Christmas is right around the corner, but Santa's not the only one dropping from the sky with presents this holiday season. Amazon's Prime Air officially began service this week, when a drone made the service's first delivery in Cambridge, England. So the future of shipping has arrived ... for a handful of people in the English countryside. Many, many more Amazonians will be getting served, however, by Prime Video, now that the company has spun it out into a standalone service. At an introductory rate that's a third the cost of Netflix, the move creates serious competition for viewing dollars around the world -- though it only brings Amazon's original programming.

Mixed Reality and Humanizing Artificial Intelligence: New Accenture Report Highlights the Evolving Role of Design as More Innovative, Responsive and Emotive Than Ever Fjord Trends 2017 takes a provocative look at the digital developments to watch in the year ahead, according to Fjord, design and innovation from Accenture Interactive NEW YORK; Dec. 13, 2016 – If this year has taught us anything, it's that digital technologies and hyper-connectivity are bringing user-led innovation to market faster than ever. Successful organizations today are those that best adapt and respond to unceasing change. Against this backdrop, Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has released Fjord Trends 2017, its tenth and most provocative annual report examining the most significant emergent digital trends expected to disrupt organizations and society in the year ahead. Three meta themes emerged, challenging long-held norms and assumptions. The rise of the autonomous vehicle, smart homes and digital assistants is creating new ecosystems that threaten the smartphone's dominance as the main command center of our lives.

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Westworld has inspired some of the best, most engaging (mercifully apolitical) conversations I've had in a very long while. The series is both entertaining and thought-provoking. If you haven't seen it, Westworld is an HBO series, based on the 1973 Michael Crichton movie, about a futuristic amusement park where people can interact with synthetic humans (robots that are indistinguishable from human beings) and do pretty much whatever they want with them. Is Sex with a Robot Cheating? There are quite a few articles that explore the ethical and moral issues arising from the advent of this type of technology.

This year's news about what artificial intelligence can do in the arts has been both exciting and scary. Neural networks have learned to paint like masters and compose sophisticated music. Those of us in creative endeavors might be as endangered by technological advances as blue-collar workers are often said to be -- though we are protected by certain limitations that technology is never likely to overcome. Last summer, a team of Russian developers released Prisma, a mobile app based on the work of some German artificial intelligence researchers. The neural network behind it could redraw an image using techniques it had learned from studying the oeuvre of a number of painters, including Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch.

Amazon's Echo line already has a truckload of skills that tap into Alexa's ability to lend a hand with tasks, and the company adds new ones on a what seems like a weekly basis. This week, Google announced Netflix support for its connected Home speaker through Chromecast alongside the ability to display images from Google Photos. It turns out that was just the beginning as Google revealed over 30 more actions for Home from third-party developers. Using voice commands, you can try to find out why you feel crappy with WebMD, sort your to-do list with Todoist, order pizza from Domino's and get news updates from the likes of The Wall Street Journal, NBC News, NPR and more. And those are just a few examples.

In 2017, artificial intelligence will slowly but surely make its presence known, both within newsrooms and to readers. In newsrooms, bots will start to produce more stories where structured data is readily available -- think game recaps, weather run downs, and overviews of how the stock market performed. This will free up resources and reduce costs. Robots will analyze complex editorial content of all lengths, and provide feedback to the humans sitting behind the keyboard. Much like how Netflix used data to help fine-tune House of Cards, news organizations will have the opportunity to adjust editorial narratives to make stories more engaging.

As newspaper circulation collapsed with the reign of digital, things seemed bleak for the traditional idea of the press. But journalists have been key innovators during the exponential growth of the Web, blazing trails and staking claims to keep the essential profession as current and changing as the times we live in. It's a hell of a comeback story, driven by a simple, almost painfully obvious resource: Data. What the winners have in common is a super-powered understanding of what readers want (and how they want it) -- and a willingness to evolve or die.

Google has added support for Netflix to its home assistant Google Home, just in time for binge-watching during the holidays. To get started you'll need the latest version of the Google Home app, and Chromecast needs to be plugged into your TV. Once in the Google Home app go to Devices - Home - Settings - More - Videos and Photos and link your Netflix account to your Google account. Once you're all done with that, say "OK Google, play Stranger Things on Netflix on my TV" the movie will start streaming. You can ask Google Home to play your favorite series, skip episodes, pause and resume playback and turn on captions.

Digitizing analog processes can have steep learning curve. Even as a kid, I could see the visual difference between TV sitcoms - shot on videotape - and films. Video had a jarring sharpness that, paradoxically, made the picture less real. Films, with much higher resolution than video, looked more real, even though the motion blur and background softness - among other artifacts - are a clear departure from reality as our eyes perceive it. The next wave of IT innovation will be powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning.