Amid rumors that the iPhone 8 will incorporate advanced facial recognition features, the Hebrew-language website Calcalist (via Times of Israel) is reporting that Apple recently acquired Realface, an up-and-coming Israeli startup with impressive real-time facial recognition software. Lending credence to rumors that the iPhone 8 may forgo the use of Touch ID in favor of facial recognition, Realface's software is said to be sophisticated enough such that it can reliably be used as a foundation for mobile-based biometric authentication. As is often the case when Apple acquires a company, Realface's web presence has already been wiped from the web. Still, thanks to the magic of Google, we were able to poke around and dig up some intriguing nuggets of information about the company's promising technology. Realface boasts that it's AI software rests upon deep learning methods and is so reliable and quick that the end-result is an absolutely seamless user experience.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is leaving no stone unturned in wooing startups in India to its cloud platform Azure. On Monday, the Redmond-headquartered tech giant announced that Flipkart, India's e-commerce marketplace, will adopt Microsoft Azure as its exclusive public cloud platform. Nadella, who is in his maiden visit to Bangalore as the CEO of Microsoft, is in talks with other startups as well to understand their technology needs. He's pitching Azure cloud platform to users as the company looks to catch up with Amazon Web Services in India. Amazon started Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2003 after experiencing the need for cloud services first hand.

If you've been following any of the latest business and technology headlines, you've no doubt heard how 2017 will be the year that ground-breaking technologies like virtual reality and artificial intelligence will create new paradigms in our healthcare systems, schools, universities, and enterprises. Even small and mid-sized businesses (SMB) stand to gain immeasurable benefits from these technological advancements, helping managers to understand, manage and measure businesses operations and customer interactions in ways that were never possible before. We'll have the opportunity to become more efficient, innovate faster and ultimately, make better decisions as long as we have the network foundation required to sustain this innovation. Here's a look at three types of technology that can help you establish the groundwork required to get ahead in 2017: Fiber Optics: Fiber is the foundation of any business technology stack with its inherent speed and scalability. With fiber, you're driving on a supersonic raceway; without it, your business will operate like the digital equivalent of driving on a dirt road.

And it all feels a little familiar. The company has re-invented the status tool – which until now has only offered the option to put a piece of text next to your name, like "at the gym" – so that it takes one of Snapchat's most central and celebrated features. And it is just the latest Facebook company to do so – with everything from Instagram to Facebook's own app taking its competitors innovations. People will now be able to share photos and videos as "statuses", in a similar way to how stories work on Snapchat and now Instagram. Rather than simply posting text, they will be able to add pictures that will show for all their friends – until they are automatically deleted.

Amazon is bringing the next generation of its excellent Fire TV Stick to the UK, updating the device with Alexa, expanded voice search capabilities and a new user interface. The addition of Alexa support is undoubtedly the most notable upgrade. The artificial intelligence assistant is widely recognised as the best in the game, powering Amazon's Echo speakers, and is set to land on a range of new product categories in the near future, including cars, phones, fridges and TVs. 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. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

Where is the data stored and who has access to it? How is my personal data shared? Today many mobile apps are connected to trackers that collect personal information and sell it.

Episode Summary: One facet of business that nearly any industry has in common is the need to stay on top of news in their respective market, including competitor strategies or understanding changes in news related to the field. Media monitoring is a domain that machine learning (ML) is well suited for, with it's ability to coax out headlines, contextual information, and financial data from the seemingly endless stream of social, blog, and other information on the web today. Signal is a company that uses ML specifically for these purposes. In this episode, we speak with Signal's Chief Data Scientist and Co-founder Dr. Miguel Martinez, who dives into real business use cases illustrating the use of machine learning for media monitoring across industries. Brief Recognition: Dr. Miguel Martinez is chief data scientist at Signal, where he manages a team of data scientists to transform best algorithms from the fields of machine learning, information retrieval, and natural language processing into large-scale commercial products.

"Insurtech", as it's known, is the application of AI to any number of touchpoints across the medical and health insurance spectrum. Real-time geolocated doctor appointment bookings are only the beginning. Imagine sending your doctor snapshots of a wound over time so he can check how it's healing. Or capturing your own EKG at home while your doctors receive alerts if anything is amiss. Even the very hardware many people already use at home for medical purposes (glucometers, for example) might be tied into the IoT.

Here's why banks and credit unions should believe in artificial intelligence and invest in the power of advanced data analytics. Traditional retail banking providers, weighed down by monolithic legacy systems and ponderous regulations, are in uncomfortable territory. Advancements in fintech have upended the industry, enticing both large financial firms and smaller tech startups to apply disruptive technologies in ways that threaten the status quo. To become more agile and remain relevant, traditional retail banking providers find themselves exploring their technological options with focused intensity. New innovations in data analytics empower financial institutions with systems that are so smart, they learn on the go, automatically refining their algorithms and improving their results over time.

It's the beginning of the end for smartphone apps as we have known and tapped on them, reckons Gartner. The analyst is calling the start of a "post-apps" era, based on changes in consumer interactions that appear driven, in large part, by the rise of dominant messaging platforms designed to consume more and more of mobile users' time and attention. It reckons messaging apps will become more popular than social media apps within the next two years. In a new report, based on a survey of mobile users in the US, China and the UK, Gartner's reading of the app usage tea-leaves shows signs of messaging platforms cannibalizing other apps, with for example, usage of dedicated video apps declining four percentage points between the 2015 and 2016 editions of the survey. Usage of standalone maps apps also shrunk by three percentage points, year-over-year, according to Gartner's data.