Online CRM and enterprise applications provider Salesforce.com has been snapping up different companies, small and large, in a series of acquisitions over the past nine months. The deals have added a range of capabilities to the company's existing portfolio, including cloud-based word processing, quote-price-configure software, and e-commerce. But most of the acquisitions focus on analytics, machine learning, and deep learning. CEO Marc Benioff has said that enterprise software and other systems that can analyze data and recommend the right course of action (that is, smarter and more predictive software) will shape the future of business software. At a Forbes CIO event in March, Benioff said, "This will be the huge shift going forward, which is that everybody wants systems that are smarter. Everybody wants systems that are more predictive, everybody wants everything scored, everybody wants to understand what's the next best offer, next best opportunity, how to make things a little bit more efficient."

Microsoft has acquired Genee, a startup that provided a virtual assistant for scheduling appointments. The deal, announced Tuesday, will bring the Genee team into the Microsoft fold and put them to work on bringing intelligence into Office 365. Genee's service lets users loop in an artificial intelligence assistant that could interpret sentences like "set up lunch at some point this week" and turn them into calendar appointments. Acquiring Genee is part of Microsoft's ongoing crusade to build intelligent productivity software and services using AI. The company has focused on that area under the tenure of CEO Satya Nadella, with features like Office Delve, which finds documents shared within an organization that are relevant to a user, and Focused Inbox in Outlook, which filters unimportant email into a separate tab so it's not cluttering a user's experience. The Genee service will be shutting down on Sept. 1 as part of the deal.

Microsoft acquires AI-powered scheduling service Genee, to be shut down and merged with Office ... 'Software is eating the world': How robots, drones and artificial intelligence will change everything

Feels like a home away from home. Microsoft acquires AI-powered scheduling service Genee, to be shut down and merged with Office ... 'Software is eating the world': How robots, drones and artificial intelligence will change everything

Microsoft acquires AI-powered scheduling service Genee, to be shut down and merged with Office ... 'Software is eating the world': How robots, drones and artificial intelligence will change everything

Hadoop distributor MapR has raised a new round of funding and may be preparing for an IPO next year, Salesforce acquires analytics startup BeyondCore, Coursera releases a new data analytics course together with PwC, and Apple CEO Tim Cook provided some illumination on how his company regards artificial intelligence (AI). We've got all the highlights in this Big Data Roundup for the week ending Aug. 21, 2016. Let's start with the news from Hadoop distributor MapR. The company recently announced that it has raised a round of equity financing worth 50 million, and provided a few select details about its financial performance. MapR is still a privately held company, so it can choose what to disclose and what not to disclose.

Welcome to the Applied Materials Earnings Conference Call. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Afterwards you will be invited to participate in a question-and-answer session. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I'd now like to turn the conference over to Michael Sullivan, Vice President of Investor Relations. In a moment, we'll discuss the results for our third quarter which ended on July 31. Joining me are Gary Dickerson, our President and CEO; and Bob Halliday, our Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, let me remind you that today's call contains forward-looking statements including Applied's current view of its industries, performance, products, share positions, profitability and business outlook. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statements, and are not guarantees of future performance.

This week saw the placation of GST bill on logistics along with many more news such as evolvement of digital payments and artificial intelligence in E-commerce industry. The meeting of AI and e-commerce could not only transform the way jillions of online transactions are done, but also change the in-store purchase behaviors which are influenced by digital interactions. According to Sachin Bansal, CEO, Flipkart, artificial intelligence is a key differentiator in the fiercely competitive e-commerce business. Digital payments will grow 10 times to reach 500 billion by 2020 and contribute 15% of gross domestic product (GDP). Some of the key reasons of these acquisitions include privacy of customer's payment data, secured payment facility and use of payment data for big data analysis to the company.

Analysis Artificial intelligence and machine learning engines are underpinning many emerging applications and services, from making sense of big data for enterprises, to supporting hyper-personalized consumer content, or virtual reality gaming. The current challenge is to move AI from the supercomputer to the mobile device, supporting technologies like computer vision locally on the handset, car, camera or VR headset. Qualcomm has been a leader here, but the past weeks have seen Intel and its Chinese partner Rockchip invest in chip-level computer vision and AI capabilities, while Apple has acquired machine learning startup Turi, presumably to enhance its AI-driven personal assistant Siri. Rockchip has licensed the XM4 imaging and vision DSP (digital signal processor) design from IP provider CEVA, to enhance these aspects of its system-on-chip (SoC) products. It says it will enable advanced vision features at the low power levels required for mobile devices, supporting digital video stabilization, object detection and tracking, and 3D depth sensing, among others.

We hear from Apple CEO Tim Cook during the company's quarterly earnings calls, but lately the leader of Apple has been opening up in ways that non-analysts can understand. First he sat down with Fast Company, and on Monday an in-depth Washington Post interview on Cook's 5-year anniversary as CEO offered more insight into the company's past failures and future surprises. A lot has changed in the last five years, Cook told the Post. Steve Jobs passed away just six weeks after Cook took the reins, which came as a shock, he said. Apple expanded its product lineup after Jobs's death, and some of those devices were conceived of and developed entirely without Jobs's input.