Silverback United, announced the acquisition of UK based Headstart AI, Inc. in an all-stock transaction. The acquisition will be immediately accretive and will accelerate its strategy for the assetization of data on a global basis. Spear Point Advisors, LLC ("Spear Point") served as Silverback's exclusive financial advisor for the transaction. IonQ an industry leader in quantum computing,announced a collaboration with Airbus to explore the potential application and benefits of quantum computing for aerospace services and passenger experiences. The Quantum Aircraft Loading Optimization & Quantum Machine Learning project will be a 12-month project that culminates in the development of a prototype aircraft-loading quantum application, hands-on collaboration and coaching sessions for Airbus developers and engineers, and an exploration of future integrations of quantum computers for Airbus and its customers.

Four years ago, the $70 billion Alibaba Group, one of the world's biggest artificial intelligence users, teamed up with Mars, the $35 billion global leader in confectioneries, to figure out the types of candy and chocolates that consumers in China prefer. The fresh consumer data that Alibaba continually gathers from the millions of people shopping on its various platforms turned up the counterintuitive finding that many Chinese who buy chocolates also purchase spicy snacks at the same time. Using that data-driven insight, Mars developed a sweet-and-spicy product: a candy bar that contains Szechuan peppercorns, the source of China's spicy "mala" flavor. Even though Mars didn't conduct any other consumer research to reinforce the A.I.-driven insight, Spicy Snickers proved to be a winner on the mainland. Depending on A.I. also saved the company time; instead of the two to three years that it normally takes to launch a product, Mars was able to bring Spicy Snickers to market for the first time in August 2017, less than 12 months after the collaboration with Alibaba started.

The company that owns the rights to JRR Tolkien's works, including The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, has been bought by the Swedish gaming firm Embracer Group, which has hinted it could make spin-off films based on popular characters such as Gandalf, Aragorn and Gollum. Embracer has acquired Middle-earth Enterprises, the holding company that controls the intellectual property rights to films, video games, board games, merchandise, theme parks and stage productions relating to Tolkien's two most famous literary franchises. The deal also includes "matching rights" in other Middle-earth-related literary works authorised by the Tolkien Estate and HarperCollins – primarily The Silmarillion and The Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth – which were published after Tolkien's death in 1973. When the business was put up for sale by the Saul Zaentz Company, which acquired its rights from the heirs and estate of Tolkien and HarperCollins in 1976, it was expected that Amazon would buy it to build its own Middle-earth empire. In 2017, Amazon paid $250m (£208m) for the rights to make a big budget prequel to Lord of the Rings, called Rings of Power, which is to have a global release on its Prime Video service on 2 September.

I recently announced that I would no longer be actively maintaining audiobridge and would be sunsetting the app on December 31, 2022 after over five years of work. With this announcement, I had conversations with many people about a potential acquisition of the company. I felt that there still is nobody that truly understands what is possible in the field of mobile music/audio creation and the ramifications it would have for many other industries. I will not be selling. After quite a bit of reflection, I have decided to not sunset the app although it will continue to be largely unmaintained for the foreseeable future.

The article highlights four companies in the Global X Artificial Intelligence & Technology ETF (AIQ) that are shaping the growth path of technologies along the AI value chain.

Machine learning (ML) is one of the hottest and most lucrative tech trends. According to a survey on the state of AI conducted by McKinsey in 2021, 67 percent of companies that adopted AI-related technologies saw increases in revenue. Increased adoption of ML technology has given rise to some of the best machine learning startups, all of which are leading the digital transformation in the 21st Century. These machine learning startup companies are located around the globe, including San Francisco, Santa Clara, San Jose, San Mateo, Redwood City, and the rest of Silicon Valley, as well as places like London and Tel Aviv. This article will explore exciting startups in the private sector and public sector, looking at their innovative ideas, funding, and expected growth.

Earnings conference calls are significant information events for volatility forecasting, which is essential for financial risk management and asset pricing. Although some recent volatility forecasting models have utilized the textual content of conference calls, the dialogue structures of conference calls and company relationships are almost ignored in extant literature. To bridge this gap, we propose a new model called Temporal Virtual Graph Neural Network (TVGNN) for volatility forecasting by jointly modeling conference call dialogues and company networks. Our model differs from existing models in several important ways. First, we propose to exploit more dialogue structures by encoding position, utterance, speaker role, and Q\&A segments. Second, we propose to encode the market states for volatility forecasting by extending the Gated Recurrent Units (GRU). Third, we propose a new method for constructing temporal company networks in which the messages can only flow from temporally preceding to successive nodes, and extend the Graph Attention Networks (GAT) for modeling company relationships. We collect conference call transcripts of S\&P500 companies from 2008 to 2019, and construct a dataset of conference call dialogues with additional information on dialogue structures and company networks. Empirical results on our dataset demonstrate the superiority of our model over competitive baselines for volatility forecasting. We also conduct supplementary analyses to examine the effectiveness of our model's key components and interpretability.

RALEIGH, NC / ACCESSWIRE / August 8, 2022 / 919 Marketing, one of the nation's fastest-growing content marketing agencies, announces the acquisition of ClickCulture, a Raleigh, N.C. -based award-winning web development and digital marketing company. This is the third acquisition by 919 Marketing to boldly expand its roster of technology-focused marketing services to become the full-service marketing leader for emerging and mature franchise brands and non-profit companies. "This exciting new partnership with the team at ClickCulture expands our company to give us more creative firepower and a deeper bench of talent to better serve our clients", says David Chapman, CEO, and founder of 919 Marketing. "We can now elevate our creative capabilities to include custom applications for websites, unique digital campaigns, and elite, award-winning graphic design to help our clients attract more customers and grow their businesses. We have a lot of smart people doing great work and now we have the data-driven creative capabilities needed to truly dominate as the holistic, one-stop solution for nonprofit companies and multi-location and franchise brands."

The layoffs are part of a restructuring that iRobot said will save the company up to $10 million in 2022 and between $30-$40 million in 2023. This was the same day iRobot announced it was being acquired by Amazon for $1.7 billion. However, iRobot said the two events are not related. To better align costs with near-term revenue, part of the restructuring includes shifting certain non-core engineering functions to lower-cost regions and increasing use of iRobot's joint design manufacturing (JDM) partners. "These actions help support the company's near-term priorities to drive innovation by executing on its product roadmaps, optimize inventory levels across all major channels, expand DTC sales and position the business for profitable growth in 2023," iRobot said in its earnings statement.

After decades of creating war machines and home cleaning appliances, iRobot agreed to be acquired by Amazon for $1.7 billion, according to a joint statement by the two companies. If the deal goes through, it would give Amazon access to yet another wellspring of personal data: interior maps of Roomba owners' homes. Those Roombas work in part by using sensors to map the homes they operate in. In a 2017 Reuters interview, iRobot CEO Colin Angle suggested the company might someday share that data with tech companies developing smart home devices and AI assistants. Amazon declined to respond to questions about how it would use that data, but combined with other recent acquisition targets, the company could wind up with a comprehensive look at what's happening inside people's homes.