Social Content is Clearly Overtaking Traditional Journalism Despite constant warnings from hardcore journalists and reporters alike, it seems that the people now prefer using the social media to remain up-to-date with the latest and greatest in international news, rather than relying on traditional news sources like the New York Times or The Telegraph. There is an obvious reason behind this increase. Almost everyone who knows how to use the internet probably has an account on Facebook and Twitter, and thanks to recent improvements in both the platforms, sharing and accessing latest content on the fly is easier than ever. As such, matters of importance and attention seem to be showing up on our Facebook and Twitter feeds far before they appear on any of the traditional news websites, causing people to flock to them instead. A number of reputed online news sources, including the Huffington Post, are now taking steps to ensure that content, especially news, can be shared across their platforms just as easily as it is on Facebook and Twitter.

It's a beautiful introduction ... Try not to drool too much! Read "A Few Useful Things to Know about Machine Learning" by Prof. Pedro Domingos. It's densely packed with valuable information, but not opaque. The author understands that there's a lot of "black art" and folk wisdom, and they invite you in. Take your time with this one.

Elon Musk is once again feuding publicly with a reporter who said something he didn't like. The Tesla chief on Monday criticized a veteran financial journalist at Fortune magazine for implying that his electric automaker acted unethically by taking two months to publicly disclose a deadly crash in one of its semi-autonomous cars. Just 11 days after the May 7 crash -- in which a Tesla driver died while reportedly watching a movie while using his Model S sedan's "Autopilot" function on a Florida highway -- Tesla sold more than 2 billion of stock at a price of 215 per share. "To put things baldly, Tesla and Musk did not disclose the very material fact that a man had died while using an auto-pilot technology that Tesla had marketed vigorously as safe and important to its customers," Carol J. Loomis, a former senior editor-at-large who spent 60 years at the venerable financial glossy, wrote in a story published Tuesday morning. After emailing back and forth with Tesla public relations managers, she said Musk joined the thread.

The Mogees Play is the latest product from London-based startup Mogees. Based on the same contact microphone and machine-learning technology first seem in the company's original product, the Mogees Pro, it promises to turn any surface into a music and gaming input device, bridging the physical and digital worlds in new and delightfully creative ways. Once again, Mogees is launching a Kickstarter campaign to brings it wares to market, but unlike many crowdfunding campaigns, which I tend to be very hesitant to cover, the startup has form in shipping product and has to date sold thousands of Mogees Pros. The Mogees Play hopes to build on that legacy with a more mass market device that fulfils founder Bruno Zamborlin's mission to introduce non-musicians to the technology and encourage everybody to begin making music and exploring their creativity right out of the box. The Mogees Play will ship with three iOS apps: Mogees Pulse, a rhythm game, which is a little reminiscent of Guitar Hero (and has the backing of Guitar Hero founder Charles Huang); Mogees Jam, a recording studio in your pocket that enables you to build rhythms, melodies and loops using the acoustic properties of any object a Mogees Play is attached to; and Mogees Keys, which is a'smart' keyboard to trigger melodies, arpeggios and chords using the Mogees Play.

As new technologies and trends emerge in the marketplace, small and medium-sized companies must look out for ways they too can benefit from improvements and advancements. Startups have demonstrated time and time again in recent years that the company willing to put new technology to use to solve an old problem (Netflix, Uber, Airbnb, etc.) are the companies that will succeed -- no matter how big or small they are when they begin. These technologies mean that work that once might have been too time consuming or expensive for a small company to do becomes quick and relatively inexpensive. Companies that can't afford a dedicated customer service representative can outsource much of that work to a chatbot that can answer simple customer service questions. While a very small business might not be able to employ the latest in robotics in-house, the advent of more automated manufacturing will make manufacturing more affordable and small runs of products more achievable. This will open up production possibilities for many small businesses.

The rise of the machines continues this week with news that the Associated Press (AP) is expanding its baseball coverage through automated stories generated by algorithms. The New York-based nonprofit news agency has ramped up its partnership with Automated Insights, a Durham, Carolina-based company that uses artificial intelligence to analyze big data and transform it into stories. The AP has worked with Automated Insights for a number of years already. Indeed, more than 3,000 computer-generated corporate earnings reports have been created over the past couple of years based on data supplied by Zacks Investment Research, and the AP has used automation in sports reports too. The organization also participated in a 5.5 million funding round into Automated Insights back in 2014.

Microsoft has recently released a set of Cognitive Services that make it easy to add powerful machine intelligence to your applications with just a few lines of code. Since these services are hosted in the cloud, they can easily be consumed by applications running on any platform. I'll also describe some practical scenarios on how these technologies can be used. We've all seen at least one movie or TV show where a bad guy is magically identified using software and a single photo or frame of video. While things in the real world don't work exactly the way you see in the movies, the Face API provides technology that can be used to power this type of software.

Anki has a big hit with its iPhone-controlled Anki Overdrive race cars that use sophisticated artificial intelligence. And now it has its second act in the form of a cute, smart A.I. toy robot named Cozmo. Cozmo is a playful, intelligent, and seemingly sentient being that is aware of people and its surroundings. It is a labor of love for San Francisco-based Anki, which has worked on 45 different versions of the toy over the past four-and-a-half years. You could think of Cozmo as something like Eve the robot in Pixar's Wall-E animated film.

The idea of human-robot relationships may sound absurd to you, especially if you aren't the biggest fan of technology, but these types of relationships will happen in the next twenty to fifty years, and maybe even sooner. In case you are wondering about the above picture, it is from the movie Serenity. The man in the photo is Mr. Universe--a man who sits in front of screens all day monitoring the universe--and the "woman" is his female companion robot that he married. The idea of someone like this is absurd right? Except when you look at what is happening in western society, you realize it isn't.

One of the most intriguing public discussions to emerge over the past year is humanity's wrestling match with the threat and promise of artificial intelligence. AI has long lurked in our collective consciousness -- negatively so, if we're to take Hollywood movie plots as our guide -- but its recent andvery real advances are driving critical conversations about the future not only of our economy, but of humanity's very existence. In May 2014, the world received a wakeup call from famed physicist Stephen Hawking. Together with three respected AI researchers, the world's most renowned scientist warned that the commercially-driven creation of intelligent machines could be "potentially our worst mistake in history." Comparing the impact of AI on humanity to the arrival of "a superior alien species," Hawking and his co-authors found humanity's current state of preparedness deeply wanting.