It's the beginning of the end for smartphone apps as we have known and tapped on them, reckons Gartner. The analyst is calling the start of a "post-apps" era, based on changes in consumer interactions that appear driven, in large part, by the rise of dominant messaging platforms designed to consume more and more of mobile users' time and attention. It reckons messaging apps will become more popular than social media apps within the next two years. In a new report, based on a survey of mobile users in the US, China and the UK, Gartner's reading of the app usage tea-leaves shows signs of messaging platforms cannibalizing other apps, with for example, usage of dedicated video apps declining four percentage points between the 2015 and 2016 editions of the survey. Usage of standalone maps apps also shrunk by three percentage points, year-over-year, according to Gartner's data.

Even though Samsung has established a cause for those Galaxy Note 7 flare-ups, the device's story is not over. Korean outlet Hankyung reports that the company will sell the "refurbished" phones, but with smaller, less-explodey batteries inside. It doesn't sound like the devices will be returning to US or European markets (it's tough to imagine regulators reversing course on bans after the first recall and reissue), but they could be sold in India or Vietnam instead. According to the report, Samsung has some 2.5 million Galaxy Note 7s left over after using 20,000 or so up in testing to determine the cause of the problem. The refurbished devices will have new cases, and batteries with a capacity between 3,000 and 3,200mAh (the phones initially contained a 3,500mAh battery).

Citing an unnamed Samsung Electronics official in the US, the report said, the Korean tech giant has recently decided to earmark at least US$1 billion to acquire AI tech companies or stakes in the firms. From left are VIV Labs' Vice President Adam Cheyer, VIV Labs' CEO Dag Kittlaus and Samsung Electronics' Vice President Rhee In-jong at a news conference held in Seoul in November last year. Samsung acquired the Silicon Valley-based AI platform company in October. "Despite several recent deals, the management pointed out the company still needed more fundamental investments into AI," an industry source was quoted as saying in the report. Over the past year, Samsung has purchased 10 tech firms, including Harman International, the US car infotainment giant.

US tech giant Apple is reportedly not working on Siri-powered speaker just like Amazon Echo, an artificial intelligence (AI)-based speaker that can be controlled by voice. "The future goal of the technology is to utilize Siri as an'omnipresent AI assistant across devices' rather than have a central hub," Times reported on last week. How Siri would become omnipresent is not known at this point. Earlier this week, Apple acquired Israel-based start-up RealFace that develops deep learning-based face authentication technology. Set up in 2014 by Adi Eckhouse Barzilai and Aviv Mader, RealFace has developed a facial recognition software that offers users a smart biometric login, aiming to make passwords redundant when accessing mobile devices or PCs, as reported yesterday.

Data is the new natural resource that can empower every citizen in a country like India, Microsoft's India-born CEO Satya Nadella said on Monday during a discussion on the digital world, cloud computing and artificial intelligence. There is need for "recognising that data is the new natural resource instead of looking at it as being unevenly spread" for empowering every citizen of India, Nadella said in a dialogue with Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani. In India, several state governments are using data resources and computing power for governance, Nadella said. The government of Andhra Pradesh is using cloud services to track high school dropouts in order to build interventions while ICRISAT is using machine learning to improve the yield of farmers, he said. "I was looking at the big consumers of the public cloud (computing) and one thing that came up was the Election Commission in Tamil Nadu,'' Nadella said with reference to the usage of CCTV cameras in Tamil Nadu at election booths in 2016. Nadella said that the broad technology areas that he is currently excited about is cloud computing, artificial intelligence and augmented reality. Much of the entrepreneurial energy in India is around cloud computing, he said. What has been seen so far in terms of artificial intelligence is statistical machine learning by using the power of data and real AI is still in the future, Nadella said. "In Punjab, I believe we took all the call centre data … We analysed the speech so that the government can get a better handle on what are the issues that can be automated and what needs human services.

The Microsoft chief's comments come in the wake of Bill Gates' call for levying taxes on robots that take away jobs from people, reports Ayan Pramanik Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella has warned that embracing Artificial Intelligence without reskilling people will have an impact on jobs, even as it has displayed efficiency in delivery of government services. "I think it is an exciting future, but at the same time, you have to be very mindful of the impact of AI on jobs. That's why I want to make sure some of the skilling work we are doing in India is going to help people," said Nadella at an interaction with the architect of Aadhaar, Nandan Nilekani. Nadella's comments come in the wake of Microsoft founder Bill Gates' call for levying taxes on robots that take away jobs from people. Nadella pointed out that Microsoft had been able to use AI to improve efficiency in government services in Punjab and Andhra Pradesh.

According to Startup Nation Central, a database for Israeli tech companies, the Tel Aviv-based firm had raised $1 million prior to the acquisition and employs up to 10 people. An email sent to the company requesting comment was not immediately replied. The company has sales in China, Israel, Europe, and the US, according to the data firm. RealFace's first product, the Pickeez app, created a new way to enjoy photos, with its recognition software automatically choosing the user's best photos from every platform they're on. Besides RealFace, Apple has acquired three other Israeli companies to date.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke at a public event in India on Monday, stressing upon the immense potential of artificial intelligence (AI), calling it the "ultimate breakthrough" in technology. "Because for all the advances in computer interface, there is nothing to beat language [the ability to do human-level speech recognition]," he said during a fireside chat with Nandan Nilekani -- India's premier technocrat and the brain behind the Aadhaar identification system. The chat was streamed live on the Microsoft Developer page on Facebook. Nadella and Nilekani were later joined by Binny Bansal, CEO of Flipkart, India's largest e-commerce company that announced a cloud partnership with Microsoft's Azure. Calling AI "the third run time", Nadella said, "If the operating system was the first run time, the second run time you could say was the browser, and the third run time can actually be the agent. Because in some sense, the agent knows you, your work context, and knows the work. And that's how we are building Cortana. We are giving it a really natural language understanding."

BENGALURU: Microsoft chief executive officer Satya Nadella said "an enlightened immigration policy" has enabled him to live the American dream, even as he emphasised that governments had the right to determine immigration and trade policies. "American values have always been about inclusion and diversity. It's a land of immigrants," said Nadella, who was born in Hyderabad and completed his bachelor's degree in engineering from the Manipal Institute of Technology, before moving to the US in 1988. "American technology reaching me in India is what made it even possible to dream the dream. And then, the enlightened American immigration policy is what led me to live the dream. And I think those are things we will always advocate for... the American dream and the American enlightened immigration policy, especially for high-skilled workers, is something that I'm optimistic about," Nadella told ETin an interview.

If there is anything that chip giant Intel has learned over the past two decades as it has gradually climbed to dominance in processing in the datacenter, it is ironically that one size most definitely does not fit all. As the tight co-design of hardware and software continues in all parts of the IT industry, we can expect fine-grained customization for very precise – and lucrative – workloads, like data analytics and machine learning, just to name two of the hottest areas today. Software will run most efficiently on hardware that is tuned for it, although we are used to thinking of that process in a mirror image, where programmers tweak their code to take advantage of the forward-looking features a chip maker conceives of four or five years before they are etched into its transistors and delivered as a product. The competition is fierce these days, and Intel has to move fast if it is to keep its compute hegemony in the datacenter. That is why at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco the company put a new path on the Knights family of many-core processors that will see the company deliver a version of this chip specifically tuned for machine learning workloads.