Intel is buying the Israeli autonomous-driving company Mobileye for $63.54 per share in cash, or about $15.3 billion. Mobileye soared about 30% in pre-market trading on Monday after the Israeli newspaper Haaretz broke the news. The Jerusalem-based company develops vision-based driver-assistance tools to provide warnings before collisions. "Mobileye brings the industry's best automotive-grade computer vision and strong momentum with automakers and suppliers," Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said in a statement. "Together, we can accelerate the future of autonomous driving with improved performance in a cloud-to-car solution at a lower cost for automakers."

First of all, I will explain the reason for the post title. For those who have not seen the films, I summarize: "A group of four illusionists win year after year to the public with their incredible magic shows and even mocking the FBI. GSMA is a great illusionist and MWC is their principal magic show. We are invited year after year to visit an event with unique keynote speakers, an enormous list of exhibitors, amazing performances and a great LinkedInplace where we can meet in person some of our social media contacts. What else can we ask for? I know that it is very ruthless to compare the GSMA with illusionists and the MWC as their greatest magic show, but at least I see quite a few reasonable resemblances, you don t. If in 2015 I wrote " MWC 2015: Everything Connected, Tapas and Jamon", and I argued as one the reasons to attend MWC was the fact it was celebrated in Barcelona. In 2016, in my post "GSMA need to think how to reinvent MWC" I justify the reasons why the MWC needed to reinvent itself. One thing has become clear to me after many years attending MWCs, this is the world's biggest phone and mobile networks show, with manufacturers set to unveil a raft of new phone handsets and new technology. However, the GSMA had insisted on introducing more and more distractions like Internet of Things (IoT), Connected Living, Connected Car, AR/ VR, Robots. Maybe the reason is because Telecom operators do not have the DNA to change. Still, many telecom operators take a dim view of some of the aggressive moves being made by these peers, especially when it comes to business models based on commercializing customer data. "I expected to see less hype and a dose of common sense" Starting by the announcement of Spain's Telefonica to introduce a broad plan "4th Platform" to help both consumer and business customers keep greater control over their data rather than giving it away to web giants Google, Facebook and Amazon. "I expected to see more applications where IoT will become a lot less exciting, but more useful and profitable.

Amazon's Alexa already boasts more than 10,000 skills, but has now added medical advice to its repertoire. WebMD announced today that it's launched its own skill for all Alexa-enabled devices (including the Echo, Echo Dot, and Fire TV), which can answer basic health-related queries. Topics include treatments for common ailments ("Alexa, ask WebMD how to treat a sore throat"), definitions of basic diseases ("Alexa, ask WebMD what diabetes is"), and the side effects of certain drugs ("Alexa, ask WebMD to tell me about amoxicillin"). WebMD stresses that, like its website, the new Alexa skill is only meant to offer supplementary information, and adds that the software is a work-in-progress. "We want to be in the place where we believe computing is going," WebMD's vice president of mobile products, Ben Greenberg, tells The Verge.

InMyBag, a new recovery service for mobile professionals that protects mobile devices from loss, theft and damage, has formed a long-term partnership with Featurespace, the leading Adaptive Behavioural Analytics fraud prevention company, to support the service to InMyBag members. The ARIC platform will be integrated into InMyBag's system to identify and block online fraud at both the point of application and claim -- all in real time. InMyBag provides its members with same-day replacement for devices such as laptops and phones, as well as enterprise-grade data recovery. Iain Harper, InMyBag CEO, commented: "We don't really see ourselves as an insurance company. We're a members' service for mobile professionals that protects the things that matter to them most -- their mobile devices."

GRAKN.AI joins the Google Cloud Technology Partner Program GRAKN.AI is pleased to announce that we have recently joined the Google Cloud Technology Partner Program to provide GRAKN.AI Cloud. AI systems need a knowledge base to manage their data because they produce and consume more complex information than average software. GRAKN.AI is a database in the form of a distributed knowledge base with a reasoning query language that allows you to model, verify, scale, query and analyse complex data easily. By providing a query language that uses machine reasoning to uncover knowledge too complex for human cognition to infer, GRAKN.AI allows organisations to grow their competitive advantage, all the while reducing engineering time, cost, and complexity. Google Cloud Platform is a cloud computing service by Google that offers hosting on the same supporting infrastructure that Google uses internally for end-user products like Google Search and YouTube. It is the engine behind many innovative cloud solutions, such as Spotify and Feedly.

