After years of scooping up brands like Converse and Hurley, Nike is shifting its focus toward buying start-ups that help it behind the scenes. Nike announced on Tuesday it has acquired Boston-based predictive analytics company Celect, marking its latest acquisition in a string of deals to bolster its direct-to-consumer strategy. Financial terms of the deal weren't disclosed. With Celect's technology integrated into Nike's mobile apps and website, the shoemaker should be able to better predict what styles of sneakers and apparel customers want, when they want it and where they want to buy it from, Chief Operating Officer Eric Sprunk explained in an interview. "Our goal is to serve consumers more personally at scale," he said. "We have to anticipate demand.

SoftBank Group Corp. said Wednesday its group net profit in the April-June period jumped more than threefold to a record ¥1.12 trillion ($10.6 billion) from a year earlier -- marking the best quarter for a Japanese firm since 2004 -- boosted by a special profit from selling part of its stake in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. SoftBank Group said its operating profit fell 3.7 percent to ¥688.82 billion in the three months that ended June 30 on sales of ¥2.34 trillion, up 2.8 percent on a consolidated basis. The company logged the largest group net profit on a quarterly basis among 400 major firms listed on bourses operated by Japan Exchange Group Inc. since Nomura Holdings Inc. started compiling such data in 2004. The investment giant said it booked a one-time gain of ¥1.22 trillion in the quarterly period following the completion of the partial sale of the stake in Alibaba. The company's profit was also boosted by gains from investments in technology startups made by its Vision Fund, through which SoftBank made investments in 81 companies as of the end of June. "It is remarkable for us to mark a (group net) profit of more than ¥1 trillion in a quarter for the first time," said Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son at a news conference in Tokyo.

In acquiring Vertex.AI for its Movidius unit, Intel is envisioning a tomorrow where deep learning will feature in many aspects of business. Chip giant Intel has acquired Vertex.AI, a Seattle start-up that is developing deep learning for every platform. The start-up will join the Movidius group, which is focused on self-learning and artificial intelligence (AI) technology on a myriad of devices. Intel acquired Movidius in 2016 for an undisclosed sum, rumoured to be in the region of $300m. This was part of a $1bn spending spree on AI tech companies, including Mighty AI, DataRobot, Lumiata, AEye and others.

WASHINGTON - Looking for that perfect recipe, or a new flavor combination that delights the senses? Increasingly, players in the food industry are embracing artificial intelligence to better understand the dynamics of flavor, aroma and other factors that go into making a food product a success. Earlier this year, IBM became a surprise entrant to the food sector, announcing a partnership with seasonings maker McCormick to "explore flavor territories more quickly and efficiently using AI to learn and predict new flavor combinations" by utilizing data collected from millions of data points. The partnership highlights how technology is being used to disrupt the food industry by helping develop new products and respond to consumer preferences and offer improved nutrition and flavor. "More and more, food companies are embracing digitization and becoming data-driven," said Bernard Lahousse, co-founder of Foodpairing, a startup with offices in Belgium and New York that develops digital food "maps" and algorithms to recommend food and drink combinations.

Cambridge Analytica may have become the byword for a scandal, but it's not entirely clear that anyone knows exactly what that scandal is. It's more like toxic word association: "Facebook", "data", "harvested", "weaponised", "Trump" and, in this country, most controversially, "Brexit". It was a media firestorm that's yet to be extinguished, a year on from whistleblower Christopher Wylie's revelations in the Observer and the New York Times about how the company acquired the personal data of tens of millions of Facebook users in order to target them in political campaigns. This week sees the release of The Great Hack, a Netflix documentary that is the first feature-length attempt to gather all the strands of the affair into some sort of narrative – though it is one contested even by those appearing in the film. "This is not about one company," Julian Wheatland, the ex-chief operating officer of Cambridge Analytica, claims at one point. "This technology is going on unabated and will continue to go on unabated.[…] There was always going to be a Cambridge Analytica. It just sucks to me that it's Cambridge Analytica."

CEOs and CFOs are decidedly more nervous when fielding questions about China during earnings calls this year. What's more, they are more likely to be deceptive with their answers. "Deception associated with questions on China has skyrocketed this quarter, up about 50% from last quarter and more than double a year ago," according to a study by text analytics provider Amenity Analytics. Amenity Analytics is one of a handful of companies that are applying natural language processing (NLP), sentiment analysis and machine learning to the financial sector, evaluating earnings calls and other public meetings to unearth information of value to an investor. It is also rare technology that offers a clear path to ROI.

Japan's mtes Neural Networks and DTCO announced their partnership to promote the "CitiOS Project", combining structural health monitoring (SHM) and blockchain technology to monitor structural changes in infrastructures such as buildings, stations, railways, etc. CitiOS can significantly improve public safety for the areas that have suffered from earthquakes. Earthquakes has always been one of the biggest security issues facing Taiwan and Japan. The damage to infrastructures generated by earthquakes has often caused unacceptable casualties and an irreparable lost in property value. CitiOS will predict whether infrastructures changes in time and take necessary measures to overcome various defects. Moreover, with the aging of population in Japan, they can no longer rely entirely on manpower to manage urban infrastructures.

In the ever changing world of information technology, business organizations are left with humongous amount of data with them. This data includes very critical information for business use, but business organizations are only able to utilize 20% of whole data available with them with the use of traditional data analytics technology. To process and interpret the reaming 80% of the data that is in the form of videos, images, and human voice (also called as dark data), there is a need of cognitive computing systems. Cognitive computing systems are typical combination of hardware and software that constitute natural language processing (NLP) and machine language, and have capability to collect, process, and interpret the dark data available with business organizations. Cognitive computing systems works exactly the phenomena of how a human brain works.

In December 2014, I asked whether we were at the beginning of "the end of the Hadoop bubble." I kept updating my Hadoop bubble watch (here and here) through the much-hyped IPOs of Hortonworks and Cloudera. The question was whether an open-source distributed storage technology which Google invented (and quickly replaced with better tools) could survive as a business proposition at a time when enterprises have moved rapidly to adopting the cloud and "AI"--advanced machine learning or deep learning. In January 2019, perennially unprofitable Hortonworks closed an all-stock $5.2 billion merger with Cloudera. In May 2019, another Hadoop-based provider, MapR, announced that it would shut down if it were unable to find a buyer or a new source of funding.

Products/Services Visa agreed to acquire the token and electronic ticketing business of Rambus for $75 million in cash. The business involved is part of the Smart Card Software subsidiary of Rambus. It includes the former Bell ID mobile-payment businesses and the Ecebs smart-ticketing systems for transit providers. Meanwhile, Rambus expanded its CryptoManager Root of Trust product line. "Security is a mission-critical imperative for SoC designs serving virtually every application space," Neeraj Paliwal, vice president of products, cryptography at Rambus, said in a statement.