Last year was an eventful one in terms of all the interviews I conducted. Here are a few highlights of the interviews I did last year for you to browse at your leisure. The latest in digital print technology brings Bruce Lee's face to life with this S.H. Figuarts rendition. I started the year talking with Bandai about their toy and figure output, specifically at the collector's end of the spectrum. In the time since, we've had all manner of major new announcements in terms of Bandai's Tamashii Nation line as well as a move into more worldwide markets.

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/.

This walkthrough uses HDInsight Spark to do data exploration and train binary classification and regression models using cross-validation and hyperparameter optimization on a sample of the NYC taxi trip and fare 2013 dataset. It walks you through the steps of the Data Science Process, end-to-end, using an HDInsight Spark cluster for processing and Azure blobs to store the data and the models. The process explores and visualizes data brought in from an Azure Storage Blob and then prepares the data to build predictive models. Python has been used to code the solution and to show the relevant plots. These models are build using the Spark MLlib toolkit to do binary classification and regression modeling tasks.

Google researchers got an eye-scanning algorithm to figure out on its own how to detect a common form of blindness, showing the potential for artificial intelligence to transform medicine remarkably soon. The algorithm can look at retinal images and detect diabetic retinopathy--which affects almost a third of diabetes patients--as well as a highly trained ophthalmologist can. It makes use of the same machine-learning technique that Google uses to label millions of Web images. Diabetic retinopathy is caused by damage to blood vessels in the eye and results in a gradual deterioration of vision. If caught early it can be treated, but a sufferer may experience no symptoms early on, making screening vital.

The tech industry's annual Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas, is known for showing off a ton of crazy gadgets, both useful and fanciful. It's easy to dismiss some innovations out of hand, but even the wackiest products hint at what consumers should expect to see in the future, by offering a read of what trends companies are focusing on. Here is a look at seven wacky CES products -- and what they can tell us about the future of tech. What it is: A black shirt that looks like something a super villain would wear. The garment, made by Japanese firm Xenoma, has embedded silver motion-sensing circuits, and it is supposed to track your movements and the position of your body.

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.

Veronica Rivera signed up for the introduction to computer science class at Harvey Mudd College mostly because she had no choice: It was mandatory. Programming was intimidating and not for her, she thought. She expected the class to be full of guys who loved video games and grew up obsessing over how they were made. There were plenty of those guys but, to her surprise, she found the class fascinating. She learned how to program a computer to play "Connect Four" and wrote algorithms that could recognize lines of Shakespeare and generate new text with similar sentence patterns. When that first class ended, she signed up for the next level, then another and eventually declared a joint major of computer science and math.

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."

Eight out of ten B2B marketing executives predict artificial intelligence (AI) will revolutionize marketing by 2020, according to a December report by Demandbase -- but is it the key to unlocking a future without email spam? Demandbase, an account-based marketing (ABM) platform, partnered with Wakefield Research to poll 500 B2B marketers from the manager level to c-level executives, at companies with at least 250 employees, about AI-driven marketing. The results of the study suggest that marketers are eager to embrace artificial intelligence, yet only 10% of respondents are currently using AI and only 26% of marketers are confident that they understand how artificial intelligence can be applied to marketing. Education and integration concerns are the largest hurdles obstructing marketers with regard to artificial intelligence. Integrating AI into an existing marketing stack was the top-ranking challenge expressed by marketers when they considered incorporating AI into their marketing campaigns, with 60% of marketers selecting it as their top concern.