E-commerce and cloud giant Amazon has revealed that it now has 45,000 robots across 20 fulfilment centres around the world. This is a 50pc increase on the same time last year, when the company said that it employed 30,000 robots alongside its 306,000 people. Amazon uses the robots to automate the picking and packing process at large warehouses. The robots are 16in tall and weigh 145kg. They can travel at 5mph and can carry packages that weigh 317kg.

This post originally appeared as a bylined article in Website Magazine. Synthetic monitoring is hardly a new technology. It's been around almost as long as the commercial World Wide Web has. But the importance of monitoring the performance and availability of a web application by simulating users' interactions with that application, from around the globe, has never been more important. We've seen prominent vendors in the broad APM space add this technology with new development or partnerships just in the last 18 months.

A teary-eyed Mala Sharma felt vindicated as she stood outside a school for impoverished children in India. A student had snatched the Adobe Systems executive's iPad and had a go with the company's simplest video editing program. He nailed it, creating a quick video that Sharma said amused his teacher and peers. For years, Adobe has been the dominant provider of expensive editing tools to professional content producers. But the recent experience in India with her company's newer, consumer-oriented app showed Sharma firsthand the value of expanding efforts to make tools approachable to anyone. "I stood there with tears in my eyes because I felt like in that minute Adobe touched and changed that child's life," Sharma said.

Intel has a disastrous history with smartphones. It fumbled a chance to be in Apple's first iPhone, and then quit making its Atom smartphone chip to focus on modems. But the company is now set to ship a groundbreaking modem that will deliver data transfer rates many times faster than most wired internet connections. The chipmaker will start shipping its first 5G modem for testing in the second half this year. Beyond mobile devices, the modem could also be used in autonomous cars, servers, base stations, networking equipment, drones, robots, and other internet-of-things devices.

Some of the hottest tech coming to CES this year includes home robots, Super UHD TVs, and the latest in PCs. Artificial intelligence in the home has been making big gains at CES over the last several years, according to the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) in a statement released Tuesday. CTA projects 2017 unit sales for voice-controlled, stand-alone digital assistant devices with a cloud-based operating system -- including Amazon's Echo and Google Home -- to reach 4.5 million units, a 52 percent increase, and reach $608 million in revenue, up 36 percent. And with home robots, companies at CES in 2017 will be looking to upstage intelligent home assistants like Google Home and Amazon Echo. Kuri: This home robot from Mayfield Robotics is all about personality.

Tomorrow's retail stores want to take a page from their online rivals by embracing advanced technology -- everything from helpful robots to interactive mirrors to shelves embedded with sensors. The goal: Use these real-world store features to lure shoppers back from the internet, and maybe even nudge them to spend more in the process. Amazon's new experimental grocery store in Seattle, opening in early 2017, will let shoppers buy goods without needing to stop at a checkout line. Sensors track items as shoppers put them into baskets or return them to the shelf. The shopper's Amazon account gets automatically charged.

Google researchers got an eye-scanning algorithm to figure out on its own how to detect a common form of blindness, showing the potential for artificial intelligence to transform medicine remarkably soon. The algorithm can look at retinal images and detect diabetic retinopathy--which affects almost a third of diabetes patients--as well as a highly trained ophthalmologist can. It makes use of the same machine-learning technique that Google uses to label millions of Web images. Diabetic retinopathy is caused by damage to blood vessels in the eye and results in a gradual deterioration of vision. If caught early it can be treated, but a sufferer may experience no symptoms early on, making screening vital.

WebRTC is the future of browser-to-browser communications, and continues to make inroads into the traditional, difficult, plug-in web communications world. WebRTC Summit 2017 New York continues our tradition of delivering the latest and greatest presentations within the world of WebRTC. Topics include voice calling, video chat, P2P file sharing, and use cases that have already leveraged the power and convenience of WebRTC. All major researchers estimate there will be tens of billions devices - computers, smartphones, tablets, and sensors - connected to the Internet by 2020. This number will continue to grow at a rapid pace for the next several decades.

Every new year brings with it the promise of astonishing video games, but what does 2017 have in store? Will this be a vintage year? From returning legends to innovative new projects, there's an impressive amount of fascinating stuff on the way – and we've tried to cram in everything, including big budget sequels, unexpected offshoots and tiny independent projects. If we've somehow overlooked your highlight of the coming year, let us know in the comments section! Described as a magical realist adventure, 29 is set within a single flat (actually owned by the game's development team), and follows the lives of its inhabitants as they prepare to move out and move on with their lives.

Faraday Future took the wraps off a long-awaited production car this week at CES in Las Vegas just as circumstances grow ever more challenging for the Los Angeles-based automotive startup backed by Chinese entrepreneur Jia Yueting. The company showed off the FF 91 crossover-style car late Tuesday that it says combines supercar performance with ultra-luxury ride and comfort, has advanced web-enabled entertainment features for passengers and even parks itself in crowded lots using autonomous driving technology. It tested the latter feature before a live audience on Monday, as well as clocking its acceleration on stage against high-end luxury vehicles from Bentley, Ferrari and Tesla. "The FF 91 will usher in a new age of connected vehicles," Nick Sampson, the company's senior vice president of engineering and R&D and a former Tesla engineer, said at the unveiling that was webcast, noting that interested buyers can reserve one at the company's website with a $5,000 deposit. Jia, who is also founder and CEO of LeEco, the so-called Netflix of China, joined Sampson and other Faraday executives at the Las Vegas event to mark the FF 91's unveiling.