Banks of the future will stop selling customers products they don't need and will focus on doing one product well, according to Starling Banks' Anne Boden. Speaking at WIRED Money 2016, Boden said: "Nowadays, we have the big banks with lots of products with lots of customer groups and lots of different channels trying to own the whole experience. "I don't believe a startup bank can beat big banks. You need to focus and do one thing really well; 20 times better than everyone else to give people a reason to bank with you." Starling is a challenger bank building data-driven current accounts controlled from smartphones. It was created in January 2014 and is due to launch within the next three months. In January this year, it received 70 million ( 48 million) in investment. Prior to founding Starling, Boden was CEO of Allied Irish Banks and head of Emea, global transaction banking across 34 countries for RBS and ABN AMRO. She has more than 30 years' experience in banking, having begun her career at Lloyds Bank, before moving on to Standard Chartered Bank and then UBS in Zurich. "I took a year out recently to discuss what is happening in the banking industry," added Boden. "I spent time talking to people involved in Fintech and a lot of the things I took for granted, and that I thought were a given, weren't true at all.

Australia, we hear, is a big place. All that space is nice to have if you're raising cattle, except for the fact that you've got to keep track of them all somehow. For ranchers, this is a lot of work, and for cattle, it means that they don't get checked on very regularly. This would be a good opportunity for robots to step in and offer some assistance, but the problem is most robots would be crazy to try getting themselves around the kind of terrain that Australia is made of. In order to tackle the hills, dales, fields, cliffs, rivers, swamps, crocodiles, platypuses, echidnas, koalas, quolls, emus, kangaroos, wallabies, wombats, and dingoes (to name just a few common obstacles in Australia), researchers from the Australian Centre for Field Robotics at the University of Sydney led by Dr. Salah Sukkarieh have designed and tested an all-terrain robot called SwagBot that's designed to be able to drive over almost anything while helping humans manage their ranchland.

Chat bots have ballooned in popularity in recent months, and now we're seeing some interesting examples of how that technology, where computers interact and respond to human requests, is being used to solve other problems. Today, Zendesk is taking the wraps off "Automatic Answers", a service for businesses to reply to emails from customers without ever having a human employee get involved. Automatic Answers is not your average, run-of-the mill email autoresponder. The service was built using a machine learning platform that Zendesk's in-house teams of data scientists and engineers, which are based out of Melbourne, Australia, have been developing on for a while now. That machine learning platform was first announced last year and it also powers a service Zendesk announced last October, Satisfaction Prediction, which is able to monitor customer-company interactions to -- as its name implies -- determine whether the customer is getting what she or he needs. The machine learning/AI element means that the responses in Automatic Answers are not only reading and responding specifically to what you the customer is asking, but it is technically getting smarter with each response (and presumably using a bit of Satisfaction Prediction to figure out if it's getting it right).

Eye in the Sky Superbly acted, this nail-biter starring Helen Mirren, the late Alan Rickman and Aaron Paul is a fully involving war drama about the new rules of engagement. Hunt for the Wilderpeople This wonderful New Zealand film has a gently absurdist quality, a simultaneously sweet and subversive sensibility all its own, mixing warmth, adventure and comedy in ways that consistently surprise. The Innocents Anne Fontaine's post-World War II drama involving a Polish convent and a French female doctor proves yet again that though moral and spiritual questions may not sound spellbinding, they often provide the most absorbing movie experiences. The Jungle Book By turns sweetly amusing and scarily unnerving, crammed with story, song and computer-generated visual splendors, this revisiting of the old Rudyard Kipling tales aims to be a model of modern crowd-pleasing entertainment. Life, Animated A remarkable documentary about how Disney animated features changed the life of a young autistic boy in a deep and profound way.

Humans have been farming for thousands of years since the first crops were planted and animals began being domesticated during the Mesolithic era. But technology could soon be squeezing us out of our traditional roles as farmers, as robots take to the fields. A robot that is capable of herding cattle and pulling trailers through the mud has gone on trial at a farm in Australia while another capable of pick broccoli six times faster than humans is being tested in Britain. SwagBot, an Australian farming machine, can herd cattle and pull trailers through mud, is being developed at the University of Sydney. At the same time, the University of Lincoln is building and testing a robot that can pick broccoli six times faster than humans. It can identify broccoli in fields with up to 95 per cent accuracy, the researchers say.

With a pocketful of savings, Melbourne entrepreenur Michelle Mannering and three fellow founders are busy building a platform utilising artificial intelligence to make the world a smarter and better place. As a hacker-in-residence at Carlton Connect and a participant in the Melbourne Accelerator Program, Mannering and her team are one of the first residents in Melbourne's new "melting pot" for innovation. "My co-founders and I all met at a bunch of different hackathons," Mannering tells StartupSmart. Just a year after meeting, the team has launched Black AI, a startup offering a platform that is developing machine learning computer vision. "Basically, we just teach computers how to understand and interpret the world," Mannering says.

A new startup factory focused on building artificial intelligence companies is launching in Hong Kong this November. Zeroth, as the accelerator is known, will offer 10 startups 20,000 each ( 15,000) in exchange for a 6% equity stake. Startups will also receive mentoring and office space. The accelerator is being launched by Tak Lo, who was previously a director at accelerator TechStars London. Speaking to Business Insider on Tuesday, Lo said that he plans to make Zeroth a success with the help of his AI connections in Europe.

Swagbot can herd cows, tow heavy trailers, and traverse rugged terrain and has been designed to manage livestock on Australia's vast sheep and cattle stations, which are often remote and difficult to access. A trial which began last month has confirmed that SwagBot is able to herd cattle, and can navigate its way around ditches, logs, swamps, and other features of a typical farm landscape. The next step will be to teach the robot how to identify animals that are sick or injured, says Salah Sukkarieh of the University of Sydney, who is leading the trial. "The trial has been very successful so far, so it's given us the confidence to move to the next phase," he says. His team is planning to fit the robot with temperature and motion sensors to detect changes in body temperature and walking gait, as well as colour and shape sensors to make sure the animals have enough pasture to graze on.

Southfield, MI, June 2016 – Stefanini, a 1B global IT provider, announced today that the company is launching Sophie, its artificial intelligence platform with the ability to turn data into valuable solutions. Aware of the latest trends, Stefanini has invested and developed this platform over the last 3 years as a Research & Development and pilot project for clients in Brazil, and now, the company is launching the platform in the United States. "We are very proud to introduce Sophie for our clients in North America, reinforcing Stefanini's commitment to connect people and technology innovations with a goal to create business value," said Antonio Moreira, Stefanini CEO, North America and Asia Pacific. "Our artificial intelligence platform can improve the end-user experience and deliver smarter and more efficient services," affirmed Mr. Moreira. Technology research firm Gartner forecasts that by 2017, autonomics-based managed services and cognitive platforms will fuel a significant reduction in the cost of IT services by automating repetitive tasks currently tackled by humans.

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