The way we watch sport, the way we shop, the way we meet each other, the way we interact with machine intelligence -- everything we can imagine is now possible by adding a crystal clear layer of visual genius over our real world. The Fourth Transformation is based on two years of research and about 400 interviews with technologists and business decision makers. It explains the technology and product landscape on a level designed to be interesting and useful to business thinkers and general audiences. Mostly it talks about how VR and AR are already being used, or will be used in the next one-to-three years. It explains how this massive and fundamental transformation will be driven, nit just by Millennials, but by the generation following them, which the authors have named the Minecraft Generation.

The war rages on over the connected home--an idea that home appliances and accessories will all be connected to the Internet. Soon, your fridge will send a text message when the milk is running low. For most people, that prospect is still far from being today's reality. But this Black Friday will spark the first battle between Amazon Echo and Google Home. Both products bill themselves as a Wi-Fi speaker and a sort of Siri-in-a-tube that answers users' spoken questions.

LOS ANGELES -- What's worse, a phone that explodes in your face or a drone that falls from the skies? It's a question worth pondering as we embark on our annual list of the top tech turkeys of the year. The Samsung Galaxy Note 7. The Samsung Note 7 received rave reviews for wireless charging, water resistant design and the ability to unlock the phone with your iris. But weeks after the first shipments, consumers started reporting phones that were erupting in flames, causing damage to houses and cars. Samsung announced a re-call and a massive replacement-- and then the new phones started blowing up, too.

To most people, artificial intelligence (AI) is represented in terms of robots with human-like similarities. Today's reality is that of AI powering technologies and driving companies to complete tasks and make things easier. Companies are using AI more than ever, even for tasks that you may not consider. To understand how AI impacts your business, it's important to understand exactly what artificial intelligence is. According to Merriam Webster artificial intelligence is, "an area of computer science that deals with giving machines the ability to seem like they have human intelligence."

Now if these are not dominant steps toward a world of AI I don't know what is. Front this technology with a robot body and it becomes an intelligent being. They can park themselves, drive themselves, break automatically and navigate based on coordinates. Once they are able to learn and map out routes as well as incorporate traffic reports and weather disturbances to get you quickly and safely from A to B without risk…bingo. Google Assistant, Amazon Echo, Apple Siri and the other personal virtual assistants are bringing all daily rituals, habits and requests together via one central point.

Google is already developing a new operating system called Andromeda, but the company is far from abandoning Chrome OS. It's been discovered recently that Google is developing an always-listening feature that will first debut on the Samsung Chromebook Pro. Currently, Chromebooks already have a voice control feature with the "OK Google" support. This allows users to make Google searches with voice commands while a Chromebook is on and in use. In Google's upcoming update, a Chromebook may not have to be in use in order for voice commands to work.

Artificial intelligence celebrates its 50th year this year and it is only advancing at a more rapid pace than ever before. From its very first task, which was to represent reasoning by a rule-based system, it has evolved into the professional field, the corporate environment, and even in the homes of many people. In the past it could never be compared to the reasoning of a human being, but even that has been improved during the course of the past half century. Descartes' logical belief that man is not machine may be a rewritten as the machine is now man. Some of the important artificial intelligence advancements have shown that intelligence can be created out of nothing. A machine is becoming more and more likely to think like a human being.

Back in the pre-iPhone era, investors would rally around the word'mobile' as the'next big thing'. It was clear that mobility and doing things on small-screen devices would affect the lives of many for years to come, but what wasn't clear was how. How were applications going to get smart enough to add value on the go? How were web standards going to evolve fast enough to accommodate all the different kinds of devices available in the market? Which platforms across the myriad of non-compatible platforms (Symbian, WinCE, RIM, Java etc), should developers invest their time?

In September, Apple quietly acquired Tuplejump, a little-known Hyderabad-based startup. Tuplejump is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) company that helps clients store, process and visualise data. In simple terms, it helps, say, an e-commerce player to use all the data it collects to improve conversion rates--the number of people who end up buying something out of the total number of visitors. This was Apple's first acquisition in India and the third one this year of an AI company. India-based AI startups are hardly visible and don't command eyepopping valuations that e-commerce companies do.

Find out how much you spent on your credit card by asking Alexa instead of searching for that information online. You can ask how much you've spent on a specific day, within a certain date range, or at a major vendor. Things like, "What did I spend between October 1st and October 31st?" or "How much did I spend at Starbucks last month?" You can tell us exactly how much you want to pay toward your monthly bill. It's your choice: minimum payment, statement balance, current balance or an amount you decide is right for you.