If you want an indication of how hot the car tech market has become, just follow the money. In this case, the more than $1 billion invested in the space in 2016 – a 30% rise in deal activity over the previous year, according to CB Insights. The business data analytics company recently reported that a record high of $1,049 million was invested across 87 automotive technology deals in 2016, representing a 91% rise in funding over the previous year. CB Insights reports that a variety of private companies invested in an array of startups covering a wide range of automotive categories, and automakers were especially active, led by GM's massive stake in Lyft and acquisition of Cruise Automation early last year. Other OEMs making large bets on mobility include Toyota with Uber, Volkswagen with Gett, BMW iVentures with Zendrive and Daimler with Blacklane and a variety of other investments.

When building large, cloud-based applications that operate at a high scale, it's important to maintain a high availability and resilience to failures. In order to do that, you must be tolerant of failures, even in light of failures in other areas of your application. "Fly two mistakes high" is an old adage in the radio control airplane hobby. It means, fly high enough so that if you make a mistake, you can continue flying with room to still make mistakes. In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Lee Atchison, Principal Cloud Architect and Advocate at New Relic, discussed how this same philosophy can be applied to highly scaled applications, and can dramatically increase your resilience to failure.

A funny thing happened during Nintendo's January presentation to show off the Switch, its upcoming games console. So intent were viewers on gleaning details about the company's mystery-shrouded new system--a portable game device that can dock with televisions--that they may have missed another kind of "switch" being presented. Amid the psychedelic lasers and quirky presentational humor, the storied company trotted out not one, not two, but six Nintendo executives and creative luminaries. None were familiar faces, though all bore impressive titles plucked from the company's inner sanctum. The company was effectively reversing years of precedent in which its front-facing communiques, dubbed "Nintendo Directs," had been shepherded by icons like late Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, Donkey Kong creator Shigeru Miyamoto and Nintendo of America boss Reggie Fils-Aimé. Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima led with the Switch's price ($299) and launch date (March 3), as if to clear the table for what followed. Next up was Nintendo Director Shinya Takahashi, who offered a historical montage of Nintendo platforms designed to cast Switch as the culmination of the company's decades of unorthodox bets.

Pity the 34 staff of Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance in Japan, diligently calculating insurance payouts and brutally replaced by an AI system. If you believe the reports from January, the AI revolution is here. In my opinion, the goings-on in Japan cannot possibly qualify as AI, but, in order to explain why, I have to explain what I think AI means. In one way, this attempt will be doomed to failure because there is no unified definition of AI. But I can, hopefully, provide a framework of understanding about the topic that may help.

With so much discussion over foreign policy and immigration concerns from Muslim-majority nations after the inauguration of Donald Trump, there might be some confusion about how the U.S. is fighting terrorism in the Middle East. The U.S. may not be in a direct war with anyone other than the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, but there is still a military presence in multiple countries carried over from previous administrations. The number of combat troops has dipped due to drone warfare, but President Trump, who campaigned on being tougher on ISIS, has said he would be willing to send up to 30,000 troops to Iraq and Syria. However, he inherited a military presence in not just those two countries, but other hotspots, as well. Just days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress and President George W. Bush authorized the use of military force to overthrow the Taliban.

The patter of automated machinery fills the air inside wire-basket manufacturer Marlin Steel's bustling factory in a rugged industrial section of this city. Maxi Cifarelli, 25, of Baltimore, peers through safety goggles at a flat screen, her left knee bent and heel resting on her chair. Two years after earning a fine arts degree from Towson University with a specialty in interdisciplinary object design, she now spends her work days working with a personality-free machine with a name to match: a computer numerical control, or CNC, router. With automation poised to sweep through the economy, some fear that it will kill more jobs than it creates. But Cifarelli's experience is the opposite. She befriended automation, instead of fighting it, and she has a job because of it.

We saw Amazon's brief and disgusting teaser for its delivery drones, China becomes the biggest producer of solar energy in the world, Windows Cloud (unrelated) and how Elon Musk scratches his Minecraft itch. The country doubled its solar capacity last year. China might not have the image of a clean energy champion, with air pollution issues and a continued dependence on coal power, but it's also moving forward with renewable energy. The country's National Energy Administration has revealed that its solar energy production more than doubled in 2016, hitting 77.42 gigawatts by the end of the year. That said, it only covers just one percent of the country's total energy output.

To manage complex web services with lots of calls to the cloud, many businesses have invested in Application Performance Management (APM) and Network Performance Management (NPM) tools. Together APM and NPM tools are essential aids in improving a business's infrastructure required to support an effective web experience... but they are missing a critical component - Internet visibility. Internet connectivity has always played a role in customer access to web presence, but in the past few years use of the Internet in the web experience has dramatically increased. The broadening use of Cloud Services sources means that web content is coming to the customer from all over the Internet in a multitude of paths. Relying solely on Network and Internet Service Providers will get you connected but at what cost to performance and cost.

Housed in the classic Denver Gas & Electric Building, 910 15th St., 910Telecom is a carrier-neutral telecom hotel located in the heart of Denver. Adjacent to CenturyLink, AT&T, and Denver Main, 910Telecom offers connectivity to all major carriers, Internet service providers, Internet backbones and exchanges. The 910Telecom Meet Me RoomTM facilities provide access to hundreds of customers as well as national and local carriers without incurring local loop fees. Passive and active panels support circuit connections from T1 to DS3, OC3-OC192, and GigE Ethernet. All major researchers estimate there will be tens of billions devices - computers, smartphones, tablets, and sensors - connected to the Internet by 2020.

Sharing emotion-driven narratives that resonate with other people is something humans are quite good at. We've been sitting around campfires telling stories for tens of thousands of years, and we still do it. One reason why is because it's an effective way to communicate: We remember stories. But what makes for good storytelling? Mark Magellan, a writer and designer at Ideo U, puts it this way: "To tell a story that someone will remember, it helps to understand his or her needs. The art of storytelling requires creativity, critical-thinking skills, self-awareness, and empathy."