Following a recall of some of its Shield tablets last week, Nvidia published solid second quarter financial results after the bell on Thursday. Non-GAAP earnings were 34 cents per share on a revenue of $1.153 billion, up five percent year-over-year. Wall Street was looking for earnings of 10 cents per share with $1.01 billion in revenue. Nvidia highlighted revenue growth for two verticals in particular: gaming and automotive tech. The GeForce GTX GPU series alone -- primarily utilized for sports gaming titles -- is touted to now have an estimated 130 million viewers. The GeForce Experience PC gaming platform has also grown to 65 million users, up from 38 million a year earlier.

Neura has announced plans to make its personal artificial intelligence (AI) service and ecosystem commercially available after successfully raising $11 million in a Series A funding round. The funding round was led by AXA Strategic Ventures and existing investor Pitango Venture Capital, and was joined by Liberty Israel Venture Fund and Lenovo Group. Speaking to ZDNet, Neura CEO Gilad Meiri said just shy of launching the company three years ago, the company is now ready to make its AI ecosystem commercially available. "What we're going to do is putting it on the shelf and inviting the world to use it, and that obviously requires a different level of infrastructure, scale, security, and customer support, so the money is mainly geared towards that," he said. Neura has developed technology based on data collected from human behaviours, and plans to make the information accessible to help enhance apps and devices through personalisation.

With the deluge of reports lately on how robots are replacing humans at everyday tasks, you may think the end of the world, at least for a certain category of human workers, is nigh. Indeed that may well be the case in certain professions. The Associated Press, for instance, has a team of robots that generates 3,000 news reports about the quarterly earnings releases of companies. This Japanese hotel that I wrote about recently is staffed entirely with robots. The paralegal may soon be a position of the past as law firms commission bots to sift through vast reams of legal information and synthesise them.

Every decade or so, a new era of computing comes along that shapes everything we do. Much of the 90s was about client-server and Windows PCs. By the aughts, the Web had taken over and every advertisement carried a URL. Then came the iPhone, and we're in the midst of a decade defined by people tapping myopically into tiny screens. So what comes next, when mobile gives way to something else?

It's already sorting your email and translating your voice searches, and machine learning will play a bigger role in Google's services moving forward. Google's parent company, Alphabet, reported its quarterly financial results Thursday, with revenue and profit both up from a year earlier. New Google CEO Sundar Pichai took part in his first earnings call, and in between discussing the numbers he revealed how important Google thinks machine learning is to its future. "Machine learning is a core, transformative way by which we're rethinking everything we're doing," he said. He was putting the spotlight on a branch of artificial intelligence that's getting more attention lately.

A Toronto-based content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform is boosting its big data capabilities with the acquisition of a New York City-based influence analytics marketing platform. ScribbleLive announced its acquisition on Wednesday of Appinions Inc., developers of an influence analytics marketing platform that is built on natural language processing and social network analysis technology. The vendor says combining ScribbleLive's data centric content workflow and publishing platform with Appinions' deep data technology will create an even more powerful content marketing platform for data-driven marketers. Toronto-based web platform creators Scribble Technologies Inc. has acquired another well-known live publishing platform in CoveritLive from California-based Demand Media. "By enabling over 500 brands such as Red Bull, PwC and Oracle to serve up the right content at the right time in the right place online, ScribbleLive has been validated as the platform for planning, creating and distributing content," said Vince Mifsud, CEO of ScribbleLive, in a statement.

Writing basic stats from a sporting event or the latest stock prices can be a tedious assignment for journalists. "Neothetics Inc. (NEOT) on Thursday reported a loss of $6.9 million in its first quarter. The San Diego-based company said it had a loss of 50 cents per share. Neothetics shares have decreased 16 percent since the beginning of the year." This is important information for someone with stock in the pharmaceutical company Neothetics, but not very useful to a mass audience. These basic stories can become a waste of time and resources for news outlets, especially a wire service such as the Associated Press.

Google has acquired a University of Toronto startup to improve its speech and object recognition research, the university announced this week. DNNresearch, incorporated in 2012 by computer science professor Geoffrey Hinton and two of his graduate students, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever, focuses on speech recognition, computer vision and language understanding. It has developed a system that "dramatically improved the state of the art in object recognition," according to the university's media release. The three-person team also received a $600,000 grant earlier from Google's Focused Research Awards, which support research in computer science and engineering. The announcement makes DNNresearch the 9th Canadian company acquired by the search giant.

Remember the cute Anki Drive demo from WWDC? Well what you might have missed is that the toy car racing game was just a front for a hardcore robotics artificial intelligence startup that could let machines understand exactly where they are in the physical world. Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, and Two Sigma see the potential, as they've invested a total of $50 million Series A and Series B funding to help Anki launch in the fall. Video games have long had computer-controlled players. They're the bots you shoot, dribble around, or race against. But they existed solely in the digital world.

Self-driving cars that allow drivers to take their hands and minds completely off the road won't come cheap if they go on sale in the next decade or two. But a Dutch and Israeli company called Mobileye envisions its relatively inexpensive driver assistance technology becoming widespread by 2016. Mobileye has raised $400 million to back its development of semi-autonomous driving technology in partnership with automakers such as General Motors, BMW, and Volvo. The company, valued at $1.5 billion, aims to deploy technology that can take over for drivers during stop-and-go traffic or handle long stretches of highway driving--features that won't cost nearly as much as Google's famous self-driving cars, according to the New York Times: "In some ways, the goal is not dissimilar to the already famous Google driverless cars, though the search giant's systems allow for completely hands-off driving. But Mobileye is aiming to get most of the functionality into cars for much less, with fewer cameras and computer equipment that cost hundreds of dollars, rather than the tens of thousand of dollars that Google's array of sensors is estimated to cost at the moment."