We hear a lot about the Internet of Things on the consumer side. The oft trotted out example of the'smart' refrigerator that tells consumers when they've run out of the milk, and so on. But more serious potential for IoT -- and potentially seriously big wins -- are likely to be on the enterprise side where connected sensors can be deployed to automate at scale. The company took in a 6 million Series A round in December, which it's just announcing now -- and which includes, on top of that, a 3 million convertible seed, bringing its total raised to date to 9 million. Investors in the business include Jabil Circuit, Stanford StartX Fund, Founder.org

In recent years, global business leaders have increasingly embraced the power of the cloud, with its 24/7 availability, scalable performance and variable costs. But the merger of these on-demand capabilities with artificial/machine intelligence (AI/MI) is a new phase in digital innovation that has not yet been sufficiently appreciated by senior management. New research from the Leading Edge Forum (LEF) shows how the combination of cloud computing and machine intelligence is shaping the business models of the future, marking a new phase in digital innovation. AI advances used to stem mostly from academic investigations and the expert system initiatives of large organisations, but there's been a fundmental shift in recent years and progress is now driven by the consumer marketplace. See also: The droids you're looking for: the AI tech that will make up the intelligent enterprise'Virtually every type of human intelligence is becoming the basis of a scalable, cloud-based, global business model.

Over July 4th weekend in 1981, several hundred game nerds gathered at a banquet hall in San Mateo, California. Personal computing was still in its infancy, and the tournament was decidedly low-tech. Each match played out on a rectangular table filled with paper game pieces, and a March Madness-style tournament bracket hung on the wall. The game was called Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron, a role-playing pastime of baroque complexity. Contestants did battle using vast fleets of imaginary warships, each player guided by an equally imaginary trillion-dollar budget and a set of rules that spanned several printed volumes. If they won, they advanced to the next round of war games--until only one fleet remained. Doug Lenat, then a 29-year-old computer science professor at nearby Stanford University, was among the players. But he didn't compete alone. He entered the tournament alongside Eurisko, the artificially intelligent system he built as part of his academic research. Eurisko ran on dozens of machines inside Xerox PARC--the computer research lab just down the road from Stanford that gave rise to the graphical user interface, the laser printer, and so many other technologies that would come to define the future of computing. That year, Lenat taught Eurisko to play Traveller. Doug Lenat says his common-sense engine is a new dawn for AI. The rest of the tech world doesn't really agree with him.

The video game industry has already taken 2016 by storm. With San Francisco's annual Game Developers Conference seeing record numbers of attendees, and Ubisoft's The Division becoming the fastest-selling original IP in games history – and generating 300m in the process – there's good reason to be excited if you're a video game fan. If first-person shooters are not your cup of tea, there's Stardew Valley, a new role-playing adventure game that allows you to go fishing, plant seeds and fall in love. Joining co-hosts Keith Stuart and Jordan Erica Webber are the founder of UK-based studio Fourth State, Mark Backler, and the community manager at Chucklefish, Molly Carroll.

Google is making it easier for companies to take advantage of the machine learning (ML) revolution with an offering that allows creation of custom machine learning models. The company on Wednesday showed off its new AI product that it is making available to folks outside of the Internet giant. With machine learning, applications are able to learn or adjust on their own without help from human developers. According to Tech Crunch, the search giant's chairman, Eric Schmidt said that Google believes machine learning is "what's next." With the new cloud service, the Internet giant will make it easier to employ some of the machine learning tech the company already uses to power features like Smart Reply in Inbox.

Cambridge Science Festival 2016 was the biggest and best ever, organisers have revealed. More than 350 events were held during the fortnight-long festival, attracting 60,000 visitors. Cambridge University, which runs the events, said the festival's main theme, artificial intelligence, sparked "considerable interest". This year was the 22nd in the festival's history, and it finished last Sunday with dozens of events on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. A spokeswoman said: "We had two momentous weeks of over 350 events and 60,000 visits, making it the largest festival to date in terms of both events and visits. "This year was marked by the considerable interest from both the public and the media in many of the artificial intelligence and machine learning events, testament to both the fascination and the concern we all feel with our growing interaction and reliance on machines.

Azure Machine Learning is Microsoft's machine learning studio. It provides a workbench for analysts to perform data analysis including applying predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms. One of the key uses of Machine Learning is finding correlations in data and using the relationships between different indicators to provide predictive power. Here is an example scenario I built in Azure ML. I found a dataset that describes a set of Community Health Status Indicators by county for the United States.

It's well understood that machine learning is eating the software world, so it's no surprise to see tech startups like Cosmify and LodgIQ emerging from stealth today with plans to leverage big unstructured data for a competitive advantage. San Francisco-based Cosmify came out of stealth today with a new solution that uses machine learning to jumpstart knowledge discovery across a range of information sources. The company's solution is designed to scan, analyze, and visualize unstructured data sources, such as documents, tweets, user data, chat logs, and photographs. Machine learning algorithms create a model of the data sources, and then maps all relevant relationships between them based on individual words or properties, according to Cosmify. Users can then explore the model to find outliers, discover behavioral trends, and predict future results.

Google is hoping to push machine learning as a mainstream business tool, with today's release of a set of preview products that take advantage of its cloud platform. Cloud Machine Learning relies on the open-source TensorFlow library, released late last year. Google said developers can use the company's tools such as Cloud Dataflow, BigQuery, Cloud Dataproc, Cloud Storage and Datalab, to train its machine learning. However, it is also offering pre-trained machine learning models with application programming interfaces. The company has been able to leverage large amounts of user and customer data stored in the applications it offers for the pre-trained models.

The United Nations Children's Fund, perhaps better known as UNICEF, has recently launched a new initiative through which they will begin to invest more money into technology start-ups that have the potential to better the lives of disadvantaged and vulnerable children all over the world. The new initiative, called Innovation Fund, has put a special focus on certain technologies that have the potential to help children, which include 3D printing, blockchain, wearables and sensors, artificial intelligence, and renewable energy. UNICEF, the United Nations program that has as its mandate the promotion of children's rights all over the world, has through its Innovation initiative put its focus on progessive projects and ideas that have the potential to help their cause. As stated on their website, UNICEF Innovation is "tasked with identifying, prototyping, and scaling technologies and practices that strengthen UNICEF's work." UNICEF is currently accepting submissions from various start-ups until February 26, 2016 through their website, though there are some requirements for being considered for funding.