our investors for their continued support as we continue to develop our business.

After the disappointing sales of the G5, South Korean tech giant LG is back with a radically redesigned G6. In the history of consumer electronics, there's been one constant: as technology advances, gadgets always get smaller and more compact. The last three years, when smartphones actually became increasingly bigger, was an anomaly. The biggest phonemakers in the world will spend 2017 fixing that problem. Later this year, both Samsung and Apple will release phones with drastically smaller bodies (while keeping the same screen size, or even expanding it) than last year's models, and mainstream consumers will go gaga.

Baidu, the Chinese company operating a search engine, a mobile browser, and other web services, is announcing today the launch of SwiftScribe, a web app that's meant to help people transcribe audio recordings more quickly, using -- you guessed it! Baidu in the past few years has been honing its DeepSpeech software for speech recognition. Last year, the company introduced TalkType, an Android keyboard that, using DeepSpeech, puts speech input first and typing second, based on the idea that you can enter information more quickly when you say it than when you peck. Now Baidu is coming out with another app enhanced with DeepSpeech, one that could arguably find better footing in a professional setting. Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft have all been working on speech recognition right alongside Baidu, but none of those four has come up with something aimed at longer-form transcription.

Wikileaks caught the CIA with its pants down this week when they released a massive collection of information about cyberattack techniques the agency uses to hack iPhones and major communication services. It's alleged that Wikileaks was given the the documents courtesy of Russia, who hacked into American systems to find them. If they prove to be real, it's a major blow to the US. You can bet that governments like Iran and China are loving the fact that they can use the documents to better defend themselves against future American attacks. In a recent interview, Alphabet's Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, claimed "that big data is so powerful that nation states will fight wars over data."

Traffic jams that clog up roads and slow down travel are the biggest problems many cities face. Rising incomes and growing aspirations convince many middle-income households to yearn for cars, which adds to the problem. Hangzhou, one of the most connected cities in China, intends to solve traffic woes with the help of artificial intelligence. The city is teaming up with Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, to install a new smart-traffic management system. Using its AI and big data analytics capabilities, Alibaba Cloud is able to provide real-time traffic recommendations and travel routes based on video and image recognition technologies.