Amazon will now fly things to people's houses to deliver them. The company has completed the first ever Prime Air delivery, dropping an order off at someone's house just 13 minutes after they'd ordered it. For now, the drone deliveries are in a private – and largely mysterious – testing process. It is trying a range of different drones, it has said, flying them around different environments in the UK as part of its secretive tests. But eventually the company intends to roll out drone deliveries to everyone across the world.

At places like schools, hotels and tourist attractions, Microsoft Translator can help up to 100 people hold a live conversation in nine different languages. Imagine you're on a guided tour in Chartres cathedral in France along with tourists from Brazil, China, Russia and Germany -- but none of you speaks French. For the last few decades, you'd each need your own tour guide. A new app from Microsoft aims to flatten this multilanguage barrier, though. The Microsoft Translator app, running on your phone but relying on a network to Microsoft's servers, can translate your tour guide's words into eight other languages.

Machine learning (ML) is getting a lot of attention at the moment. This is partly because a slew of new companies are emerging which are using it in innovative ways. And partly because it can get easily subsumed into the fuss and furore about AI and the rise of evil robot intelligence. Graph technology, on the other hand, is something which takes more of a back seat and yet, in a lot of ways, also sits at the forefront of the big data and analytics movement. "We firmly believe is that it's at the intersection of machine learning and graph technology where the next evolution lies and where new disruptive companies are emerging," says Ash Damle, Founder and CEO at Lumiata which helps healthcare organisations makes predictions.

Deep learning, which is basically neural network machine learning with multiple hidden layers, is all the rage--both for problems that justify the complexity and high computational cost of deep learning, such as image recognition and natural language parsing, and for problems that might be better served by careful data preparation and simple algorithms, such as forecasting the next quarter's sales. If you actually need deep learning, there are many packages that could serve your needs: Google TensorFlow, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, Caffe, Theano, Torch, and MXNet, for starters. I confess that I had never heard of MXNet (pronounced "mix-net") before Amazon CTO Werner Vogels noted it in his blog. There he announced that in addition to supporting all of the deep learning packages I mentioned above, Amazon decided to contribute significantly to one in particular, MXNet, which it selected as its deep learning framework of choice. Vogels went on to explain why: MXNet combines the ability to scale to multiple GPUs (across multiple hosts) with good programmability and good portability.

Steadfast robots replace hotel desk clerks and retail workers, autonomous cars and drones transport robots that deliver packages more efficiently, shopping sprees take place in virtual reality – these are just a few of the innovations Gartner, Inc. predicted during a webcast entitled, "The Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2017." In a fascinating presentation that encouraged companies to experiment with scenarios for these and other technologies based on targeted business value, David Cearley, Vice President and Gartner Fellow, explained how intelligence anywhere and everywhere actually puts people in charge. More and more people will use augmented reality for more personalized shopping experiences. It's about all of that together," said Cearley. "We need to…put the person at the center.

Recently, we had written about how Expedia is planning to become the first $100 billion online travel company. One of the main drivers to help Expedia reach its target is technological investments. In one of its moves towards technological advancements, Expedia has recently announced voice activated searches on its platform through Amazon Alexa. This is the company's first move towards introducing a voice activated search product and it marks progress in Expedia's ongoing work on the processing of natural language. The feature will enable Expedia customers to ask Alexa about the status of their existing flight reservations, it will help them rent cars and also answer queries about the customers' loyalty program numbers.

There is a lot of confusion these days about Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL), yet the distinction is very clear to practitioners in these fields. Are you able to articulate the difference? There is a lot of confusion these days about Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL). There certainly is a massive uptick of articles about AI being a competitive game changer and that enterprises should begin to seriously explore the opportunities. The distinction between AI, ML and DL are very clear to practitioners in these fields.

The Minecraft video game is popular with children; now a version is being used to test artificial-intelligence programs. The Minecraft video game was familiar to José Hernández-Orallo long before he started using it for his own research. The computer scientist, who devises ways to benchmark machine intelligence at the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain, first watched his own children play inside the 3D virtual world, which focuses on solving problems rather than shooting monsters. In 2014, Microsoft bought Minecraft, and its science arm, Microsoft Research, gave its own researchers access to a new version of the game that allowed computer programs, as well as people, to explore and customize the 3D environment. Then, after inviting a small group of outside researchers that included Hernández-Orallo to download the machine-friendly version of the world, last July, Microsoft made it freely available to anyone, with the goal of speeding up progress in artificial intelligence (AI).

Business as we know it is changing. But some business leaders aren't convinced that it will affect them or their business. But the truth is, business is changing at a fundamental level. Some of the key leadership challenges of today include the advent of big data, data becoming a major business asset, AI taking over, platform businesses challenge traditional suppliers, the sharing economy, 3 D printing, robots becoming more intelligent, and more. These eye-opening facts show the importance of all the things I continue to write about here, capturing the key tech trends and business challenges every leader should reflect on...

M6 Publicité and M6 Web Select Accenture's New Advertising Offering, Powered by Artificial Intelligence, To Target Ads More Effectively NEW YORK; Dec. 13, 2016 – M6 Publicité and M6 Web, Group M6 subsidiaries, have chosen Accenture's (NYSE: ACN) new Advanced Video Analytics offering that uses artificial intelligence to more accurately predict customer advertising preferences and serve targeted ads more effectively. M6 Group is the second largest private TV Group in France with major traditional TV channels such as M6, W9, and 6ter, as well as 6play, a free digital TV platform. M6 Publicité and M6 Web chose Accenture to implement a powerful data-driven advertising optimization tool run by a team of data scientists, analysts and developers. This data tool integrates several Accenture offerings including artificial intelligence that increases the number of users reached with targeted ads. Processing large amounts of historical user data, artificial intelligence can predict with more precision users' interests, behaviors, and purchasing actions.