Apple's new-model, top-of-the-line MacBook Pro laptop computer could set you back nearly $4,000 before taxes. But that will seem like a Black Friday steal when a 45-year-old Apple computer goes on sale this week in Monrovia, where it may fetch six figures or more. On Tuesday, John Moran Auctioneers will auction off a functioning Apple-1 computer hand-built by Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs and others in a Los Altos, Calif., garage in 1976. The system was the rock upon which the trillion-dollar Apple empire was built. In his 2011 biography "Steve Jobs," Walter Isaacson quotes Wozniak as saying of the Apple-1: "We were participating in the biggest revolution that had ever happened, I thought. I was so happy to be a part of it."

Apple's new-model, top-of-the-line MacBook Pro laptop computer could set you back nearly $4,000 before taxes. But that will seem like a Black Friday steal when a 45-year-old Apple computer goes on sale this week in Monrovia, where it may fetch six figures or more, even without a 16-inch, high-definition screen and the latest microprocessors. On Tuesday, John Moran Auctioneers will auction off a functioning Apple-1 computer hand-built by Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs and others in a Los Altos, Calif., garage in 1976. The system was the rock upon which the trillion-dollar Apple empire was built. In his 2011 biography "Steve Jobs," Walter Isaacson quotes Wozniak as saying of the Apple-1: "We were participating in the biggest revolution that had ever happened, I thought. I was so happy to be a part of it."

WIRE)--Alation Inc., the leader in enterprise data intelligence solutions, today announced the acquisition of Lyngo Analytics, a Los Altos, Calif.-based data insights company. The acquisition will elevate the business user experience within the data catalog, scale data intelligence, and help organizations drive data culture. Lyngo Analytics CEO and co-founder Jennifer Wu and CTO and co-founder Joachim Rahmfeld will join the company. Lyngo Analytics uses a natural language interface to empower users to discover data and insights by asking questions using simple, familiar business terms. Alation offers the most intelligent and user-friendly machine-learning data catalog on the market.

Inside an ordinary-looking home, a robot suspended from the ceiling slowly expands arms holding a sponge, before carefully wiping a kitchen surface clean. Nearby, another robot gently cleans a flat-screen television, causing it to wobble slightly. The cleaning robots live inside a mock home located at the Toyota Research Institute in Los Altos, California. The institute's researchers are testing a range of robot technologies designed to help finally realize the dream of a home robot. After looking at homes in Japan, which were often small and cluttered, the researchers realized they needed a creative solution.

HeartVista is hoping to increase the use of CardiacMRI's. To achieve this goal, the Los Altos, CA-based company has developed the One Click Cardiac Package MRI software, which recently received FDA clearance. "It has been widely excepted in the clinical community and the scientific community that cardiac MRI is the gold standard for everything that you can almost do or diagnose in a cardiac setting," Itamar Kandel, HeartVista's CEO, told MD DI. "But the problem is that the actual scan itself is very complex; takes a lot of time, and takes a very high level of skill to even perform." He added, "You have this situation where the best technology is not approachable to the vast majority of the needs. The problem we came to solve is to bring this technology to the masses -to democratize Cardiac MRI." HeartVista's FDA-cleared Cardiac Package uses AI-assisted software to prescribe the standard cardiac views with just one click, and in as few as 10 seconds, while the patient breathes freely.

I love the origin stories of some of the world's technology giants. Together with Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs started the Apple empire from his parents' garage in Los Altos, California. This story has a mythic quality now because technology and talent rarely come together like they did in Silicon Valley in 1976. Flash forward to 2017, and our cities are on the cusp of a major technology revolution--artificial intelligence (AI). Workers across sectors fear that AI means that the robots are coming for their jobs.

Innovusion, a startup specialising in LiDAR sensor technology for autonomous vehicles, has raised $30m after a funding round led by Chinese Tesla-rival Nio. Nio Capital, the investment arm of the Chinese firm, led the series A round alongside venture capital firms Eight Road Ventures and F-Prime Capital, giving the sensor firm the opportunity to boost its production capacities. The funding round also included seed-stage investors. Founded in 2016, the Los Altos, California-based company makes sensor systems using LiDAR, a light detection and ranging technology which involves shining a light on a surface to measure the distance from it. "LiDAR technology is critical to accelerating the adoption and deployment of autonomous vehicles," said Junwei Bao, co-founder of Innovusion.

Artificial intelligence startup Avaamo has raised $14.2 million (about Rs 95 crore) in a series-A round of funding led by Intel Capital. Ericsson Ventures, Mahindra Partners, Wipro Ventures and WI Harper also participated in the round. The Los Altos, California and Bengaluru-based company, which specialises in conversational interfaces to solve specific enterprise problems, plans to use the funding to expand its sales and marketing. With this fundraising, the company has, so far, raised $23.5 million. "We felt we should get our ecosystem to work with us," said Avaamo CEO Ram Menon.

Journalists look at the redesigned Toyota Motor Prius plug-in hybrid vehicle, one of the automaker's electrified models (Photo: TORU YAMANAKA, AFP/Getty Images) DETROIT -- Toyota plans to spend $35 million on partnerships with universities to study ways to make better batteries for electric vehicles and test possible solutions using artificial intelligence. The Japanese automaker said the universities will also explore whether other materials, such as magnesium, could be used to make improved batteries, said Brian Storey, program manager for the Toyota Research Institute, which is based in Los Altos, Calif., but has offices in Ann Arbor and Cambridge, Mass. Today's hybrid, plug-in hybrid and battery electric vehicles are powered by lithium-ion batteries -- a technology that Storey said was invented nearly 40 years ago. "And we are just now beginning to perfect them," Storey said. The problem facing the auto industry is that existing batteries continue to be costly and have range limitations that have held back industry sales compared with cheaper, but less fuel-efficient gasoline engines.

A couple of years ago, Andy Rubin--the celebrated creator of Android and until recently the head of Google's mobile Internet efforts--helped his wife, Rie, build a bakery in a decommissioned train station in Los Altos, California. They called it Voyageur du Temps, French for time traveler. As the name suggests, the bakery conveys visitors to an earlier era--by painstakingly re-creating the flavors and textures of classic European pastry. To pull this off, the Rubins went so far as to hire chefs from Japan, where traditional baking techniques are rigorously studied, and to purchase a rare Bongard Cervap oven, one of only two on the West Coast. The project was typical Rubin, in that it involved throwing an almost comical amount of money, energy, and engineering talent at a hobby, just for the fun of it. Even at his backward- looking bakery, Rubin couldn't resist adding some forward-leaning touches. He began writing software for a "closed cash" device that could receive payment, dole out change, and log transactions without a cashier's intervention. And he built a private meeting room in the back, complete with a homemade magnetized lock system. Rubin ended up spending a lot of time in this secure sanctum, as he invited friends and colleagues to snack on croissants d'Échiré and chew over a question he had begun pondering: What should he do next?