Because you can play Minecraft pretty much anywhere, it only makes sense the world-building game would make an appearance in virtual reality. VR company Oculus revealed Wednesday a version of Minecraft is now available for Samsung's Gear VR. According to Oculus, the VR version of Minecraft will support many of the features of the Pocket Edition, available on mobile devices, including creative and survival modes as well as multiplayer. Users have two ways to play: A default theater view where you essentially play as you would on a mobile or home console device; or in first-person, where you can "stand beside your creations." The VR edition will require a separate controller.

Can't reach your smartphone to adjust the lighting in your home theater? Eyesight announced at the Samsung Developers Conference Wednesday that it will embed its computer-vision and deep-learning technology into Samsung's Artik 10 Internet of Things module. The companies say this will enable manufacturers to embed gesture-recognition capabilities directly into products such as smart light bulbs. It will also eliminate the need to grab your smartphone to control a device, and it will significantly reduce response time because the processing power will be on the device itself instead of a server in the cloud. Eyesight said it would demonstrate its technology at the conference by using subtle finger movements to control a set of Phillips Hue LED light bulbs.

YouTube promises to be dramatically smarter and easier to navigate with the latest mobile app update. The Android and iOS versions of the app feature larger images and a simplified interface make the video preview pop out more. The bigger change is behind the scenes, in the recommendation engine. Google says it's tapping into deep neural networks, which enables computers to learn from the information they gather over time. In practice you may see video suggestions that better match what you may want to see based on your viewing history.

Intel is making it easier to create smarter and more functional gadgets, robots, drones, and wearables using its Edison developer board. The company has made a series of improvements to its latest IoT Developer Kit 3.0, which is used to program functionality into devices. The developer kit adds support for a wider range of sensors and adds connectivity to IBM's Bluemix cloud service. The kit also has improved programming tools and integration with Google's Brillo and Android. Edison has been used as a developer board to prototype and test devices.

MaritzCX, a global customer experience (CX) software and services company, today is pre-announcing two new capabilities in its customer experience product offerings to help businesses broaden their understanding and response to customers. PredictionCX provides the first-of-its-kind capabilities to help businesses grow by analyzing known customer information and applying it to predict customer loyalty. SocialCX is a first-to-market offering that helps CX pros manage and increase reviews on social media at the local/branch level. PredictionCX – Rescue, Up-sell, Anticipate Needs of Silent Customers MaritzCX created PredictionCX to give organizations greater opportunity to recover customers and drive financial returns from their customer experience program. Companies are looking for ways to understand the full spectrum of the customer experience and increase loyalty and retention, which is continually challenged with increasing survey fatigue and growing response bias.

ARE ALGORITHMS taking over our jobs? Yes, yes they are… and that a good thing. An algorithm is a series of steps with rules that help us solve problems and accomplish goals. And when we structure these steps and rules the right way we can automate the algorithm to establish Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). And it is this A.I. that helps us do our analytical heavy lifting so we can focus our time on doing the things that we're good at… the things we were hired to do.

In 2007, Stephanie Costello had a boring office job with a lot of downtime that she spent online. She recalls the day she read one of those articles on MSN.com that have become a staple of the Internet: how to make extra money online. These types of articles often appear in the soft-news sections of MSN, Yahoo and other sites, usually with the message that there is money being left on the table. Costello was intrigued at the prospect of cutting through the boredom of her day with the opportunity to pick up a little extra cash. She went to the website, Mechanical Turk, where companies can post tiny tasks and workers can find and perform them online. It was free to register--no call for an "investment" up front, which indicated that it was not on its face a scam. And she began making money immediately. Costello is a trailblazer of sorts. She was one of the early workers to join Mechanical Turk, the first online, crowd-based, micro-labor platform.

IBM (IBM, Tech30) Watson is teaming up with Sesame Workshop to develop a new suite of preschool products that could range from consumer apps and toys, to educational tools for schools. Sesame Workshop is the nonprofit that creates "Sesame Street." The company says it entered into this partnership because it wants to provide personalized learning to as many kids around the world as possible. "There's not necessarily anything wrong with preschool education today," Harriet Green, IBM's GM for Watson IoT, Commerce and Education told CNNMoney. But not enough kids have access to the right level of education at the right time in their lives.

In his many years as an artificial intelligence researcher, Eric Horvitz has worked on everything from systems that help determine what's funny or surprising to those that know when to help us remember what we need to do at work. On Wednesday, Horvitz, a technical fellow and managing director of Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, research lab, received the ACM – AAAI Allen Newell Award for groundbreaking contributions in artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. The award honors Horvitz's substantial theoretical efforts and as well as his persistent focus on using those discoveries as the basis for practical applications that make our lives easier and more productive. Harry Shum, the executive vice president of Microsoft's technology and research group, said Horvitz epitomizes a style of research that is unique to places like Microsoft because it is focused on having an impact in both the research and industry domains. "People talk about basic research and applied research. What we are doing here is Microsoft research," Shum said.

The development of artificial intelligence and robotics is not only seen as a key to economic competitiveness, but AI research is also a reflection of different countries' "soft power" influence. For instance, nations such as the U.S., Israel, and India consider AI as key to securing their borders. By contrast, Japan and South Korea expect the "fourth industrial revolution" to benefit their trade positions. Today, China and Russia are trying to predict events. Different approaches to AI are already changing the world.