BlackBerry QNX is off to a great start at CES 2017. Today they announced what they are calling their "most advanced and secure embedded software platform for autonomous drive and connected cars," which is also known as QNX SDP 7.0. "With the push toward connected and autonomous vehicles, the electronic architecture of cars is evolving – from a multitude of smaller processors each executing a dedicated function, to a set of high performance domain controllers, powered by 64-bit processors and graphical processing units. To develop these new systems, our automotive customers will need a safe and secure 64-bit OS that can run highly complex software, including neural networks and artificial intelligence algorithms. QNX SDP 7.0 is suited not only for cars, but also for almost any safety- or mission-critical application that requires 64-bit performance and advanced security. This includes surgical robots, industrial controllers and high-speed trains."

SYS-CON Events announced today that Enzu will exhibit at SYS-CON's 20th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, and the 21st International Cloud Expo, which will take place October 31-November 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Enzu's mission is to be the leading provider of enterprise cloud solutions worldwide. Enzu enables online businesses to use its IT infrastructure to their competitive advantage. By offering a suite of proven hosting and management services, Enzu wants companies to focus on the core of their online business and let Enzu manage their IT hosting infrastructure. All major researchers estimate there will be tens of billions devices - computers, smartphones, tablets, and sensors - connected to the Internet by 2020.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Cloud Academy will exhibit at SYS-CON's 20th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Cloud Academy is the industry's most innovative, vendor-neutral cloud technology training platform. Cloud Academy provides continuous learning solutions for individuals and enterprise teams for Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and the most popular cloud computing technologies. Get certified, manage the full lifecycle of your cloud-based resources, and build your knowledge based using Cloud Academy's expert-created content, comprehensive Learning Paths, and innovative Hands-on Labs. For more information, please visit https://cloudacademy.com/.

Tesla Motors Inc. began rolling out software updates to customers with newer cars, bringing them to parity with owners who have what's known as "Autopilot 1" and setting the stage to ultimately unleash full self-driving capability. Will then hold to verify no field issues and upload to rest of fleet next week," Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said in a Twitter post on Saturday. The end-of-year software update comes as the automotive and technology industries prepare to descend on Las Vegas for the annual Consumer Electronics Show and Detroit for the North American International Auto Show. Tesla is skipping CES and the Detroit auto show but instead is hosting investors at its $5 billion Gigafactory 1 east of Reno, Nevada, on Jan. 4, where it makes batteries and energy storage packs. Now customers with the "Hardware 2" suite will have those features.

Surprisingly, concern with the cost of implementing AI is lower on the list at 42 percent. Overall, there is a lack of general understanding around AI technologies available, and how to begin using them. Further education and hands on experience will be required to ensure the use of AI technology to support marketing is successful. "As someone who has been studying AI for many years, I've recognized the promise of AI and B2B marketing for some time, which makes it really rewarding to see this vision is now shared by marketing executives," said Aman Naimat, SVP of Technology at Demandbase. "This data reveals that in order to be successful, marketing leaders need to lead the charge and present opportunities for AI instruction and experience for their teams, to ensure implementing it into their B2B technology stacks is effective."

Ford Motor Co. said Tuesday it was scrapping plans to build a $1.6-billion factory in Mexico and would invest $700 million to expand a Michigan plant to build electric and autonomous vehicles that will add 700 jobs there in a move Ford's chief executive said was a "vote of confidence" in the economic policies of President-elect Donald Trump. Ford isn't abandoning expanded production in Mexico. The company said that to "improve company profitability" it would build its next-generation Ford Focus at an existing plant in Hermosillo, Mexico. But in the wake of criticism by President-elect Donald Trump of the U.S. automaker and other companies moving manufacturing jobs across the border, Ford said it would cancel its plans for a major new plant in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. A company news release didn't mention Trump, but Chief Executive Mark Fields told CNN on Tuesday that the new plans were "a vote of confidence" in the direction of the U.S. economy under the president-elect.

We uncovered the following insights and trends: • Semi-autonomous vehicles are the stepping stone to fully autonomous vehicles. Most car manufacturers and technology companies have taken Tesla's lead and are offering features like self- parking, adaptive cruise control, emergency braking and semi-hands off driving in highway/interstate conditions. Semi-autonomous features help consumers become comfortable with the idea of robots taking the wheel.

Ford Motor Co. said Tuesday it was scrapping plans to build a $1.6-billion factory in Mexico and would invest $700 million to expand a Michigan plant to build electric and autonomous vehicles that will add 700 jobs there in a move Ford's chief executive said was a "vote of confidence" in the economic policies of President-elect Donald Trump. Ford isn't abandoning expanded production in Mexico. The company said that to "improve company profitability" it would build its next-generation Ford Focus at an existing plant in Hermosillo, Mexico. But in the wake of criticism by President-elect Donald Trump of the U.S. automaker and other companies moving manufacturing jobs across the border, Ford said it would cancel its plans for a major new plant in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. A company news release didn't mention Trump, but Chief Executive Mark Fields told CNN on Tuesday that the new plans were "a vote of confidence" in the direction of the U.S. economy under the president-elect.

Ditto Labs, Inc., a pioneer in deep learning announced today that Red Fort Capital led a new round of investment in the vision-as-a-service company. Ditto's vision-as-a-service API can find nearly anything appearing in a photo -- a specific product, brand logo, location, demographic profile -- even subjective measures of sentiment -- in near real time. Ditto's service is a high value AI application for thousands of digital business's. "Humans can no longer keep up: ubiquitous cameras are casting off reams of big data. Today, critical business decisions need computers to act on visual data at massive scale and in real-time," said Red Fort Capital CEO Parry Singh.

Google dispelled any lingering questions about its commitment to cloud in 2016, as its strategy emerged to become a major player in the enterprise market in the years ahead. The company has spent tens of billions of dollars to build the underlying infrastructure, services and talent pool that feed Google Cloud Platform (GCP). As a result, it has de-emphasized price as the main differentiator and instead focused on enterprise demands, data analytics and a set of technologies to drive applications the company said will dominate the industry in the future. Machine learning is still too new for many IT shops, but Google has banked on it as the future of cloud computing. New services added in 2016 included the Machine Intelligence suite of services and new releases for translation, text analysis, and image and speech recognition.