Line Corp. plans to use part of the 130 billion it garnered from last month's initial public offering to bankroll acquisitions of content and technology, transforming its messaging service into a one-stop shop for Asian social media users. Japan's most popular messaging service is gunning for companies in areas ranging from artificial intelligence chatbots and advertising to video streaming and games, including those with augmented reality features, Chief Executive Officer Takeshi Idezawa said in an interview. The Tokyo-based company has assembled a dedicated team to scope out and review possible targets across the globe. The idea is to build Line into a "smart portal," supplementing its mainstay features of chatting, stickers and games with commercial services such as food delivery, job searches and travel reservations in main markets. "We are very open-minded about the size and geography" of potential acquisitions, Idezawa said.

Despite the slowdown in GDP growth to 6.9 percent in 2015, China is still making aggressive investments to drive the adoption of high technology by local enterprises and organizations, according to Gartner, Inc… The massive consumer base and the number of internet users in China (estimated at 650 million internet and 980 million mobile internet users in 2016) present the most-promising big data opportunities. Led by hyperscale internet companies such as Baidu (internet traffic data), Alibaba (supply chain and transaction data) and Tencent (social data), approximately 25 percent of businesses have been pursuing the value of big data. "The government-sponsored strategy'Internet Plus' is targeted at boosting economic growth through digital transformation," said Jie Zhang, research director at Gartner. "It has issued a detailed action plan for 11 key industries in 2015, mandating the necessity of digital business transformation by leveraging big data and cloud technologies." Venture capitalists have been pouring money into startups focused on AI, which broadly refers to efforts to make computers emulate human cognitive functions such as recognizing speech or images.

IBM has opened a cloud data center in Pangyo, South Korea, bringing its total number of data centers to 47, with nine of them in the Asia-Pacific region, the company said today. The new center, outside Seoul, will help serve the cloud-services market in South Korea, which IDC said it expects to grow to 1 billion in 2019, from 445 million last year. The data center, built in collaboration with giant South Korean IT services provider SK Holdings C&C, will offer the standard Bluemix IBM cloud services and will emphasize helping local startups create cognitive apps and industry-specific services that use its IBM's Watson natural-language and machine learning offering. South Korean companies already using IBM's cloud include beauty-industry firm Amorepacific, social content-analysis firm Coolio, video game maker Gravity and data security startup UpRoot.

Whether you're partial to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, one of the others, or all of the above, new and old movies are yours for the watching. Witness Christian Bale's turn as a serial killer in the sardonic American Psycho. Or get your horror on with Final Destination 3. Read on to learn about all 12 movies now available online. Given that it's based on one of the most popular books of all time (Antoine de Saint-Exupery's 1943 novella), fans may rule that Mark Osborne's movie version of The Little Prince (2016) is somewhere between an insult and a disaster. But taken on its own, it's a wonderfully creative, soul-soothing work.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Emotion Detection and Recognition market to reach USD 22.65 billion by 2020 This study has been done on a global level broadly covering four regions, namely, North America, Europe, APAC, Middle East and RoW, and the market is projected to grow from USD 5.66 billion in 2015 to USD 22.65 billion by 2020, at a CAGR of 31.9% during the period. The market is being driven by factors such as increased focus on affective computing, business intelligence, and growing amount of spatial data as well as prompt availability of analytical tools. "Law Enforcement, Surveillance, and Monitoring areas are projected to showcase robust growth in the emotion detection and recognition market" The defense and security agencies require emotion detection technology for surveillance and monitoring purposes. Major implementation of this technology has already been done in the areas of military services such as lie detectors and polygraph tests. The emotion detection technology helps in matching the records in real-time and detecting the stress levels of a criminal.

SILICON has been making our computers work for almost half a century. Whether designed for graphics or number crunching, all information processing is done using a million-strong horde of tiny logic gates made from element number 14. But silicon's time may soon be up. Moore's law – the prophecy which dictates that the number of silicon transistors on microprocessors doubles every two years – is grinding to a halt because there is a limit to how many can be squeezed on a chip. The machine-learning boom is another problem. The amount of energy silicon-based computers use is set to soar as they crunch more of the massive data sets that algorithms in this field require.

BARCELONA, SPAIN – Newfound enthusiasm for the latest technologies, such as drones and smartphones, to improve the way aid is provided to people in disasters may be overblown, experts warn. The annual World Risk Report from the United Nations University (UNU) highlights the growing interest in new technologies to improve emergency response -- from drones that can survey crisis-hit areas to social media networks that allow survivors to communicate with the wider world. These can provide important information to the logisticians who organize aid delivery or health workers trying to track deadly diseases like Ebola in no-go areas, the report said. But Matthiasƒ Garschagen, a risk management expert with the UNU Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS), said it could not substitute for the basic infrastructure some countries have lacked for decades. "Too many people see technology as the main panacea for solving all the problems you have after disasters strike," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Fintech reloaded maps out a strategy showing how traditional banks should become a digital platform.

How much can a 17-year-old boy really know about women? For starters, that thousands face heartbreaking and costly misdiagnosed breast cancer scares every year. Abu Qader, who's about to start his final year in the Chicago public school system's Lane Technical College Prep High School, was born in war-scarred Afghanistan but has spent most of his 17 years on Earth in the U.S. Qader and European business partner Vedad Mesanovic, who focuses on young and under-resourced scientists, created a company they call GliaLab (named after the cells that support and protect neurons). They are now courting venture capitalists for a targeted 600,000 to help finance the breast cancer-focused artificial intelligence that Qader first created for a 10th-grade class project. Qader believes his technology can help women (and men, too) take on potentially deadly breast tumors and non-cancerous growths by using the convenience of their own mobile phone or tablet to aid in diagnosis and classification, reduce human error and save the expense of false-positive readings.