Inc. surprised some with one of its next-gen commerce announcements. Amazon Go, which promises to eliminate the checkout altogether, generated headlines in mainstream media and prompted some to contemplate the potential demise of retail as we know it. Lost in all this hype is the fact that the brick-and-mortar apocalypse is no more likely today than it was before Amazon's recent endeavor. Of course, Amazon, which is the world's largest internet retailer, has set the standard for commerce reinvention with fast delivery, near-invisible payments and other perks tied to its Amazon Prime membership platform . Amazon has outpaced the rapid growth of digital commerce in the retail industry globally, increasing its own market share from 12% in 2011 to 19% in 2016, according to the latest data from Euromonitor International.

As a London taxi driver on the front line of the impact of driverless cars, I found Jackie Ashley's article (Driverless cars should be a major political issue, 2 January) long overdue. Many of the questions she raises are worrying. The idea that faceless corporations such as Uber are developing this technology to give it away for the greater good of mankind and the environment is questionable. Once these non-national monopolies take control, they will have the power to set the price for the job, and my bet is it will not be as cheap as Jackie predicts. Just check out the companies and individuals who have bought shares in these tech platforms, there's hardly an idealist among them.

You've probably broken the rules of just about every app you use. If you've changed your phone number and not immediately told Facebook, you're infringing the site's terms of service. Facebook's "statement of rights and responsibilities" requires its users to tell it of any change within 48 hours, as pointed out by The Guardian. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

DRONES could learn a thing or two from the birds and the bees. If an aerial robot loses a part mid-flight, you would expect it to crash. But it could stay airborne by mimicking fruit flies, which can keep flying even after a catastrophic loss of limb. To uncover the insects' secret, biologists placed flies with a clipped wing into a wind tunnel and analysed their movements using high-speed cameras. They used this data to run simulations of the flies' wing motion.

A German inventor hopes his plan to add print patterns on clothes will prevent businesses from marketing toward people based on their online activities. The new "HyperFace" technology seeks to camouflage computer users by putting patterns on clothes that would make it appear as if they had multiple eyes and mouths, which would confuse facial recognition programs, according to a Guardian report Wednesday. Companies have been able to learn about individual's spending habits by developing methods such as facial recognizing through the computer's camera. "HyperFace" hopes its imitation facial features will cloud the systems from being able to tell which faces were real and subsequently misinterpret the emotional reactions detected towards certain online products. The product was slated to hit the market in a textile print on Jan. 16, 2017 at the Sundance Film Festival, in Park City, Utah, after being in the works since 2013.

With the increased attention on fraud and cybersecurity, companies are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to strengthen fraud mitigation efforts to predict the trustworthiness or riskiness of an online transaction. In an effort to achieve the same, iovation, a provider of device-based solutions for authentication and fraud prevention, launched the iovationScore machine learning fraud prevention solution. Michael Thelander, Product Marketing Manager, iovation in an interview with Techseen discussed this new solution and the advent of machine learning in fraud detection. Thelander: iovationScore is less about "fraud detection" than it is a tool for "real-time predictive analysis." One of its uses is to provide immediate insight into how risky a device is, from the very first moment that device appears on your digital doorstep.

Developed by UK tech company Babylon, the initiative follows widespread criticism of the much-maligned hotline, which has been beset by problems. The app, initially available to people in Camden, Islington, Enfield and Barnet, will address urgent but non-life-threatening conditions. Users will be able to type details of their ailments and the artificial intelligence will ask further questions to assess their condition, while matching the responses with medical databases. According to the Financial Times, the process requires 12 messages and an average of ninety seconds to make a provisional diagnosis. In comparison, the average call time for a 111 user spanned from 10 to 12 minutes.

Amazon doesn't have an official presence at the CES gadget show in Las Vegas but its Alexa voice control software seems to be everywhere. From trash cans you can tell to reorder food to cars you can talk to, the smart assistant seems destined to appear everywhere. Dozens of firms revealed they are adding Alexa capabilities to their gadget, as amazon itself revealed the smart speaker now has over 7,000 'skills'. Amazon also today added a new one - the ability to order takeaway food. LG revealed its new Asmart fridge will use Amazon's Alexa, and is one of dozens of firms that has added the smart tech as the CES show in Las Vegas Prime members can ask Alexa to reorder from Amazon Restaurants by saying a restaurant name or cuisine type, for example, 'Alexa, order sushi from Amazon Restaurants.'

Every year, more than a billion people around the world celebrate Chinese New Year and engage in a subtle linguistic dance with luck. You can think of it as a set of holiday rituals that resemble a courtship. To lure good fortune into their lives, they may decorate their homes and doors with paper cutouts of lucky words or phrases. Those who need a haircut make sure to get one before the New Year, as the word for "hair" (fa) sounds like the word for "prosperity"--and who wants to snip away prosperity, even if it's just a trim? The menu of food served at festive meals often includes fish, because its name (yu) sounds the same as the word for "surplus"; a type of algae known as fat choy because in Cantonese it sounds like "get rich"; and oranges, because in certain regions their name sounds like the word for "luck."

When Leonid Moroz, a gregarious Russian-born neuroscientist and geneticist at the University of Florida, began studying ctenophores nearly a decade ago, he had a fairly simple goal in mind. He wanted to determine exactly where the blobby marine creatures--which are more commonly known as comb jellies because of the comb-like projections they use to swim--belonged on the tree of life. After spending several years sequencing ctenophores, Moroz and his team discovered that the animals were missing many of the genes found in the nervous system of other animals thought to be closely related, such as coral and actual jellyfish. That meant that they'd branched off on their own up to 550 million years ago and were potentially among the first animals on earth. "It was quite surprising to see," said Moroz, almost like stumbling on a group of aliens living in the sea.