HTC may have taken a bolder approach in the smartphone world with its new U Ultra and U Play, but it's decided to play it safe with its roadmap for the rest of the year. After today's launch event in Taipei, I caught up with President of Smartphone and Connected Devices Business, Chialin Chang, who confirmed that HTC will only be releasing six to seven smartphones this year. While that's a drastic cut from last year's eleven to twelve models, he claims this has so far allowed the company to focus on its smartphones' core features, in a bid to put up a better fight against other brands. In the case of the two newest phones, Chang sees machine learning as their main selling point. The exec described the so-called Sense Companion virtual assistant as a combination of Google's Awareness API, device information and third-party data.

Disruption: it's the death knell for enterprises averse to change but the sweet capriccio of opportunity for visionary, built-to-last companies. This is largely because the technology-driven disruption that has created the current market conditions thrives on agility and a willingness to change. Generally, large companies are averse to change, and instead focus on stability and efficiency. This may be beneficial to shareholders in the near- and intermediate-term, but does not always translate into sustained market leadership. Organizations that embrace the disruption, on the other hand, can deliver new innovative solutions to open new markets and create new business models, while outpacing the slow-to-adopt companies reluctant to transformation.

SEEK is using machine learning and artificial intelligence to send its users more relevant job advertisements and alerts. Norway switches off its FM radio network this week, but other nations have abandoned similar plans. James Fairfax, the philanthropist and former chairman of John Fairfax & Sons, has died, aged 83, at his home in Bowral. Facebook has launched its own'Journalism Project' in an attempt to better engage with news organisations. Communications Minister Mitch Fifield is expected to woo the crossbench on media regulation.

After a decline in 2015, U.S. patenting activity rose to a record high in 2016. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted 304,126 patents last year, up from 298,407 in 2015. The increase was largely driven by West Coast technology companies, including Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Boeing, IBM, Intel, Google, and Microsoft. According to a 24/7 Wall St. analysis of data provided by Information for Industry (IFI) Claims Patent Services, Korean conglomerate Samsung Electronics was granted the most patents in 2016. Including its major subsidiaries, Samsung was awarded more than 8,500 patents, slightly higher than IBM's 8,088 awarded patents.

Fresh off making some bold promises about self-driving cars and setting a US sales record, Audi built on a very good 2017 this week by lighting things up at the Detroit auto show. As in, it showed off a new headlight technology. Too bad the "Matrix Laser" system, which debuted as part of Audi's Q8 concept SUV and does everything from highlighting pedestrians to auto-dimming for the sake on oncoming cars, isn't welcome in the US. This tech is Audi's latest push the reinvent the way drivers see the world around them, and its future-heavy name is actually accurate. "Each headlight uses a single laser as the light source, but the beam is broken into a million distinct pixels by the diodes," says Volker Kaese, Audi's director of innovation.

A Samsung fridge with built-in cameras means you can check if you need milk while your at the grocery store. If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. Our picks and opinions are independent from any business incentives. More appliance manufacturers than ever before are advertising "smart" connectivity, promising convenience features like remote control, automatic supply replenishment, or intelligent energy consumption. Each company also has its own word-soup of apps, standards, modules, hubs, and brands that might make the appliance smarter, but can certainly make a layman feel dumb.

The UK is one step closer to a super-fast transport system after four potential routes have been short-listed fro Elon Musk's Hyperloop One project. The US start-up has disclosed a list of 35 routes in locations around the world vying to put near-supersonic rail transit system to the test. In the UK, four routes have been picked, that could see lines built from London to Edinburgh, Liverpool to Hull, Glasgow to Cardiff or a'Northern Arc' across a series of northern cities. The London-Edinburgh scheme was led by an Edinburgh University team that has plans to take the route via Birmingham and Manchester. If selected, it would mean travelling between the two capital cities would take just 45 minutes, and the journey from London to Manchester would take only 18 minutes.

How do you combine historical Big Data with machine learning for real-time analytics? An approach is outlined with different software vendors, business use cases, and best practices. "Big Data" has gained a lot of momentum recently. Vast amounts of operational data are collected and stored in Hadoop and other platforms on which historical analysis is conducted. Business intelligence tools and distributed statistical computing are used to find new patterns in this data and gain new insights and knowledge for a variety of use cases: promotions, up- and cross-sell campaigns, improved customer experience, or fraud detection.

One of the newer technologies getting buzz these days is the voice-enabled digital assistant – and new data from Accenture [pdf] suggests that it's not all hype. In fact, the use of embedded voice-enabled digital assistants in smartphones and PC/laptops has reached the mainstream among 14-17-year-olds, per Accenture's survey of almost 26,000 consumers across 26 countries. The results indicate that 31% of 14-17-year-olds regularly use voice-enabled digital assistants, with another 20% just getting started using them. Adoption – not surprisingly – declines with age, but still remains above one-third (38%) of Millennials (18-34) and higher than one-quarter (27%) of Gen Xers (35-54). Although only 15% of Boomers (55) are currently using voice-enabled digital assistants, another 35% are interested in doing so.

The Internet of Things still mostly feels like the Internet of Crap, but there's one ray of hope in the connected home on which plenty of companies are jumping aboard: Amazon's Alexa. In particular, I'm talking about the voice-powered ecosystem that's quickly grown around the company's virtual assistant. At CES, we saw Alexa integration in Dish's upcoming Hopper, washing machines and, much to our delight, a dancing robot. It's even heading outside the home: Both Ford and Volkswagen are bringing Alexa to their cars for hands-free commands. In a little over two years, Alexa has gone from being a baffling product (a connected speaker from Amazon, really?!) to an essential feature for any connected device.