Between cat videos and online banking, the web runs the gamut of wasteful and wonderful when it comes to getting things done. And if you were to weigh the Internet's time wasters against its time-saving tools, it would be like an elephant sitting across a fulcrum from a field mouse. But through all the advances that have come with cloud computing, the Internet is quickly turning into a giant productivity machine. Shopping is great when you're soaking in some retail therapy, but when you're doing it because you have to, it can feel like a major chore. Mezi, a free iOS app, works like a personal assistant that you can text message. Just tell the service what you want--airfare, clothing, dinner reservations, personal electronics--and Mezi's agents scour the web for the best deals, even using coupons if possible to get you a good deal.

Machine learning in 2017 will become a mainstream tool for communications providers struggling to transform data overload into actionable analytics, according to Argyle Data. "The telecommunications industry is drowning in data," said Padraig Stapleton, VP of engineering at Argyle Data. Stapleton said fraud and financial analysts alike are overwhelmed by the struggle to control and harness this fire-hose of information into actionable analytics. There is just too much IP traffic going across mobile networks for humans to review, detect and respond to fraud in the traditional ways such as discovering fraud and writing preventative rules. Machine learning does all the grunt work for analysts, sifting through data in real time and providing output instantly in understandable, accessible formats," said Stapleton.

The upcoming Samsung Galaxy S8 has been the subject of countless rumours over recent months, but the latest leaks all but confirm an unusual design choice that could be cause for concern. Thanks to the handset's enlarged screen, Samsung has decided to completely drop the home button and move the fingerprint scanner to the back of the phone. However, Samsung appears to have taken a very different approach to rival smartphone manufacturers that have also embraced the rear-mounted sensor. Schematics released by Cnet Korea suggest that the Galaxy S8's fingerprint scanner will sit right beside the camera sensor, rather than a couple of centimetres below it. Users will inevitably end up inadvertently fingering the larger camera lens instead of the fingerprint scanner, which will need wiping down if enough dirt builds up over its surface.

Nearly a decade ago, Comcast promised liberation from the tyranny of the cable box. But today its control seems here to stay--as does big cable's control over how you consume the programming you pay for. This week, the Federal Communications Commission met for the first time under its new chairman, Ajit Pai, a Republican. The original agenda for the meeting included consideration of the agency's latest proposal--advanced under former Democratic chairman Tom Wheeler--to force cable companies to make their services a bit more open. That item disappeared from the agenda--and with it the likelihood that much of anything will change in the world of cable, at least as far as government regulation is concerned.

Don't Forget the Ops: Build Operations into Your Cloud Many private cloud projects were built to deliver self-service access to development and test resources. While those clouds delivered faster access to resources, they lacked visibility, control and security needed for production deployments. In their session at 18th Cloud Expo, Steve Anderson, Product Manager at BMC Software, and Rick Lefort, Principal Technical Marketing Consultant at BMC Software, discussed how a cloud designed for production operations not only helps accelerate developer innovation, it also delivers the control that IT Operations needs to run a production cloud without getting in the way. Speaker Bios: Steve Anderson is a Product Manager for BMC's Cloud Lifecycle Management solution. This role involves working directly with customers to capture their requirements for a cloud management platform.

The Deloitte Technology, Media and Telecommunications Predictions 2017 report predicts that more than 300 million smartphones will feature some form of machine learning capability by the end of the year, as augmented and virtual reality technology becomes a more regular feature of everyday life. Artificial intelligence will also start appearing in drones, tablets, cars, medical tools and Internet of Things (IoT) connected objects, the report said, adding that many devices will be able to carry out machine learning chores without needing to be connected to the cloud. Deloitte said that 5G mobile networks will roll out this year and would result in much higher speeds, lower latency, and support for low-power low-bitrate IoT devices and sensors.

Today Intel announced record results on a new benchmark in deep learning and convolutional neural networks (CNN). Developed with ZTE, a leading technology telecommunications equipment and systems company, the image recognition technology is what many companies in Internet search and AI are trying to advance. Perception, such as recognizing a face in an image, is one of the essential goals of the ZTE 5G System," said Duan Xiangyang, vice president of the ZTE Wireless Institute. "Deep learning technology is very important as it can enable such perception in mobile edge computing systems, thus making ZTE's 5G System smarter." The test took place in Nanjing City, China, where ZTE's engineers used Intel's midrange Arria 10 FPGA for a cloud inferencing application using a CNN algorithm. ZTE has achieved a new record – beyond a thousand images per second in facial recognition – with what is known as "theoretical high accuracy" achieved for their custom topology. Intel's Arria 10 FPGA accelerated the raw design performance more than 10 times while maintaining the accuracy. The Arria 10 FPGA provides up to 1.5 teraflops (TFLOPs) single precision floating-point processing performance, 1.15 million logic elements, and more than a terabit-per-second high-speed connectivity. Such deep learning designs can be seamlessly migrated from the Arria 10 FPGA family to the high-end Intel Stratix 10 FPGA family, and users can expect up to nine times performance boost. Besides the impressive increase in performance, the team at the ZTE Wireless Institute sped design time with the use of the OpenCL programming language. With the Intel reference design, and using the Intel SDK for OpenCL to program the FPGA, our development time was greatly shortened," said Xiong Tiankui, chief engineer, ZTE Wireless Institute.

The good: Long battery life, Good camera with a wide range of controls, Easy to grip without a case The bad: Includes excessive apps, Not water and dust resistant, No virtual assistant at launch Who should buy: Android fans looking for a great large phone with long battery life. When Samsung recalled its Galaxy Note 7 last September, Android fans looking for a big-screened smartphone were left with few choices aside from Google's Pixel XL. Enter Huawei's Mate 9, which launched in the U.S. in early January. Huawei's device will also be the first smartphone to include Amazon's Alexa voice assistant built-in, which will be added through a software update promised to arrive during the first quarter of this year. With Alexa, Mate 9 will be capable of handling many of the same tasks as the Amazon Echo.

Three has made its Wi-Fi calling service significantly easier to use, which should help customers cut their monthly mobile bills. Previously, users could only take advantage of the feature through Three's additional inTouch app, which delivered a less-than-pleasant user experience. However, customers can now make calls and send texts over a Wi-Fi connection without the app. It's a handy service, allowing users to both save money and stay in touch with friends and family whenever a Wi-Fi network is available, even when signal is poor or non-existent. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Compare broadband providers and find the best deal for you with our Best Broadband Deals page. Three has made its Wi-Fi calling service significantly easier to use, which should help customers cut their monthly mobile bills. Previously, users could only take advantage of the feature through Three's additional inTouch app, which delivered a less-than-pleasant user experience. However, customers can now make calls and send texts over a Wi-Fi connection without the app. It's a handy service, allowing users to both save money and stay in touch with friends and family whenever a Wi-Fi network is available, even when signal is poor or non-existent.