In last month's blog I talked about keeping your team innovative. One of the key tenets of an innovative team is the concept of moonshots or "10x Thinking" or audacious goals. In a "moonshot economy," while a breakthrough can mean the start of a new industry leader, it can also mean the death of an industry stalwart. First, let's take a look at some previous moonshots and how they've impacted various industries and the world. The first is, of course, the great Space Race.

Google has announced a deal to buy Moodstock, a French startup that builds technology which helps smartphone devices recognize images and objects. Moodstock's work in computer vision and machine learning and its technology behind smartphones being able to recognize images and objects was the reason behind Google's interest. Google's technology has been including machine learning, such as in its free translation and photo services. Google's inclination towards this as well as their interest in improving machine vision is what prompted the US technology' giant's decision to buy Moodstock. The Moodstocks team, described as a small group of researchers and engineers, will join a Google research and development centre in Paris.

At betaworks, we are very excited about the opportunities conversational interfaces offer for building new kinds of products, services, distribution channels and user experiences. We have been investing and building in this space for quite some time now. Given our curiosity and experience in this space, we introduced Botcamp back in April this year and we were blown away by the quality and quantity of applications in this space. We received over 400 applications from early stage bot companies from all over the world. These developers are building conversational services in various verticals from enterprise, finance, and commerce to travel, analytics and news on different platforms. Some products were thin bots, some had taken a human-assisted approach and some were a result of over a year's work on language analysis and machine learning in specific verticals.

Alleged criminals might not be the only ones to benefit from pleading the Fifth. By falling silent during the Turing test, artificial intelligence (AI) systems can fool human judges into believing they're human, according to a study by machine intelligence researchers from Coventry University. Alan Turing, considered the father of theoretical computer science and AI, devised the Turing test in an attempt to outline what it means for a thing to think. In the test, a human judge or interrogator has a conversation with an unseen entity, which might be a human or a machine. The test posits that the machine can be considered to be "thinking" or "intelligent" if the interrogator is unable to tell whether or not the machine is a human.

Amazon's annual competition for picking perfect robots that could one day work in the company warehouses crowned the latest champion in its robotic picking challenge. Competitors were asked to handle a wide range of products from toiletries to clothes and then evaluated on the basis of speed and precision in stocking shelves. The contest was won by a joint team from the TU Delft Robotics Institute in the Netherlands and the company Delft Robotics. The robot developed by Team Delft managed to pick items from a mock Amazon warehouse shelf at a rate of 100 per hour. The failure rate noted was 16.7%.

WIMBLEDON fans are being served a mash up of machine learning and advanced analytics in a bid to capture viewers' attention on social media and digital platforms. Statistics and analytics have been a big feature of grand slam tennis for some years now. But what's new this year is Watson. IBM's flagship AI-driven analytics platform has been tasked with crunching through the hundreds of thousands of social media and online posts which the event generates. It's mission will be to find the stories that fans are most engaged with, and drive creation of the sort of content that they most want to see.

Google's DeepMind is teaming up with NHS-funded Moorfields Eye Hospital to research whether machine learning can help the fight against blindness. The NHS said AI could play a "big role in tackling avoidable sight loss" and the partnership is intended to explore "how cutting edge technologies can help medical research into eye diseases". This includes macular degeneration, which generally affects the elderly, as well as diabetes-related sight loss. Machine learning processes will be applied to around a million eye scans to help search for early symptoms of sight loss. The number of people with sight loss is set to double by 2050, with around two million people in the UK currently living with sight loss – around one in 30.

Automation has everyone on the edge. According to a recent report by US-based research firm'HfS Research', India's IT services industry, which employs around 3.7 million people, will lose 6.4 lakh jobs to automation in the next five years. The report further adds that the IT industry worldwide would see a net decrease of 9% in headcount, or about 1.4 million jobs, with countries such as the Philippines, the United Kingdom and the United States also taking hits by 2021. But that is just one part of the story. The wave of'technological unemployment' will have a broader spectrum, say experts.

The NHS is pairing up with Google's artificially intelligent image software DeepMind for a new medical research partnership that could play a "big role in tackling avoidable sight loss." Specialists at the NHS-funded Moorfields Eye Hospital in London will use DeepMind, the internet giant's machine learning project, to research whether the technology can help detect and prevent eye diseases and blindness. DeepMind will be applied to one million anonymous eye scans to look for early signs of eye conditions that humans might miss such as macular degeneration and retinal conditions caused by diabetes. The end goal of the research is to create a more efficient method by which to analyse data and come to an earlier diagnosis for patients. The number of people suffering from sight loss in the UK is predicted to double by 2050, and the project marks Google's first machine learning collaboration with healthcare specialists.

Google announced today that it has acquired Paris-based Moodstocks, a startup that has developed machine learning technology to bolster the image recognition features on smartphones. "We continue to pursue our machine learning and research efforts," wrote Vincent Simonet, head of the research and development team for France Google, "and Moodstocks is the latest proof of our commitment to this area." "Today, we're thrilled to announce that we've reached an agreement to join forces with Google in order to deploy our work at scale. We expect the acquisition to be completed in the next few weeks. Our focus will be to build great image recognition tools within Google, but rest assured that current paying Moodstocks customers will be able to use it until the end of their subscription."