When Whitney Wolfe founded Bumble, the popular swipe-based dating app where women make the first move, she wasn't out to start a dating app revolution--she just wanted to create a way to bring accountability to the online dating realm. But the app's major boom has shown that the dating space needed a different approach. Now, as the company is in its second year, Bumble is expanding the platform to allow different kinds of connections instead of just romantic ones. Wolfe outlined plans for the app's future at South by Southwest, including many new features that are just around the corner. The idea for Bumble was born after Wolfe's messy departure from Tinder, which has a reputation of being more hookup-focused than relationship-focused. On Tinder and other sites, it's common for women to receive aggressive messages and (ahem) unsolicited photos from their matches, which might drive users away.

At this moment there are a lot of new technologies that could have a massive impact on eCommerce. This is why Managers are having a difficult time to place the correct bet. For this reason, we have investigated Managers and Directors to navigate future eCommerce trends. We asked more than 60 carefully chosen managers from all around Europe. First, we asked them about their eCommerce investments last year.

Scanning for audible security cues is a skill we'll have to acquire in the near future--and as VUIs are becoming a more and more common interface in our daily lives, the sooner, the better. In the future, VUIs will be able to be used in situations where a human-less GUI could feel impersonal. For example, you could interact with a friendly VUI when confirming a large bank transfer or have your blood-test results read to you via a health app. But in order to interact with these products and reveal sensitive information to them, they first need to gain our trust.

The age of the bot has begun. We just have barely begun to notice. It's only been 10 years, and smartphones have fundamentally changed our world, the bot revolution will come quicker, and have an even greater impact on us. The bots cometh in all shapes and sizes, hardware and software, automations and AI and robot fried and foe. But most likely our most common interaction with them in the very near future will be in the form of messenger/personal assistant and customer service bots.

Apple's Siri may not be the most capable voice assistant, or the most beloved. In the race to dominate the next generation of interfaces, though, Siri had one key advantage: a cushy home on hundreds of millions of iPhones. Now, however, Amazon has snuck Alexa onto iOS--making this look more and more like a blowout. Amazon's shopping app, already a top destination, now becomes a Trojan Horse for Amazon's most promising product in years. That puts iPhone and iPad owners just two taps away--one to open the Amazon app, the next to activate the microphone--from a voice assistant that doesn't just rival Siri, but surpasses it in significant ways.

The former gives you smart control of dimming just one color (white, obviously) and the latter lets you "sync your lights with your music, TV or games, or control via your smartphone, switch, wearables or other smart accessories," Philips explains in its press release. By plugging it into smaller lights often used in bedrooms, you can set the Hue Candle to emit melatonin-enhancing warm light in the evening, and more energetic blue colors in the morning, for instance. The bulbs can pump out the equivalent of 40 watts and a color range from 2200k to 6500k, ranging from warm white to cool daylight. You can also set it up to take voice commands from your Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit and Google Home device or fit it into almost any smart home system. If you have an eclectic mix of light fixtures, the new bulbs should help you get more fully automated.

Trust is important when it comes to design. Whenever we arrive at a new website or consider a product, we rely on feeling like we trust a brand in order to interact with it. Whether you trust the service or not is the difference between whether you will sign up, make an order, refer a friend, or come back for a second spin--all within a matter of a few unconscious seconds. But that's no longer the only place we look for trust. The graphic user interfaces (GUIs) you use to interact with websites are slowly being complemented or replaced entirely by voice user interfaces (VUIs), such as personal-assistant bots.

Apple, Amazon, and Google are at war over the future of personal computing, and now Amazon is taking the battle to its rivals' home turf: the smartphone. All three are convinced that voice-controlled virtual assistants have the potential to transform how we interact with our devices. Apple has Siri, Google has Google Assistant, and Amazon has Alexa. They believe that in the future, you won't swipe or manually fiddle with your device -- you'll just talk to it, as you would another human. Whoever gets ahead now has the potential to define the next major era of computing.

Amazon is bringing Alexa to the iPhone today right inside of the company's main app. While this isn't the first time Alexa has been on a smartphone -- third parties have made it happen already -- this is the first time it's coming directly from Amazon. And it could be a huge help to anyone who's filling their home with Alexa-enabled devices. Inside of the Amazon App for iOS, there will be a microphone icon near the top of the screen that you can press to call up Alexa. You'll be able to ask the assistant almost anything you'd normally be able to ask through a device like the Echo.

We talk about artificial intelligence (AI), robots, and machine learning as if they're coming soon, or are just some tech pipe dream. In fact, a special report from Bank of America, Merrill Lynch predicts the global market for AI and robots will be just under $153 billion by 2020, and some industries will experience up to a 30% productivity increase through the use of those technologies alone. That can either terrify you if you've seen too many sci-fi films, or excite you if you consider the upside and benefits it could yield. The reality probably lies somewhere in the middle. There will be disruption – there will be jobs and perhaps even whole industries that see massive displacement from robots and other "intelligent" machines. And that says nothing of the inherent risk associated with creating something capable of logical thinking without emotion. The robots may not rise up and exterminate humanity any time soon, but the development of true AI is closer than you think.