A slowdown in tech start-up funding has at least one big beneficiary: Walt Disney Co.'s video games division. The entertainment giant is having an easier time finding partners with whom it can develop mobile games, one of its top executives said last week. Why? Up-and-coming companies are losing access to the cash needed to launch games on their own. "As the venture money has dried up and exits have slowed down and valuations have come down, larger game developers that have one or two hits [but not a big stable of them] are now open to work with us in co-development," said Chris Heatherly, senior vice president and general manager at Disney Mobile Games. The comments came during a discussion last week at the L.A. Games Conference with Michael Metzger of investment bank Houlihan Lokey.

Auckland-based software developer Touchpoint Group has launched a new artificial intelligence program, designed to help companies better understand customer behaviours. Labelled Ipiphany, it is the first cognitive analytics program in the world to be able to simultaneously "learn" from combinations of customer information collected via text, machine learning and natural language processing. Launched following a three-year cognitive behaviour research project by data scientists in Australia and New Zealand, the research allowed Touchpoint Group to develop a cloud-based solution designed to deliver faster insight compared to traditional research methodologies. Formed in Auckland in 2001, Touchpoint is one of the region's leading developer of customer engagement software across industries including banking, insurance, and utilities, and already provides solutions for many of the largest banking and financial services companies. Touchpoint Group CEO Frank van der Velden believes Ipiphany could "dramatically improve" the financial returns from existing investments in "customer data" made by large companies.

Golfers in Japan will soon be able to get drinks, snacks, and other products delivered to them by drone while they're out on the course. Rakuten, a major Japanese shopping portal, will launch the drone delivery service in May at a course in Chiba, to the east of Tokyo. Golfers will be able to order from a menu of roughly 100 items through a dedicated Android app, and each drone delivery will be limited to 2kgs of goods. The service will be offered daily from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. and suspended during bad weather. To operate the service, Rakuten has a dedicated drone depot where an operator will pack the goods and set the delivery location.

Professor Toby Walsh, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of New South Wales will be giving a lecture on the future of robotics tomorrow at UCT. Professor Walsh is currently on the Executive Council of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and an advocate of the'Campaign to Stop Killer Robots'. He is also Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. John Maytham speaks to Professor Walsh to find out more about the lecture he will be delivering, and the interesting subject of artificial intelligence. AI is trying to build computers to do things that we would normally think of as intelligent and its starting to pervade our lives. He says artificial intelligence is starting to take over more aspects of the things humans do.

Artificial intelligence and UAVs are two emerging technologies with big potential. Due to the continual breakthroughs in semiconductors, natural language processing, and other technologies, some scientists think that AI could eclipse human intelligence as soon as 2029. Given the improvements in weight reduction and battery technology, many investors believe UAVs could do everything from powering Internet connections to delivering products quickly over the next decade too. Given the two technologies' potential, it isn't surprising that Chevron (NYSE: CVX) has big plans for artificial intelligenceand UAV technology for its future. Let's explore in more detail.

For people living in a world without sound, sign language can make sure their points of view are heard. But outside of the deaf and hard-of-hearing communities, this gesture-based language can lose its meaning. Now a pair of entrepreneurial technology students in the US has designed a pair of gloves to break down the communication barriers, by translating hand gestures into speech. US inventors have designed a pair of gloves, called'SignAloud', which translate the gestures of sign language to spoken English. The gloves (pictured) use embedded sensors to monitor the position and movement of the user's hands, while a central computer analyses the data and converts gestures to speech Called'SignAloud', the gloves use embedded sensors to monitor the position and movement of the user's hands.

Parry Malm: I studied computer science in university, and worked coding CRM software starting in 1999, so the idea of the importance of customer data is native to me. When I led a global marketing team for a FTSE250 publisher, I sent out millions of emails, and I was always perplexed as to why one worked, and why one didn't. "Here's a secret about email marketers: most of them hate writing subject lines." Because it's surprisingly hard, and it's an imperfect process, and if your subject line sucks then all your effort on the rest of the email has been a waste of time. Previous to Phrasee, marketers would just stick their finger in the air.

The 2016 Summer Movie Preview is a snapshot of the films opening through early September. Release dates and other details, as compiled by Kevin Crust, are subject to change. The view of Earth from space and the information it reveals about humanity's effect on the planet are examined in this large-format science documentary. Business suddenly picks up for a London kosher baker when his young Muslim apprentice accidentally drops a stash of pot into the mixer. Written by Yehudah Jez Freedman and Jonathan Benson. The kidnapping of a beloved kitty forces two naive cousins to infiltrate a street gang. Written by Peele & Alex Rubens. In 1913 Cambridge, England, a young Indian math genius joins forces with an eccentric professor. Written and directed by Matthew Brown. Written by Lily Hollander, Anya Kochoff Romano. After an auto accident, a young woman finds herself in a life at odds with the one she remembers. Written by Doc Pedrolie and Victoria Arch. The famous writer's downward spiral is witnessed by a young reporter during the revolution. With Minka Kelly, Giovanni Ribisi, Joely Richardson, Adrian Sparks. A lonely lombax and a tiny robot team with the Galactic Rangers to save their world in this animated adventure.

Justin Sullivan/GettyEatsa is San Francisco's fully automated fast food restaurant where orders appear in a cubby. At San Francisco's first fully automated restaurant, meals appear in little glass cubbies, just 90 seconds after customers order and pay on wall-mounted iPads. It's a human-less experience – no waitstaff, no cashier, no one to get your order wrong and no one to tip. The moment before the meal appears, the see-through display screen that fronts the cubbies goes black for the few seconds when you might catch sight of the hand that feeds you. Eatsa has not yet achieved total automation.

Tens of thousands of geeked out video game fans from across the globe are flooding this weekend's PAX East festival -- dubbed the "Woodstock for gamers" -- to try their hand at the latest virtual reality tech. "I would never miss PAX for the world," said Carly Monson of Belmont, who turned up to the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center decked out as Flammie from the 1993 Nintendo game "Secret of Mana." The annual gamer expo's big draw this year, attendees told the Herald, is the chance to sample the soon-to-be-released virtual reality headsets and mind-bending VR games that industry insiders predict will change the way video games are played forever. "It's kind of like a Woodstock for gamers," said Robert Khoo, president of Penny Arcade, the group behind the mega event. In addition to the wildly popular state-of-the-art virtual reality headsets, gamers stood in line for hours to play unreleased video games, test out the latest gadgets and compete in ultra-competitive tournaments.