To celebrate summer 2016, we're putting on a special offer. This offer starts on 22 August and will run through to the end of 2 September, and is even applicable on our already heavily discounted Early Bird, Startup and Academic passes! Upcoming event topics include: Deep Learning, Healthcare, Chatbots & Virtual Assistants, FinTech, Machine Intelligence, Renewable Energy and Autonomous Vehicles. View all of our upcoming summits for 2016 & 2017 here & take advantage of this offer!

Tesla makes the world's best electric cars - but they're not content to rest on their laurels. The company just launched a powerful new battery that makes the Model S the fastest production car you can actually buy. Meanwhile, autonomous vehicle startup nuTonomy has beat Uber to the punch by launching the world's first fleet of self-driving taxis in Singapore. The MIT Climate CoLab awarded honors to a new elevated Caterpillar Train that soars over traffic jams. And in Europe, Paris is planning to go completely car-free for an entire day this September, and we spotted an awesome pedal-powered school bus on the streets of the Netherlands.

Aptonomy Inc. has developed drone technology that could make prison breaks, robberies or malicious intrusions of any kind impossible for mere mortals. Dubbing it a kind of "flying security guard," the company has built its systems on top of a drone often used by movie-makers, the DJI S-1000, a camera-carrying octocopter. To that skeleton, Aptonomy adds a new flight controller, and second computer to power day- and night-vision cameras, bright lights, and loudspeakers, among other things. And more importantly than the hardware features, Aptonomy has developed artificial intelligence and navigational systems that allow its drones to fly low and fast, avoiding obstacles in structure-dense environments, and detecting human activity or faces in the area, autonomously. A user can open up a browser, get onto the Aptonomy interface, click on a point on a map to send out a drone to a particular location, then watch that flight in real time, or review a recording of it later.

Weather Underground makes weather forecasts based on 8,000 public and 192,000 privately constructed weather stations across 195 countries. The company is adding 400 new stations across Asia, South America, and Africa, and it'll be integrating all of them with IBM's Watson language-learning AI (the one that played Jeopardy! So what exactly does this mean? It is creating a global weather forecast system tied into a number of worldwide businesses, and with that, a hope to outmaneuver one of the most costly, damaging variables in global industry--weather. When IBM bought The Weather Company/WU last October it immediately announced its intention to merge WU's 200,000 weather stations with Watson through the Internet of Things.

A consortium of companies, including DigitalGlobe, CosmiQ Works and NVIDIA, today launched SpaceNet, an open-data initiative aimed at improving image analysis tools. The data are being hosted by Amazon Web Services as part of a partnership. With an increase in the number of CubeSats, high-resolution satellites and drones of every shape and size, we have accumulated petabytes of imagining data that can be processed with analytics to solve myriad problems. DigitalGlobe, which operates imaging satellites, has built out partnerships with companies like Facebook to target rural villages with internet access using photography as a guide. Satellite imaging has also been analyzed to help the Navy find Somali pirates, crowdsource the hunt for Malaysia Airlines flight 370 and identify deforestation zones.

In a dish of water in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a new kind of robot stirs, its tentacles twitching. Squashy and soft, this robot is different from its technological ancestors – Octobot runs without a power cable or rigid electronics, moving autonomously – if still clumsily – through the world. Soft robots have long been heralded as a new class of machine. But their tethers, and the electronics needed to control their movements, have held them back. Developed by Michael Wehner and colleagues at the Wyss Institute for Bioinspired Engineering, Harvard University, it's a big step towards fulfilling the potential of soft robots.

The world's most prestigious startup school launched 48 companies today at part 2 of its Summer 2016 Demo Day. Nanoparticle analytics and delivery robots were amongst the products revealed in the B2B, biotech, enterprise, edtech, fintech, and hardware verticals. You can check out our write-ups of all 44 startups that launched yesterday, and TechCrunch's picks for the top 7 from the batch. Trying to distill trends from the hodgepodge of startups at Demo day can be futile, because the real winners are the ones ahead of the trends. For example, TechCrunch thought Airware's drone operating system was a little too early in 2013. It turned out to be smartly ahead of the curve. Now you see lots of drone startups in YC, but many are chasing Airware which has gone on to raise 70 million. Y Combinator president Sam Altman explains "The best company at any given Demo Day is not the one that fits the theme of that Demo Day. Altman cites the Alan Kay quote that "the best way to predict the future is to invent it", adding "I think short of that, the future is basically unknowable. What I like about YC is the companies get to invent the future. They don't have to guess." One important development is that 30% of this batch's companies were founded outside the US, a bigger portion than in the past. YC partner Justin Kan credits that to the program being around long enough that it's funded successful companies from tons of countries.

When Google acquired British Artificial Intelligence (AI) company DeepMind for over 500 million in 2014, it was part of a wave of increasing hype about the potential of machine learning to transform societies and economies worldwide. Two years later and commercial opportunities for DeepMind and AI tech are beginning to be explored more. Beating humans at notoriously complex board games and within hospitals on healthcare projects has ensured that DeepMind remains in the headlines, but in terms of commercial value, the technology's full potential is still relatively unexplored. However, Google has announced that it has now unlocked one of those initial possibilities applying an AI system to control energy use in parts of its data centres. Power consumption is typically extremely high in data centres, where large electrical servers are prevented from overheating by a network of cooling units. During a testing phase in the first part of 2016, Google reportedly achieved a 40% reduction in energy use at its data centres through employing DeepMind to optimise consumption.

"They tirelessly patrol outside your property around the clock, and actively deter crime by establishing physical presence at the site," the San Francisco startup Aptonomy said on its website. "[Smart] drones live on your property, and get to know it well. In a live monitoring scenario, you can adjust the drone's viewpoint and move it around safety in real-time – even from hundreds of miles away." Special features of the security drone are a flight controller, day and night vision cameras, strobe lighting and loudspeakers built on top of the DJI S-1000, a camera-carrying octocopter, the type most often used by movie-makers. The security drone's artificial intelligence hardware and navigational systems allow it to fly low and fast, avoiding obstacles in structure-dense environments to detect human activity or faces.

The deal, announced Tuesday, will bring the Genee team into the Microsoft fold and put them to work on bringing intelligence into Office 365. Acquiring Genee is part of Microsoft's ongoing crusade to build intelligent productivity software and services using AI. It's unclear whether the functionality from the assistant will be making its way directly into Office 365, or if the team behind Genee will just be put to work improving a variety of Microsoft's products. This all plays into Satya Nadella's ongoing strategy of aggressively acquiring companies to shore up Microsoft's capabilities and growth areas.