Amazon has started its drone delivery trial in Cambridge, UK, the company announced Wednesday. In a tweet, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos revealed Amazon Prime Air, which promises to deliver packages with small drones in 30 minutes or less after placing an order. The company did not say when the service will be available. "We will deploy when and where we have the regulatory support needed to safely realize our vision," said Amazon. "We're excited about this technology and one day using it to deliver packages to customers around the world in 30 minutes or less."

Amazon.com has long talked about its ambitions for using drones to deliver small parcels to its legions of customers. Now, it appears the e-commerce giant is one step closer to that goal. On Wednesday, the company said that it has made its first autonomous drone delivery -- an order for an Amazon Fire TV streaming device and a bag of popcorn -- to a shopper in the United Kingdom. Jeffrey P. Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, tweeted Wednesday morning that the box was at the customer's home 13 minutes after the order was placed. First-ever #AmazonPrimeAir customer delivery is in the books. Check out the video: https://t.co/Xl8HiQMA1S

Google's self-driving cars have graduated from the company's "moonshot division", X labs, to become a full-blown subsidiary of umbrella group Alphabet, called Waymo. The new company, headed by X alumni John Krafcik, is charged with turning the self-driving car technology that Google has been developing behind closed doors into a viable business for the future. How that will actually happen, though, Waymo has apparently not yet decided. Mooted revenue streams include Uber-style driverless ride sharing, disrupting the trucking and logistics sector, fitting self-driving technology into public transit vehicles, improving the "last mile" of postal delivery or even simply licensing the software to car manufacturers who will sell cars to end users. "Self-driving technology is awesome in all these categories," said Krafcik at an event to announce the launch of Waymo.

SYS-CON Events has announced today that Roger Strukhoff has been named conference chair of Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo 2017 New York. The 20th Cloud Expo and 7th @ThingsExpo will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. "The Internet of Things brings trillions of dollars of opportunity to developers and enterprise IT, no matter how you measure it," stated Roger Strukhoff. "More importantly, it leverages the power of devices and the Internet to enable us all to improve the state of the world and lives of people."

After eight years and two million miles, Google officially announced the launch of a new company dedicated solely to its self-driving cars. "We believe that this technology can begin to reshape some of the ten trillion miles that motor vehicles travel around the world every year with safer, more efficient and more accessible forms of transport," the company said in a blog post on its website Tuesday. Waymo, which stands for "a new way forward in mobility," aims to make roads safer by ending drunk and distracted driving and make cars accessible for people with limited mobility. Google completed the world's first fully autonomous trip in 2015 when a legally blind man drove through suburban Texas, relying solely on the car to pilot. "We are a self-driving technology company. We've been really clear that we're not a car company, although there's sometimes some confusion on that point," said CEO John Krafcik.

From advanced driver assistance systems and security solutions to concepts for cleaner drives and holistic connectivity, the list of pioneering products from Continental is expanding as the automotive industry continues its rapid shift towards software and mobility services. To demonstrate its interpretation of the digitalization of the automotive world, the international technology company will be showcasing a collection of products and services at CES 2017 on January 5 - 8 in Las Vegas. "The entire automotive industry is undergoing a revolution and we at Continental are playing an active role in shaping it. On the basis of our solid expertise in systems integration and our years of experience in the field of vehicle connectivity, we are constantly adapting our products in line with the latest market trends," said Helmut Matschi, member of the Executive Board at Continental and head of the Interior Division. "For example, we are developing the building blocks of new mobility solutions for our customers and helping to shape the mobility of tomorrow together. At the CES, we will be showcasing the very latest solutions that will take us into the future."

"Most current advanced driver assistance systems based on radar and cameras are not capable of accurately detecting and classifying objects – such as cars, pedestrians or bicycles – at a level required for autonomous driving," said Sachin Lawande, president and CEO of Visteon, a leading global cockpit electronics supplier. "We need to achieve virtually 100 percent accuracy for autonomous driving, which will require innovative solutions based on deep machine learning technology. Our Silicon Valley team, with its focus on machine learning software development, will be a critical part of our autonomous driving technology initiative." Visteon's recently opened facility in the heart of Silicon Valley will house a team of engineers specializing in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The center is located close to the West Coast offices of various automakers and tech companies, as well as Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley – two of the leading universities for artificial intelligence and deep learning in the U.S. In addition to leading Visteon's artificial intelligence efforts, the Silicon Valley office will play a key role in delivering control systems, localization and vision processing – interpreting live camera data and converting it to information required for autonomous driving.

Taking a look into the future, Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) ConsumerLab presents the sixth edition of its annual trend report The 10 Hot Consumer Trends for 2017 and beyond. AI is an important theme this year and consumers see it playing a much more prominent role than before - both in society and at work. In fact, 35 percent of advanced internet users want an AI advisor at work, and one in four would like an AI as their manager. At the same time, almost half are concerned that AI robots will soon make a lot of people lose their jobs. Two in five believe smartphones will learn their habits and perform activities on their behalf automatically.

Ford CEO Mark Fields holds Velodyne Puck LIDAR sensor at a press conference at CES in Las Vegas in January. Carmakers and tech firms competing to develop automated vehicles seek a combination of sensors and cameras that provide maximum perception and visibility of surroundings at a cost that's manageable for mass production. Velodyne, a leading maker of laser-based LiDAR, or Light, Detection and Ranging, sensors, says it has designed a new solid-state version of its technology that provides 3D imaging for automated vehicle systems that will cost less than $50 per unit when manufactured at high volume. That's a fraction of the $8,000 cost of its current mechanical spinning LIDAR devices used in prototype robotic cars. The new design "creates a true solid-state LiDAR sensor, while significantly raising the bar as to what can be expected from LiDAR sensors as far as cost, size and reliability," company founder and CEO David Hall said in a statement.

Netflix employs an algorithm that helps its users discover movie options, and now it's about to help discover new planetary systems. Researchers at the University of Toronto Scarborough have developed a new approach to identifying stable planetary systems based on the machine learning artificial intelligence Netflix uses. "Machine learning offers a powerful way to tackle a problem in astrophysics, and that's predicting whether planetary systems are stable," Dan Tamayo, lead author of the research and a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Planetary Science at the University of Toronto Scarborough, said in a press release. Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence that allows computers to learn new functions without being programmed. This is how Netflix can make scarily accurate predictions of what you're interested in watching without you telling it.