Big Data is the new competitive advantage. From being a massive challenge, it has now become an enormous opportunity. The amount of data in the world is fast exploding, yet analyzing this data is paving the way for innovations, even faster! Newer analytical solutions are being offered everyday to help companies outperform competition. Machine learning on the other hand, is out-reaching milestones one after another, and attracting billions of investment from the tech giants.

Salesforce.com Inc. CRM 0.18 % 's annual Dreamforce customer conference, set to blanket downtown San Francisco next week, will be an unusual blend of business, technology, entertainment, philanthropy and personal empowerment. The conference, which is the world's largest tech get-together sponsored by a single company, will be an expression of the business-software provider's socially conscious corporate culture and the idiosyncratic character of its Chief Executive Marc Benioff. The event, which is expected to draw 170,000 attendees--17% more than last year--comes as Salesforce, whose public profile to date has been confined largely to salespeople and marketers, is stepping onto a larger stage. The company on Thursday vowed to block Microsoft Corp. MSFT 0.35 % 's 26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn Corp. LNKD 0.13 %, after failing in its own effort to buy the online network of 450 million mostly professional members. Meanwhile, Salesforce is considering a bid for the consumer-focused messaging service Twitter.

Amsterdam, September 29, 2016 – One of the world's first automated inspections by an intelligent drone with deep learning capabilities was demonstrated at the GPU Technology Conference Europe today by Aerialtronics, a Dutch manufacturer of technologically advanced drones, Neurala, a pioneer in deep learning software, and NVIDIA, the world leader in GPU-accelerated computing. This new "intelligent drone" identifies objects and their condition in flight, which dramatically increases the efficiency and accuracy of documenting assets, lowering costs, and making it easier for frequent inspections. It adds to the use of commercial drones to help businesses access difficult and dangerous areas, such as cell towers and turbines. The resulting system can visually inspect a cell tower and recognize the equipment mounted on the mast. This is the first step required to start automating the documentation of assets, and assessing the mechanical functionality and condition of the cell tower to identify rust and other defects.

Apple's intelligent personal assistant and knowledge navigator allows users of its devices to send messages, schedule meetings and make phone calls. The voice-activated, interactive system has been incorporated into Apple's mobile operating systems since 2011 with iOS 5. Microsoft's primary intelligent personal assistant, which was developed in time for the launch of the Windows Phone 8.1 operating system in 2014, is now integrated into Windows 10. The system can be used to track package deliveries, find files on a PC and set reminders. Google's intelligent personal assistant is available for use on its own Android-operated mobile devices and via Google Search apps downloadable on Apple devices. First launched in 2012, it can answer queries, warn users of bad traffic, and provide reminders of dinner dates and flight times.

UK-based artificial intelligence startup PROWLER.io has raised 1.5 million pounds in seed funding. The investors were Passion Capital, Amadeus Capital and Infocomm Investments. Cambridge, UK – 30th September, 2016 – Cambridge-based startup PROWLER.io has secured 1.5 million in seed investment to fund development of its sophisticated decision-making AI engine designed to revolutionise autonomous system design. This 1.5 million investment will enable PROWLER.io to build a prototype version of its platform with select partners. Initially the company will target games developers, with numerous other sectors to follow.

The online world isn't as simple as we've thought it to be. Behind the seemingly quiet and vast space of nothingness, huge amounts of data are uploaded and downloaded in fractions of a second. Data science does not only keeps track of these numbers, but also attempts to analyze and organize them. Algorithms are created to keep tabs on searches in search engines, analyze user data preference, and so on and so forth. The demand for qualified data scientists have become very high. A recent Bloomberg article predicted that there will be a shortage of data scientists in the US by the year 2018.

Data Scientist –Executive Director Role (London) J.P. Morgan's Corporate & Investment Bank New Product Development group is tasked with accelerating new solutions to market through research, strategic analysis and testing of potentially transformative concepts. A small and diverse group of engineers, data scientists and business analysts, this team works closely with the core business and external partners to identify and align innovative new technologies and business processes to the firm, creating value for our clients and disrupting current legacy processes and business models. The Role: * The Data Scientist in this role will be leading the NPD Data Science effort based out of our London office. They will recruit and develop multiple small teams, each headed by a Vice President and composed of several Associate level data scientists, that will be tasked to develop innovative analysis. They will work with the established Data Science team in New York and business analysts and software engineers within NPD, both in London and New York, to contribute to the advanced data analytics efforts of the New Product Development group as a whole.

This is a Beta release of Google Cloud Machine Learning API. This API might be changed in backward-incompatible ways and is not recommended for production use. It is not subject to any SLA or deprecation policy. Google Cloud Machine Learning brings the power and flexibility of TensorFlow to the cloud. You can use its components to select and extract features from your data, train your machine learning models, and get predictions using the managed resources of Google Cloud Platform.

Investors poured a record high 1.05B into artificial intelligence startups in Q2'16, and AI is already affecting more areas of our lives than many people realize. Even retail and e-commerce companies are increasingly integrating the technology. Recently there's been a rush of AI announcements and acquisitions by major retailers: Just last week, Etsy acquired Blackbird to enhance its search functionality through AI, followed the very next day by Amazon acquiring Angel.ai And earlier this month, e-commerce unicorn Houzz (see our full unicorn tracker here) announced a deep learning initiative to help users find and buy products by clicking on images. Using CB Insights data, we dove into the wide array of AI startups focused on retailers and e-commerce businesses, including AI-powered personal shopping apps, natural language processing and image recognition tools for shopping websites, predictive inventory allocation tools, and more.

Several years ago I was working as the CTO of a major tech company with significant operations around the world. One morning while reviewing our daily collected figures I noticed and determined that we were facing a significant sales drop in one of our most important target regions that my team simply couldn't explain. We immediately scrambled all the relevant people in our department and began combing through our data to try and identify what the problem was and how to fix it. In a matter of days, we had identified the source and created an effective way to counter the problem, yet the scars of the experience were lasting and deep. In the weeks that followed we pored over our protocol to identify what we could have done better to address the issue faster.