Small drones are inefficient birds. They fly for short bursts of time, and get thrown about in the wind. That's not great for anyone hoping to use a drone as a hovering sentry, but there's a better way: tethers. Put a leash on a drone, and suddenly it's a flexible flying watchdog, able to peek up high and then recharge safely in its mechanical nest. This is Aerovironment's Tether Eye, a quadcopter promising 24 hour surveillance from a height of 150 feet, all in one tidy box.

Supporters of the slain Taliban chief have held funeral prayers across Pakistan for Mullah Akhtar Mansour, killed in a U.S. drone attack last week. Some 400 Jamaat-ud Dawa members held the ceremony Friday in the northwestern city of Peshawar. Similar ceremonies were also held in Quetta, Hyderabad and Karachi. Jamaat-ud Dawa is a terror organization widely believed to be front group for Lashkar-e-Taiba, blamed for the 2008 attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai. The funeral prayers took place even though Mansour's body is still in the hands of Pakistani authorities for DNA testing.

Ever since Gerard Salton of Cornell University developed the first computerized search engine (Salton's Magical Automatic Retriever of Text, or SMART) in the 1960s, search developers have spent decades essentially refining Salton's idea: take a query string, match it against a collection of documents, then calculate a set of relevant results and display them in a list. All of today's major Internet search engines--including Google, Amazon, and Bing--continue to follow Salton's basic blueprint. Yet as the Web has evolved from a loose-knit collection of academic papers to an ever-expanding digital universe of apps, catalogs, videos, and cat GIFs, users' expectations of search results have shifted. Today, many of us have less interest in sifting through a collection of documents than in getting something done: booking a flight, finding a job, buying a house, making an investment, or any number of other highly focused tasks. Meanwhile, the Web continues to expand at a dizzying pace.

Gravity, her forthcoming EP (due out May 27th on Universal Germany) and moody first single, explores a familiar theme: the push and pull of an irresistible lover. But this being a Simonne Jones' joint, that heartache is wrapped in a blanket of industrial beats and physics-based metaphor. "You've set me in motion / The stars are blurs around the sun / The push and pull, the force of your body / Closer you get, I'm overcome / Bound by attraction / Floating on axis / Around your atlas / You're holding me like gravity, all around." In less skilled hands, this scientific approach to lyrical matters of the heart could've come off as ham-handed, and run the risk of alienating listeners from the song's emotional content by shoehorning it within dense concepts. Yet, it succeeds, lending to the seductive timbre of Jones' soft voice, because this is how her mind works.

Google Home is an always-on speaker coming later this year. LOS ANGELES - We know that Big Brother has been watching our every move for years--but are you ready to have your home conversations monitored as well? Following on the footsteps of Amazon's smash Echo connected speaker, which reads the weather and news, plays music, and turns lights on and off, based on your voice instructions, Google is set to launch its rival product, Google Home, later this year. And this week reports surfaced saying Apple could be joining the fray with its own speaker featuring the Siri personal digital assistant from the iPhone. Which begs the question--how do you feel about buying a connected speaker for the kitchen that could listen to every word you're saying?

These are just a few of the dozens of phrases that were created as part of rebranding efforts to cut down on the fear and hesitation that artificial intelligence (AI) has inspired in the past. But despite past expressions of reluctance in regards to artificial intelligence, AI is back and it's here to stay. Companies are clamoring for predictive and prescriptive analytics engines. And a day doesn't go by without news of another learning or advanced reasoning system that is executing on a task better than humans. The emergence of these intelligent systems and the ever-increasing hype around them has led to companies' trying to figure out their own AI strategy.

Designers will succeed programmers as the kings of Silicon Valley, machines will become as smart as humans, and ambient computing will supplant smartphones in the next few years. Those are three of the top 10 trends coming in technology, according to five venture capitalists who made their predictions Wednesday night at a local Silicon Valley institution. The Top 10 Tech Trends event has been held annually for the past 18 years by the Churchill Club, which hosts forums with tech's top executives, financiers, entrepreneurs, and thinkers. The criteria for the trends are that they must not be obvious and that they will take off within five years, though both rules are frequently broken. Few of the predictions directly involved traditional enterprise computing, which customarily is focused on the nearer-term trends, but virtually all of them are enabled by heavyweight enterprise technologies.

The Dogo from General Robotics is a portable, tactical combat robot. The big difference is that the Dogo is armed with a 9mm Glock pistol. Dogo weighs 26 pounds and can to climb stairs and other obstacles. It trundles along at 2.5 miles an hour for at least two hours on one battery charge. The operator gets a 360-degree view of the surroundings via six video cameras, while another two cameras are sighted along the pistol barrel.

Earlier this year, consulting firm Frost & Sullivan predicted that artificial intelligence in healthcare will see a "dramatic market expansion" in the next couple of years, with the potential to reduce the cost of medical treatments by half across the board. "By 2025, AI systems could be involved in everything from population health management, to digital avatars capable of answering specific patient queries," said Harpreet Singh Buttar, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan. With this in mind, we identified companies that are already applying machine learning techniques and predictive analytics to reduce drug discovery times, provide virtual assistance to patients, and diagnose ailments by processing medical images, among other things. We published the market map below in April 2016 and updated it on 5/24/2016, adding over 35 companies to it and removing ones that exited, like MetaMind, which was recently acquired by Salesforce. The startups below have raised more than 870M in aggregate funding since 2011.

Mountain View, California - Alphabet's Google unveiled its answer to Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant along with new messaging and virtual reality products at its annual I/O developer conference on Wednesday, doubling down on artificial intelligence and machine learning as the keys to its future. Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai introduced Google Assistant, a virtual personal assistant, along with the tabletop speaker appliance Google Home. He also unveiled Allo, a new messaging service that will compete with Facebook's WhatsApp and Messenger products and feature a chatbot powered by the Google Assistant. Allo, like WhatsApp, will also have end-to-end encryption when it is rolled out this summer. Amazon's Echo, a surprise hit that has other tech giants racing to match it, uses a virtual assistant called Alexa, a cloud-based system that controls the Echo speaker and responds to voice-controlled commands by users.