Shekar Natarajan, Wal-Mart's vice president of logistics strategy, told reporters the technology is custom-built on top of the drone and is proprietary for Wal-Mart. A control tower will oversee the images on a screen and will send alerts when items are flagged so that workers can go back to the stacks to fix the issue.

With its new music-and-art project, called Magenta, Google is putting the "art" in artificial intelligence. The minds inside the Google Brain team have released a 90-second piano melody that was generated through machine learning. The project, first announced at Moogfest, is built on top of Google's TensorFlow, the web giant's open-source AI engine. Magenta's algorithm was primed with only four notes to start with, and it took off from there to plunk out a verse and bridge of sorts. The drum parts were added later for texture.

Blade Runner is the perfect film for experimentation with artificial intelligence. In Ridley Scott's sci-fi classic, Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) hunts down and "retires" humanoid robots called replicants. A new class of replicants called "Nexus-6" are capable of yielding human-like emotional responses, further blurring the line between who is human and who is machine. This journey eventually leads Deckard to question his own humanity. So it's all too fitting that a reconstruction of the film created by an AI could be mistaken for the real thing.

The same principles apply: The audience for those shows is aging and declining, and news of all kinds is available at a pace that was unthinkable even 10 years ago. And as Olbermann pointed out, the desire for the "leisurely, well-done" show is very much on the wane. I executive-produced Weekend All Things Considered for four years. And while I loved the work, the constraints of the magazine format were frustrating. The time had to be filled, no matter the quality of the stories.

The Web giant on Wednesday unveiled a 90-second piano melody (mp3), the first piece of art created by machine learning as part of Project Magenta. The project, announced last week at Moogfest, is an artificial intelligence effort to create original music and visual art. Along with creating music and art, another goal of the project is to build a community of artists, coders and machine learning researchers, Douglas Eck, a research scientist working on Project Magenta, wrote in a blog post Wednesday explaining more about the team's ambitions. Eck wrote that the team wants to open-source the infrastructure, beginning with audio and video support. One of the greatest challenges of the project is not only creating art but also telling a compelling story, Eck wrote.

Researchers have been attempting to make robots and artificial intelligence more creative over the past months – from drawing to writing quasi-dystopian poetry. Today we get another piece of work from a Google machine: a 90-second melody. It's the result of Google's Project Magenta, which aims to use machine learning to create music and art, and bridge the communities between those interests with coders and researchers. Magenta is built on top of its TensorFlow system, and you can find the open-sourced materials through its Github. The team says the challenge is not to just get Google machines to create art, but to be able to tell stories from it. After all, that's what artists do with their crafts: to compose a narrative into their work then share them with the world.

Spotify is a household name, with more paying users than any other music-streaming service in the world. But it doesn't make a penny. Those 30 million paid subscribers help it rake in almost half the revenues in the global industry. But most of the money goes to record labels and artists, while the privately owned Swedish company faces growing competition from Apple with its deep pockets and massive iPhone user base. To reduce its dependence on labels and stand apart from rivals, Spotify is broadening beyond its music library.

Streaming video helps sell shoes because Amazon Prime members buy more, Bezos says. Inc. chief executive officer spoke at Recode's Code conference Tuesday night about artificial intelligence, privacy on the internet, his goals with the Washington Post, Amazon's ambitions in entertainment, and more. Amazon is No. 1 in the Internet Retailer 2016 Top 500 Guide. For Netflix, Amazon is a particularly complex competitor because their goals aren't the same. The way Bezos looks at streaming video: "It helps us sell more shoes," he said.

Sony (NYSE:SNE) outlined a cautious outlook for the financial year 2016. However this did not convince the market as the stock price strengthened further on its release. As I pointed out in an article in March Sony has set out a strong position in the youth dynamic. This is headlined by its move into Virtual Reality and further Playstation products, as well as a strengthening position in the fast-growing streaming Music business. Its successful re-organization moves and new products I highlighted in an earlier article. The establishment of their "Business Incubation Group" to brainstorm on new products and new concepts shows that creativity is back at the front of the company's agenda.

According to Pew Research Center's analysis of comScore data, at the start of 2015, 39 of the top 50 digital news websites have more traffic to their sites and associated applications coming from mobile devices than from desktop computers. This fact is self -explanatory why service providers are moving towards news app. More and more apps are being launched worldwide each one claiming to be exclusive and original. But the truth is they are not, especially news apps. With the abundance of data being generated every second, there has been an excess of information.