In 1994, soon after Jeff Bezos incorporated what would become Amazon, the entrepreneur briefly contemplated changing the company's name. The nascent firm had been dubbed "Cadabra," but Bezos wanted a less playful, more accurate alternative: "Relentless." Twenty-four years later, perhaps no adjective better describes Bezos' empire than the name he once wanted to give it. The company is known as the "everything store," but in its dogged pursuit of growth, Amazon has come to dominate more than just ecommerce. Amazon is a fashion designer, advertising business, television and movie producer, book publisher, and the owner of a sprawling platform for crowdsourced micro-labor tasks.

This morning, we explain what a terrible year cryptocurrency had -- I hope you didn't remortgage your house. Meanwhile, Xbox seems ready to have a strong 2019, and drones plunge one of the UK's biggest airports into chaos. After five years, two mid-generation console releases and a brand-new gamepad...Xbox is poised to dominate the next console generation While the Switch and PS4 are riding high in this console cycle, Microsoft is better positioned than any other video-game company to take control of the coming one, which is expected to kick off in 2020. Living the Marty McFly dream.Nike's first self-lacing basketball shoes go on sale in 2019 for $350 On Nike's quarterly earnings call, executives revealed plans for an'Adaptive' basketball shoe that will cost around $350. That's about $400 cheaper than last year's HyperAdapt trainers, but more expensive than the Jordan XXXIII with its strap the wearer adjusts on their own.

The S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission puts Uber neck-and-neck with Lyft. Both planned IPOs are shaping up to be among the biggest in a spate of offerings aimed for 2019. Lyft said Thursday it had filed its S-1, and people familiar with the matter have said it is aiming to debut in March or April. Uber's filing indicates it could go public as soon as the first quarter, as The Wall Street Journal reported in October. That would be sooner than many observers had expected.

In a week of multiple nine-figure venture capital funding rounds, B2B FinTech has proved it plans to end the year on a high note. The star of this week's roundup is undoubtedly data: Two Robotics Process Automation (RPA) companies focusing on enterprise data analytics and automation landed a combined $565 million, while other high-value rounds were closed in the workspace sharing and asset-based lending markets. Below, PYMNTS breaks down the more than $912 million raised by B2B FinTech firms this week. RPA is igniting chatter in the corporate finance community as professionals explore next-level analytics and automation functionality to enhance processes like accounts payable, accounts receivable, cash flow management and more. This week, RPA startup Automation Anywhere made waves with its $300 million investment from the SoftBank Vision Fund, reports said Thursday (Nov.

Medtronic has announced that it will acquire long-time partner Nutrino, an AI powered personalized nutrition platform for an undisclosed sum. As part of the deal Medtronic will be integrating Nutrino's AI-driven personalized insights and food database. The acquisition is set to specifically boost Medtronic's offerings for people living with diabetes and offer the company's predictive glycemic response algorithm, which will be integrated with Medtronic's CGM system. "Bringing Nutrino and their nutrition-related expertise into our organization will give us a substantial differentiator in the diabetes industry and accelerate our progress to help people with diabetes live with greater freedom and better health," Hooman Hakami, executive vice president and president of the Diabetes Group at Medtronic, said in a statement. "The Nutrino team has been an outstanding partner over the past few years. We are excited to welcome them to our team, and I have no doubt that, together, we will make a profound impact on the lives of people with diabetes."

Our customers are living in a data-driven world and the volume of information they generate is growing exponentially. As a result, companies are increasingly investing in the hardware, software, and services needed to gain actionable insights from their data. By 2022, the total addressable market for artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) and big data is expected to grow to approximately $160 billion.[1] However, according to Gartner, by 2020 half of organizations will lack sufficient AI and data literacy skills needed to extract business value from their data, and they are already demanding easier-to-implement, faster-to-deploy, and more cost-effective solutions for AI/ML and big data analytics.[2] Today, HPE announced that we are acquiring BlueData, a leading provider of AI/ML and big data analytics infrastructure software, which will significantly expand our footprint in the rapidly growing artificial intelligence and big data analytics space.

Ltd. said Friday it has agreed to acquire cybersecurity company Cylance Inc. for $1.4 billion in cash. Cylance, based in Irvine, Calif., is among a group of cybersecurity companies that have been highly valued by venture investors over the past few years. Cylance uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify computer viruses.

Microsoft has been all in on AI this year, and in the build versus buy equation, the company has been leaning heavily toward buying. This morning, the company announced its intent to acquire Xoxco, an Austin-based software developer with a focus on bot design, making it the fourth AI-related company Microsoft has purchased this year. "Today, we are announcing we have signed an agreement to acquire Xoxco, a software product design and development studio known for its conversational AI and bot development capabilities," Lili Cheng, corporate VP for conversational AI at Microsoft wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition. Xoxco, which was founded in 2009 -- long before most of us were thinking about conversational bots -- has raised $1.5 million. It began working on bots in 2013, and is credited with developing the first bot for Slack to help schedule meetings.

Microsoft seeks to bring artificial intelligence and chatbots as a mainstream part of the workplace and it's taking steps to make it easier for partners to deliver AI capabilities directly into its popular Power BI reporting tool. At an event in San Francisco Wednesday, company officials revealed new AI capabilities coming to its Power BI self-service analytics tool with its new Azure Cognitive Services containers for partners without deep data-science development skills to deliver intelligent apps. Also looking to make it easier for partners to develop bots, Microsoft announced it has agreed to acquire XOXCO, a startup with expertise in conversational AI. Founded in 2013, XOXCO created the first commercial chatbot for Slack, a meeting scheduling app called Howdy. XOXCO is also known for its Botkit developer tool for building chatbot apps and providing native integration with messaging platforms.

Interest and activity around communications and networking solutions that leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to enable agility and greater efficiency continues to build. That's why TMC is launching three new AI-focused events under the banner of The New Intelligence. This table lays out the details of these events. And the below briefs highlight some recent industry AI developments. In its new IT Operations Readiness Index, Cisco looks at where the more than 1,500 senior IT leaders it surveyed are in their IT operational transformation journeys.