When it comes to security in their financial transactions, American consumers want it all. In Total System Services, Inc.'s 2016 U.S. Consumer Payments Study, a whopping 74% of all respondents said they would choose the credit card with the best security features over the credit card with the best rewards. Payment networks like Mastercard Inc. have done their best to respond. In the past couple of years, Mastercard has experimented with a number of cutting-edge security initiatives. These innovations have included everything from an app that allows cardholders to take a selfie for payment authentication to a wearable band that uses the account holder's unique heartbeat as authentication. Late last month, Mastercard introduced its latest pioneering security platform, Decision Intelligence.

SANTA CLARA, CA--(Marketwired - Mar 8, 2017) - NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) with Microsoft today unveiled blueprints for a new hyperscale GPU accelerator to drive AI cloud computing. Providing hyperscale data centers with a fast, flexible path for AI, the new HGX-1 hyperscale GPU accelerator is an open-source design released in conjunction with Microsoft's Project Olympus. HGX-1 does for cloud-based AI workloads what ATX -- Advanced Technology eXtended -- did for PC motherboards when it was introduced more than two decades ago. It establishes an industry standard that can be rapidly and efficiently embraced to help meet surging market demand. The new architecture is designed to meet the exploding demand for AI computing in the cloud -- in fields such as autonomous driving, personalized healthcare, superhuman voice recognition, data and video analytics, and molecular simulations.

International Business Machines Corp. and Salesforce.com Inc. agreed to mingle their artificial-intelligence technologies in a bid to boost sales of the powerful data-analytics offerings. The companies Monday announced plans to offer integrated AI services that weave the broad humanlike conversation and learning capabilities of IBM's Watson with Salesforce's more sales-oriented Einstein technology. The new offerings, available in the second half of the year, are aimed at helping a wide variety of companies better target products and services at customers. IBM CEO: AI Will Be Man and Machine, Not Man vs. Machine. Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM, said that she believes that believes artificial intelligence will help to create jobs and that clients will have a "symbiotic relationship" with AI.

NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Ingrasys, a subsidiary of Foxconn) announced today their plans for HGX-1, a hyperscale GPU accelerator for AI and cloud computing. This open-source design is being released in conjunction with Microsoft's Project Olympus initiative at the OCP (Open Compute Project) conference and is designed to give hyperscale datacenters a high performance and flexible path for the machine learning industry. I see this release part of a larger narrative for NVIDIA, which has truly been seeing incredible momentum in cloud/hyperscale over the past year--their Tesla business tripled (yes, tripled) last year. The compute model is changing, and machine learning training currently favors GPU computing--NVIDIA's bread and butter. HGX-1 is a component of Microsoft's Project Olympus contribution to OCP, which, for those who are unfamiliar, is a consortium that is seeking to speed up the pace of innovation by applying the benefits of open source to hardware, which then opens up the design to the OCP community so it can easily be built and deployed.

Quantiphi, Inc., a Google Cloud Services Partner, announced today that it has received Specialization Status in Machine Learning as part of Google Cloud's new Partner Specialization Program. "We started Quantiphi over three years ago with the belief that artificial intelligence and machine learning will be essential building blocks of digital transformation, and a new breed of expertise will be necessary to help businesses harness the full potential of these technologies," said Asif Hasan, Co-founder, Quantiphi, Inc. "We are committed to bringing the power of Google Cloud Platform's machine learning technologies together with Quantiphi's experience and proven use cases in applied machine learning to customers of any size who want to achieve transformational analytics." Quantiphi has put together a wide array of machine learning models that help businesses build AI products, find and retain high value customers, improve operating efficiencies and reduce risk across several industries including Healthcare, Insurance, Media, Retail, Manufacturing and Consumer Products. About Quantiphi Inc Quantiphi is a category defining Data Science and Machine Learning software and services company focused on helping organizations translate the big promise of big data and machine learning technologies into quantifiable business impact. It is founded on the belief that machine learning and artificial intelligence are transformative technologies that will create the next quantum gain in customer experience and unit economics of businesses.