Your car may already feel like an extension of your home based on the hodgepodge of stuff collecting in the backseat, but it's apparent that technology will soon make the two more connected than ever. No one has proposed blurring the line more than Hyundai -- which unveiled a futuristic concept car last week that literally connects to the home via a hole in the wall. Hyundai envisions the car becoming a lounge-like extension of the living space that provides air conditioning and entertainment, and acts as a back-up generator. "By seamlessly blending features from the car with home and work environments, the user experience is uninterrupted whether socializing, working at home, or on the move," Hak Su Ha, Hyundai's design center director, said in a news release. But even if cars never plug into the home physically, they will digitally.

A 2017 Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivan equipped with Waymo's self-driving vehicle technology. Waymo, the company born from Alphabet's Google Self-Driving Car research project, faces mounting competition to perfect technology needed for fully autonomous vehicles. After staying low key about its progress, the latest indications from the new company are that it's far along the path to making such vehicles a reality by taking cost out of the components and boosting overall performance and reliability. John Krafcik, Waymo's chief executive officer, said at the Automobili-D conference in Detroit that the latest sensors, software, artificial intelligence and other components -- all developed and built in-house -- are being used for a fleet of 100 Chrysler Pacifica minivans, the first batch of which will begin public road tests in California and Arizona this month, he said. Keeping development and production in-house has led to major cost savings, including a 90% reduction for the laser Lidar sensor riding atop the new Pacificas.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Fusion, a leading provider of cloud services, 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. Fusion, a leading provider of integrated cloud solutions to small, medium and large businesses, is the industry's single source for the cloud. Fusion's advanced, proprietary cloud service platform enables the integration of leading edge solutions in the cloud, including cloud communications, cloud connectivity, and cloud computing. Fusion's innovative, yet proven cloud solutions lower our customers' cost of ownership, and deliver new levels of security, flexibility, scalability, and speed of deployment. For more information, please visit http://www.fusionconnect.com.

SANTA MONICA, CA – Consumer Watchdog today called on Uber to release information about testing its robot cars in Arizona after pulling them out of San Francisco and to answer 10 questions about its vision for self-driving vehicles. In a letter to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick Consumer Watchdog's Privacy Project Director John M. Simpson wrote: "Consumer Watchdog believes you opted to pick up your toys and move because you wanted to keep important information about your robot car testing secret. We would welcome your proving our conclusion to be incorrect, by making public important information about your robot car activities. Using public highways as your laboratory carries the obligation of telling the public what you are doing." Consumer Watchdog noted that had Uber obtained a testing permit in California, the company would have been required to report any crashes of its robot cars to the Department of Motor Vehicles and to file annual disengagement reports, explaining when the robot car turned control over to the test driver and when the test driver felt it necessary to intervene.

Audi's plans to build AI-powered autonomous vehicles may have taken center stage during NVIDIA's CES press conference, but it's not the only automaker working with the company. NVIDIA announced its building smart vehicles with the folks at Mercedes-Benz, too. "Mercedes-Benz and NVIDIA share a common vision of the AI car," NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said. "At this point, it is clear AI will revolutionize the future of automobiles." The two firms have been working together for about three years now, and their product is almost ready for market.

Networked Insights, a Chicago-based company whose tools crawl the social web and analyze data for marketers, has raised $30 million in Series E funding, the company announced Friday. The company sifts through 560 million social media posts from 30 million sources daily, it said on its website. It sorts and analyzes that information for marketers and agencies, and pitches itself as a way for them to create better-targeted and more effective campaigns. Its clients include NBC Universal, media-buying agency GroupM, and American Family Insurance, whose venture arm is an investor. The funding will help Networked Insights invest in deep learning and artificial intelligence capabilities on its platform, Kairos, the company said. It said it would also use the infusion to enter partnerships and pursue acquisitions.

For cord cutters who want nothing but the best, Nvidia's $200 Shield TV console has always been the box of choice for streaming videos and even games. At CES 2017, the company announced a new-and-improved version that adds in HDR support, refines gaming and entertainment options, and even transforms the Android TV device into a voice-controlled rival of the Amazon Echo. We've already covered all the details revealed during Nvidia's CES 2017 press conference, but I just spent over an hour at Nvidia's suite to learn more about the new Shield TV's every nook and cranny. Here are some initial impressions, and a look at some of the more nitty-gritty improvements that weren't mentioned during the keynote. Before we even get into flashy features like smart-home controls and Google Assistant, the second-gen Shield TV packs worthwhile quality-of-life improvements over its predecessor.

Traditional automakers, many of whom ushered in an era of incredible disruption nearly a century ago, now face disruption themselves from four modern forces -- connected, autonomous, shared and electric cars. The infrastructure and scale required to build a connected car is incredibly complicated, expensive and resource intensive. At its core, it's a software challenge, and a chief obstacle for these brands is integrating the complex cloud technology required to deliver next-generation driving experiences. Today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, we announced the Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform, a set of services built on the Microsoft Azure cloud and designed to empower auto manufacturers to create custom connected driving experiences. This is not an in-car operating system or a "finished product;" it's a living, agile platform that starts with the cloud as the foundation and aims to address five core scenarios that our partners have told us are key priorities: predictive maintenance, improved in-car productivity, advanced navigation, customer insights and help building autonomous driving capabilities.

For cord cutters who want nothing but the best, Nvidia's $200 Shield TV console has always been the box of choice for streaming videos and even games. At CES 2017, the company announced a new-and-improved version that adds in HDR support, refines gaming and entertainment options, and even transforms the Android TV device into a voice-controlled rival of the Amazon Echo. We've already covered all the details revealed during Nvidia's CES 2017 press conference, but I just spent over an hour at Nvidia's suite to learn more about the new Shield TV's every nook and cranny. Here are some initial impressions, and a look at some of the more nitty-gritty improvements that weren't mentioned during the keynote. Before we even get into flashy features like smart-home controls and Google Assistant, the second-gen Shield TV packs worthwhile quality-of-life improvements over its predecessor.

TYSONS, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--CSC (NYSE: CSC) today announced the expansion of its strategic alliance with Microsoft through the advancement of Industrial Machine Learning (IML) solutions that enable data scientists to produce new data-derived enterprise insights, leading to better and more timely business decisions. Most large, data-rich companies fail to benefit from information on an enterprise-wide scale because they are not equipped to effectively capture and analyze available data sources. A recent survey from PwC and Iron Mountain found that 57 percent of businesses are unable to extract significant value from their information, and 23 percent are unable to derive any real value at all. Regardless of size, geography or sector, businesses are struggling to fully realize value from their information. "CSC has been working with Microsoft on industry-specific approaches to the problem of creating data science that works," said Dan Hushon, chief technology officer, CSC.