Connected devices, Smart City, home automation, e-health, Big Data ... In recent years, the concepts of communicating objects have multiplied. In reality, they are all one facet of the same upheaval - the Internet of Things. Cars can be driven without a driver, TVs are going online, and heating systems are activated automatically to the arrival of the residents. The Internet is making many processes in daily life easier. The Internet of Things, or IoT, which enable devices to communicate with people or machines, is actually working in many places in our daily life already.

Before you configure a new Chevy Bolt, check out all the highlights and trailers from last night's videogame awards show or wax nostalgic about manual transmissions, first make sure you sign up for a chance to win a smart home surveillance kit, courtesy of Synology -- the entry window closes tonight at 11:59PM ET. Cars with a stick shift are already hard to find, but the advent of EVs could put the final nail in the coffin. Like many of you, Roberto Baldwin will miss the satisfaction and control that driving stick offers, even if a "solid, utilitarian" Bolt can drive to your destination stress-free. DIY media center fans don't have to choose between offshoots of the XBMC family tree. Plex is not only releasing its Media Player software for free, it's releasing an add-on for Kodi (fka XBMC) so that its users can easily access their content from that front end as well.

TalkTalk and other internet providers have stopped providing connections to users after being hit by a huge cyber attack. The troubled internet provider has said that it – along with the Post Office and other internet providers across Europe – were hit by the Mirai worm and had their connections taken offline. That worm is becoming increasingly dangerous. It was blamed for a huge internet outage earlier this year, and works by taking over a variety of unsecured internet devices and then pointing them at weak points in the web's infrastructure. This time it appears to have targeted a certain kind of router that is used both by the Post Office and TalkTalk, and so left customers of both companies unable to get online.

A company behind a health care information website under fire over inaccurate, plagiarized articles on Thursday said it had temporarily suspended operations of eight other niche online services. It emerged this week that articles on DeNA Co.'s website Welq were not properly fact-checked and that outside contributors were told to write stories by taking information from other medical websites and rewriting it. "It was seriously wrong to provide medical information in an inappropriate manner when it needed to be handled with extra care," DeNA CEO Isao Moriyasu said in a statement Thursday. BuzzFeed Japan on Monday revealed how DeNA, which is better known for its mobile game business and professional baseball team, used a manual to instruct its writers on how to create stories that are likely to top search engine lists as well as how to rewrite information to avoid simply copying and pasting, which could draw accusations of plagiarism. As a result, the stories were a hodgepodge of information from various sites and lacked any attribution.

The Japanese inventor received ¥6 billion ($53 million) from partners, including Panasonic Corp., last month to advance "the Laundroid" -- a robot Sakane is developing to not only wash and dry garments, but also sort, fold and neatly arrange them. The refrigerator-size device could eventually fill the roles of washing machine, dryer and clothes drawer in people's homes. Sakane, whose earlier inventions include an anti-snoring device and golf clubs made of space materials, said the funding will bring closer his dream of liberating humanity from laundry. Among his inspirations for the project is the 1968 Stanley Kubrick sci-fi film classic "2001: A Space Odyssey." Laundroid was designed to resemble the mysterious objects in the film that brought technology to prehistoric humans, and the project was originally code-named "Monolith."

Vinci believes in a future where your headphones are the central hub of your connected world. Over the last two years we've been testing and perfecting a smart, wireless headphone that is controlled by your voice and powered by cloud technology, with no connection needed to your mobile phone. Wire-free and phone-free, Vinci is perfect for joggers, travelers and all music lovers. Vinci allows you to voice control your music when manually choosing songs on your phone is inconvenient. No matter what you're doing - walking, running, or commuting - you can tell Vinci exactly what song or artist you want to listen to, say a specific genre or mood, or let Vinci pick a song for you.

Nvidia cofounder Chris Malachowsky is eating a sausage omelet and sipping burnt coffee in a Denny's off the Berryessa overpass in San Jose. It was in this same dingy diner in April 1993 that three young electrical engineers--Malachowsky, Curtis Priem and Nvidia's current CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang--started a company devoted to making specialized chips that would generate faster and more realistic graphics for video games. East San Jose was a rough part of town back then--the front of the restaurant was pocked with bullet holes from people shooting at parked cop cars--and no one could have guessed that the three men drinking endless cups of coffee were laying the foundation for a company that would define computing in the early 21st century in the same way that Intel did in the 1990s. "There was no market in 1993, but we saw a wave coming," Malachowsky says. "There's a California surfing competition that happens in a five-month window every year. When they see some type of wave phenomenon or storm in Japan, they tell all the surfers to show up in California, because there's going to be a wave in two days. We were at the beginning."

In December 1964, over a single evening session in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, John Coltrane and his quartet recorded the entirety of A Love Supreme. This jazz album is considered Coltrane's masterpiece – the culmination of his spiritual awakening – and sold a million copies. What it represents is all too human: a climb out of addiction, a devotional quest, a paean to God. Five decades later and 50 miles downstate, over 12 hours this April and fuelled by Monster energy drinks in a spare bedroom in Princeton, New Jersey, Ji-Sung Kim wrote an algorithm to teach a computer to teach itself to play jazz. Kim, a 20-year-old Princeton sophomore, was in a rush – he had a quiz the next morning.

The deep penetration of internet among users in India has paved way for digitization. Digital platforms are leveraging new age technologies such as AI to make lives easier and enriching. Parenting too has joined the digital/ AI bandwagon. Today there are several apps that have implemented AI to help parents nurture and groom their children. This was a much needed revolution in assisting parents to understand the needs and psychology of their children. It guides them throughout the parental journey and helps in develop a mutual understanding that results in healthy relationships within the family.

It is a paradigm shift from the GUI to a whole new interface of getting things done. It represents a true smartphone first interface, and part of the unstoppable shift to all things AI. Facebook says there are already 33,000 bots built for Messenger that allow users to buy anything from flowers to airplane tickets or customer support. So, in the light of this change and all the craze around chat bots, TLabs & Haptik are proud to bring to you India's 1st Botathon, where we welcome you to build conversational bots over platforms such as Slack, Facebook or any other platform you see fit. The difference of a hackathon to a botathon, you ask?