Microsoft has reported strong Q3 results that beat analyst expectations, with revenues of $26.8 billion, up 16 percent year on year, or 13 percent in constant currency. Productivity and business processes revenues were up 14 percent at $9 billion; Office 365 commercial products and cloud services revenue grew 12 percent overall; Intelligent Cloud revenues hit $7.9 billion, up 15 percent year on year, while Azure revenues saw growth of 93 percent – having logged over over 90 percent growth for ten consecutive quarters. CEO Satya Nadella hailed the results, and suggested that AI, intelligence, edge computing, and the IoT stand at the core of the company's repositioning in recent years – which has taken place under his leadership. "It was another strong quarter, the result of picking the right secular trends," he said. "The intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge era is already upon us. It represents a tremendous opportunity. We took significant steps this quarter to put this at the forefront of everything we do, realigning our entire engineering organisation to accelerate innovation and better serve the needs of customers and partners."

On March 1, 2018, the Company acquired processing prepaid platform, servers, POS terminals, customer list, a processing software program from ECS Prepaid LLC. The core asset of ECS is its processing software program, which Gopher intends to marry immediately into the prior acquisition of the UGO HUB and the UGO brand of products. ECS PrePaid's core operating system currently operates over 9,000 terminals in retail locations throughout the United States. These terminals process over 14,000 transactions a day and have capacity to entertain at least three times its current volume, without further software expense. This platform generated approximately $32 million in revenue for the year ended December 31, 2017 (unaudited), approximately $4.2 million for the month of January 2018 (unaudited) and approximately $4.3 for the month of February 2018 (unaudited).

Deep ocean robotics is not generally an area where we expect to see much in the way of significant innovation. When we do write about submersible robots, they're usually confined to very near-surface operations. This isn't a total surprise: It seems like the only people who really worry about what's going on in the deep ocean (meaning hundreds or thousands of meters beneath the surface) are the military, the occasional scientist, and the oil and gas industry. Robots are important to these folks, even critical in some cases, but the technology has been more or less stagnant for decades, which is why we don't write about it very frequently. To be fair, there are some very good reasons why it's hard to innovate when it comes to submersible robotics.

Google parent company Alphabet reported first quarter earnings for 2018 today, beating Wall Street estimates on sales and profit thanks in large part to its mammoth search advertising machine that continues to grow year after year. But one interesting highlight from the earnings announcement was just how much money the company's smart home company Nest earns in revenue and reports in losses. Because Nest was rolled back into Google proper earlier this year, Alphabet recast its quarterly earnings figures for 2017 to account for the fact that Nest revenues and losses would be moved from the "Other Bets" section of Alphabet's business to the standard Google revenue line item. Comparing the differences in quarterly revenues and operating income, we can see that Nest made about $726 million in revenue, yet it ultimately contributed a $621 million loss to the "Other Bets" section throughout the year. In other words, Google spent more than half a billion dollars last year to establish Nest in sectors like security cameras, alarm systems, and video doorbells.

The S&P 500 tech sector, up 1.8% in 2018, is still among the best-performing groups in the broader index. But more than a third of the 69 stocks in the sector have declined in 2018, the most for any full year since 2011. In 2017, only six of them had lost ground. The divisions are likely to come into sharper focus as more tech-focused companies report financial results in the coming days. With valuations already stretched by traditional measures, investors are contemplating which companies warrant the higher multiples that typically come with the tech label.

YouTube parent company Google on Monday released what it said would be the first quarterly report outlining efforts to enforce its community guidelines. The report, which looked at the last quarter of 2017, said that it removed eight million videos from YouTube during the quarter, adding that the videos it removed "were mostly spam or people attempting to upload adult content." Of note, however, is that YouTube's machine-learning algorithm spotted the overwhelming majority of the content. During the company's quarterly earnings call Monday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that "over six million videos removed in Q4 were first flagged by our machine systems, and over 75% of those videos were removed before receiving a single view." The company introduced its machine flagging in June, 2017.

Alphabet, Google's parent company, is spending like it is beginning to prepare for life after advertising. Currently, Alphabet makes nearly 90 percent of its money from selling advertising on the internet, and gobbles up heaps of data about its users to help marketers target those ads more effectively. But a close reading of Alphabet's financial results for the first quarter of 2018, which were announced on Monday, showed that the Silicon Valley giant is accelerating its efforts to diversify into other businesses. Alphabet has made investments in areas like self-driving cars and online computer services for businesses for years, but spending in those areas was up dramatically in the first quarter. The company's capital expenditures, which included installing undersea cables and the construction of new data centers, were $7.7 billion -- more than triple the same period last year.

Net profit jumped 73% to $9.4 billion in the first quarter, up from $5.4 billion in the same period last year, a performance that highlights the firm's huge lead in the global market for online ads. The earnings growth was Alphabet's strongest since the fourth quarter of 2009. Advertising revenue, which accounts for nearly all of the company's top line, soared 24% to $26.6 billion. Revenue from "Other Bets," a segment which includes Waymo self-driving cars, totaled $150 million, an increase of 14% from the same period last year. The results landed while regulators in Washington are considering getting tougher on internet privacy.

The EU has launched a formal investigation into Apple's proposed acquisition of UK music-recognition app Shazam. The European commission announced its in-depth investigation into the deal over concerns that it would harm consumer choice and give Apple an unfair advantage through access to user data, which could aid in poaching customers from rivals. Shazam has been downloaded 1bn times and is used 20m times a day. It is the world's leading music recognition system, able to listen to and identify tracks via a smartphone and then link those tracks to multiple music subscription services, which means it could therefore hold commercially sensitive data on Apple's competitors and their consumers. Noting that Apple Music has become the second-largest music streaming service in Europe, the EC said: "Access to such data could allow Apple to directly target its competitors' customers and encourage them to switch to Apple Music. As a result, competing music streaming services could be put at a competitive disadvantage."

Can Artificial Intelligence replace lawyers? Perhaps sometime in the distant future, but in the meantime AI is already augmenting the work done by legal professionals as startups race to reach that ultimate goal. One burgeoning player in the AI-powered legal tech space is Tel Aviv-based LawGeex, which has developed automated contract review technology to help companies sift through things like NDAs, supply agreements, purchase orders, and SaaS licenses, to ensure they're aren't any unsanctioned legal gotchas buried deep in legalise. Today, the company is announcing that it has closed $12 million in new investment. Led by VC fund Aleph, with participation from previous backers, including Lool Ventures, the new round of funding will be used by LawGeex to further develop its product, and build a bigger presence in the U.S. where it recently opened a New York office. It brings the startup's total funding to date to $21.5 million.