On the one hand there is a service provided to users free of charge,

Alphabet, the parent company of the internet search giant Google, earned $39.27bn in the last three months of 2018, but its share price sank as its costs rose. Alphabet's revenues for the quarter were 22% higher than the same period last year and the company made a profit of $8.9bn, the company announced on Monday. Revenues in the US rose 20% while revenues from Europe, the Middle East and Africa rose 29%, helped by the strength of the euro and the pound. It was the latest tech company to announce strong revenue growth – news that has cheered investors – but rising costs that come as the company is facing increasing competition from Amazon clouded the news. The fees that Alphabet pays to companies like Apple for Google to be their default search engine rose to $7.4bn up from $6.6bn for the same period last year.

Apple will cut the price of some of its flagship iPhones for just the second ever time, as interest in buying them falls. The company is going to reduce the phones to the cheaper prices it used to charge in countries outside the US, instead of taking into acount the rising US dollar, it said. Apple has recently experimented with charging considerably higher prices for iPhones, especially in some countries around the world. With the iPhone X, it increased the cost of the flagship model considerably, and recent currency fluctuations meant that this year's phones were even more expensive. But now it will look to drop those prices so they are in line with last year's prices.

Apple has reported a decline in both revenue and profits in its latest quarterly financial results, as the company feels the pinch from slowing demand for its star product, the iPhone. The results showed a 15 per cent fall in sales of the iPhone in the three months ending to 29 December, diving from $61.1bn (£46.8bn) in 2017, down to £51.9bn dollars (£39.8bn) a year later. Mac, iPad and the Wearables, Home and Accessories category all experienced an increase in net sales, but the most notable growth came from Apple's services - which includes its Apple Music streaming platform, the App Store, iCloud storage and Apple Pay - jumping 19 per cent, from $9.1bn (£7bn) to $10.9bn (£8.3bn) year-on-year. However, combined, the hole left by weak iPhone sales resulted in a total drop to $84.3bn (£64.5bn), Profits also fell slightly to $19.9bn (£15.3bn),

China's NetEase may be struggling to get its games whitelisted in its native country, but that isn't stopping it from making waves in the wider gaming industry. The internet giant's gaming unit has acquired a minority stake in David Cage's studio Quantic Dream, best known for its cinematic PlayStation exclusives Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human, both of which incorporate interactive storytelling techniques and motion capture technology. According to NetEase, Quantic Dream will continue to operate independently under the leadership of its co-CEOs Cage and Guillaume de Fondaumière. But the real benefit for the French studio will be an entry point into China, the world's biggest gaming market, where NetEase rules alongside rival Tencent. Despite the country's gaming freeze being lifted, the government's crackdown on titles that don't adhere to strict cultural guidelines (and contain sexual or violent content) could be a concern for Quantic and its adult-oriented games.

It's accepted science that carbon dioxide emissions contribute to climate change. CO2 molecules trap heat in the atmosphere, and they stick around for decades -- 40 percent will remain for 100 years, and 20 percent for 1,000 years. If wood, coal, natural gas, oil, and gasoline consumption remain on their current trajectory, the global temperature will rise between 2.5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). So what can be done? If you ask Apple alum and serial entrepreneur Matt Provo, plenty.

SAN JOSE, Calif., Jan. 25, 2019 -- Guavus, a Thales company and pioneer in Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based analytics, announced today that it has acquired SQLstream, a real-time streaming analytics company based in San Francisco, CA. The acquisition enables Guavus to expand its offering, providing communications service providers (CSPs) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) customers access – at the network edge – to real-time, cloud-enabled streaming analytics to address their growing big data needs. "With our integrated solutions, CSPs to IIoT customers will be able to take advantage of something that's radically different as we deliver AI-powered analytics from the network edge to the network core. With this solution, our customers can now analyze their operational, customer, and business data anywhere in the network in real time, without manual intervention, so they can make better decisions, provide smarter new services, and reduce their costs," said Guavus CEO, Faizel Lakhani. "In a world facing exponential growth in the volume of data coming from increasingly connected network devices and IIoT-based sensors, the inclusion of SQLstream's industry-leading technology opens up huge new opportunities for our customers and our partners. Their disruptive technology allows customers to interactively inspect and curate streaming data for analytics at the edge. We're excited to have the SQLstream team onboard," said Lakhani.

When it comes to deep tech, from AI to big data and AR, Europe is neck and neck with Asia and Silicon Valley. European deep-tech start-ups demonstrate the best opportunities for scaling up. And, according to the recent State of European Tech report, Europe's tech industry is growing five times faster than the rest of the European economy in terms of gross value added, a level that has accelerated in recent years. Last year, our Europe Start-up 100 2018 list looked at various players demonstrating how Europe is gathering momentum in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous vehicles (AVs), augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), robotics, big data and more. This listing is part of our Europe Start-up 100 series for 2019, which every day this week is focusing on a different list, including fintech and e-commerce, hardware and the internet of things (IoT), and medtech and life sciences start-ups. On Friday (25 January), we will publish our full Europe Start-up 100 list of the ones to watch.

A revolution is happening right before our eyes. It's groundbreaking, and yet its disruptive power is only fractionally visible. With each passing second and each bit of new data, computers are getting smarter and smarter. Ubiquitous and quiet, machine learning algorithms are watching us, gathering information about our preferences, lifestyle, and habits. Consciously or unconsciously, we feel the benefits of these algorithms while lazing on our couches, clicking away on insightful recommendations for which movies to watch, books to read, and products to buy.

Cision Ltd. (NYSE: CISN) is buying TrendKite Inc. for $225 million. TrendKite uses artificial intelligence to help communications professionals assess the impact of their efforts. "TrendKite and Cision have a shared understanding of the communications industry's need to quantify the business value of earned media campaigns," says TrendKite CEO Erik Huddleston. "The combination of TrendKite's rich analytics platform and the Cision Communications Cloud platform will powerfully impact our joint customer base with the most robust, end-to-end Earned Media Management solution available." Buyers are hot on the trail of innovations, including artificial intelligence, that will drive sustainable value to customers and make companies more efficient, more effective and less expensive to run.