Marketing and sales seemed to be much easier in the past. Customers simply visited a retail shop, where they could ask a knowledgeable salesperson about a product they discovered in a local newspaper. In recent years, the ubiquity of the internet and a state-of-the-art technology changed everything. Customers became prosumers, well informed about the product before the purchase. And what is even more important, customers frequently use a variety of channels: online and traditional stores, mobile apps, online auctions, price comparison websites, social media and more. Today, in spite of all the available technologies, life is more challenging for both marketers and salespeople.

Taking a souvenir home from an art gallery no longer has to mean a trip to the gift shop. A new app lets people scan a work of art with their smartphone camera to find out more about it and save a digital copy. The app, called Smartify, uses image recognition to identify scanned artworks and provide people with additional information about them. Users can then add the works to their own digital collection. Smartify co-founder Thanos Kokkiniotis describes it as a combination of the music discovery service Spotify and music recognition app Shazam – but for visual works.

Amper, a startup that offers AI-powered music composition, is announcing that it has raised $4 million in funding. The round was led by Two Sigma Ventures, with participation from Foundry Group, Kiwi Venture Partners and Advancit Capital. Amper previously raised funding from Brooklyn Bridge Ventures. You might not expect a film composer like Drew Silverstein (who founded the company with Sam Estes and Michael Hobe) to create a product that is ostensibly competes with his own work, but Silverstein doesn't see that way. Instead, he pitched Amper as a fast, affordable and royalty-free way to create the music for more "functional" projects (like commercials a or short online videos), where most companies would currently use pre-written stock music.

Dr. Stephen Roberts, director of the Oxford-Man Institute and professor of machine learning at the University of Oxford, tells Newsweek that the entire internet only recently matched the capacity of a single human brain. "It wasn't until 2010 that the sum total of internet traffic exceeded a zetabyte, and that's just a single human brain," Roberts said. Roberts was speaking at Newsweek's Artificial Intelligence and Data Science in Capital Markets conference, in London, March 2.

The truth is that "artificial intelligence" is a broad term that refers to much more than what has been popularized in pop culture... and it's a branch of science that will have irreversible impact on the marketing world. Before we get into how, here is a short glossary of terms and some background information that will help you get the most out of this issue. A way of talking about the algorithms that computers use to build their own models based on example input. It describes a computer that can move beyond fully descripted code and learn from experience, just as humans do. Deep learning is also sometimes known as neural networks.

Even the most optimistic tech evangelist would concede that we're a long way from getting help from the likes of Rosie, the superbly efficient robotic housekeeper in The Jetsons. While today's household generally aren't life-sized and typically don't have mechanical limbs, they can take care of several chores we'd just as soon avoid, giving us more time to do things we enjoy like collapsing on the couch and chilling with Netflix. Some people find cutting the grass relaxing. Robomow is for that second group. This battery-operated mower can trim yards up to 23,000 square feet (1/2 acre) and can handle slopes of up to 20 degrees. Instead of just cutting once a week, it allows you to take care of your yard as often as you'd like.

Arrival Amy Adams stars in this elegant, involving science-fiction drama that is simultaneously old and new, revisiting many alien-invasion conventions but with unexpected intelligence, visual style and heart. Elle Paul Verhoeven's brilliantly booby-trapped thriller starring Isabelle Huppert is a gripping whodunit, a tour de force of psychological suspense and a wickedly droll comedy of manners. The Founder Michael Keaton gives a performance of ratty, reptilian brilliance as Ray Kroc, the American salesman who turned a California burger stand into the global fast-food behemoth that is McDonald's, in John Lee Hancock's shrewd and satisfyingly fat-free biopic. I Am Not Your Negro As directed by the gifted Raoul Peck, this documentary on James Baldwin uses the entire spectrum of movie effects, not only spoken language but also sound, music, editing and all manner of visuals, to create a cinematic essay that is powerful and painfully relevant. La La Land Starring a well-paired Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, writer-director Damien Chazelle's tuneful tribute to classic movie musicals is often stronger in concept than execution, but it's lovely and transporting all the same.

Do students learn as much when they read digitally as they do in print? For both parents and teachers, knowing whether computer-based media are improving or compromising education is a question of concern. With the surge in popularity of e-books, online learning and open educational resources, investigators have been trying to determine whether students do as well when reading an assigned text on a digital screen as on paper. The answer to the question, however, needs far more than a yes-no response. In my research, I have compared the ways in which we read in print and onscreen.

The idea of a robot covered in human skin, muscles and tendons, might sound like the main character of the latest horror film. But researchers from the University of Oxford have predicted that the gruesome bots could soon be used in medicine. They suggest that flesh-covered bots will be used in the near-future to grow tissue grafts for the injured and elderly. The Eccerobot, known as Ecci, was developed by scientists from the University of Zurich in 2011. It was the first ever robot to have'muscles' and'tendons', as well as the'bones' they help move.

Loyal readers know that I have frequently written about "the dawn of the robots" (which is the title of a Science Fiction book by famed author Isaac Asimov). A recent flurry of articles on the subject of our automated future has more than strengthened my belief that it will be A.I. 1 – Humanity 0 in the foreseeable future. It is not that I don't see the business benefits from automation or artificial intelligence. It is undoubtedly true that the Weather Channel app has become infinitely more accurate with the help of IBM's Watson. And now Watson will do my tax returns, too, courtesy of H&R Block.