Google CEO Sundar Pichai may acknowledge that the future is multi-cloud, but that doesn't mean he thinks all clouds are equal. In a revealing comment during the company's Q2 earnings call, Pichai dropped this bombshell: "[T]here is a tremendous cost to your business of being on the wrong [cloud] architecture." In other words, Pichai believes going with anything but Google is something of a dead end. Now, if only he could convince the majority of enterprises that have elected to go with cloud market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS), or leading contender Microsoft Azure. Which is of course what he spent the earnings call, as well as the company's Google Next conference, trying to do.

Wall Street is buzzing over Alphabet's blowout June quarter financial results. Analysts are growing more confident over the prospects for many of Alphabet's emerging businesses including YouTube, autonomous cars and cloud computing. The internet giant reported better-than-expected second-quarter earnings Monday. It posted adjusted earnings per share of $11.75 versus the Wall Street consensus of $9.59 for the June quarter. Alphabet shares are up 4.3 percent in Tuesday's premarket session to $1,263.50.

Facebook Tests AR Adverts in Its News Feed Facebook is working with a select group of advertisers to create augmented reality ads for its News Feed. When users activate an ad's tap-to-try AR capability it can display for example how a pair of glasses would look on their face via the user's webcam and screen. Facebook says it also intends to expand shopping support in Instagram Stories. July 10th -- NVIDIA Collaborates with Daimler and Bosch to Develop Robotaxi Fleets. NVIDIA, Daimler and Bosch announce a partnership to develop on-call, fully automated and driverless taxis.

Microsoft reported its Q4 2018 earnings yesterday, with highlights like surpassing $100 billion in revenue for the fiscal year, all three operating groups seeing double-digit year-over-year growth, and as a result the stock soaring past $800 billion in value. All of that meant a smaller tidbit slipped through: three additions and three minor changes made to the earnings release. Statements in this release that are "forward-looking statements" are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. This is then followed by 24 factors. In this past quarter's release, there were 27 factors. The third one seems ordinary and something that any company would want to include.

Customer and partner expansion and industry recognition signal rapid adoption of company's sales and learning platform together with funding led by General Catalyst Allego, the sales learning and coaching platform, today announced the close of a strong quarter, in which the company added key new customers, renewed 100 percent of its existing customer base and garnered solid industry recognition for its mobile-friendly sales learning platform. Allego also announced it has closed a $7.5M investment led by General Catalyst. "Partnering with visionary sales and training leaders and our team's focus on ensuring their success continued to drive great results for both Allego and our customers in the first half of 2018" "Partnering with visionary sales and training leaders and our team's focus on ensuring their success continued to drive great results for both Allego and our customers in the first half of 2018," said Yuchun Lee, CEO and co-founder of Allego. "We're excited to see the modern learning paradigm -- characterized by easily created and absorbed content, provided continuously and in bite-sized pieces, with reinforcement and support for informal learning -- rapidly gaining traction across sales training and corporate L&D." As it has since inception, Allego continues to fund its growth through positive operating cash flow.

In the broad sweep of AI's current worldly ambitions, machine learning healthcare applications seem to top the list for funding and press in the last three years. Since early 2013, IBM's Watson has been used in the medical field, and after winning an astounding series of games against with world's best living Go player, Google DeepMind's team decided to throw their weight behind the medical opportunities of their technologies as well. Many of the machine learning (ML) industry's hottest young startups are knuckling down significant portions of their efforts to healthcare, including Nervanasys(recently acquired by Intel), Ayasdi (raised $94MM as of 02/16), Sentient.ai With all the excitement in the investor and research communities, we at TechEmergence have found most machine learning executives have a hard time putting a finger on where machine learning is making its mark on healthcare today. We've written this article, not to be a complete catalogue of possible applications, but to highlight a number of current and future uses of machine learning in the medical field, with relevant links to external sources and related TechEmergence interviews. The list below is by no means complete, but provides a useful lay-of-the-land of some of ML's impact in the healthcare industry.

Shanghai-based computer vision company Yitu announced today that it has acquired an additional US$100 million in funding, with China Industrial Asset Management as the sole investor this round. Yitu is one of China's four AI unicorns, along with Face, Cloudwalk and SenseTime. On June 12th, 2018, Yitu completed its C Round with US$200 Million from GC Capital, ICBC International, and SPDB International. This new funding raises Yitu's valuation to over US$2.3 billion. Yitu was found in 2012 and focuses on computer vision, natural language processing, knowledge reasoning, intelligent hardware, and robotics.

Earlier this month, Aaron Levie, CEO of Box teased of new growth at the end of 2018 and some small acquisitions in the future. He mentioned that the company had plans to invest more into core technologies, like artificial intelligence, security and workflow. "We might make small acquisitions ourselves in terms of growing that technology. We are very confident in the position we occupy and just want to expand that from there," and so they did! With the recent acquisition of Butter.ai, a startup that helps customers search for content across all business applications powered by machine learning.

This is the tech news you need to know this Thursday. News of this deal comes just four months after President Trump blocked Broadcom from acquiring chipmaker Qualcomm in a $103 billion hostile takeover on national security grounds. The new terms give Facebook explicit permission to audit developers' use of data, in what looks an effort to prevent a second Cambridge Analytica-style scandal. Musk was responding to a Twitter user who said he had been told Musk wouldn't be able to help bring clean water to Flint. According to an excerpt of the account in Vanity Fair, employees feared Brin's behaviour would lead to a sexual harassment lawsuit.

This article was written by Kwon Sok Oh, a Financial Analyst at I Know First. NVIDIA Corp. (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the leading designer and manufacturer of graphics processing units and related products and services. It's main operating segments are the GPU segments and the Tegra Processor segment. NVIDIA currently has 11,528 employees with $9.71 billion in revenue in 2017. It is headquartered in Santa Carla, CA.