Today, messaging app Kik announced a new bot store to urge users and developers alike to embrace the trendy new form of artificial intelligence-powered software. The company has offered bots in its chat app in the past, which you can converse with over text and use to perform basic web tasks. But now Kik will feature 16 new bots made with a list of partners, including Funny Or Die, The Weather Channel, and Vine, to give users a quick and easy way to pull information, find funny GIFs, get makeup tips, and play games. Kik is also letting developers create their own bots to offer in Kik's Bot Shop, as it's called. The company will approve each one before it's available in the store, and users can locate new bots by tapping on "Find People" in Kik's search bar.

A new online tool can search Tinder to find out if your partner has recently been swiping. The service called Swipe Buster costs 5 and uses public information from the dating platform to'bust' a suspected cheater. This allows anyone to search for specific Tinder users without even making an account – but the ease of'spying' now has many users concerned about the security of their data. A new online tool can search Tinder to find out if your partner has recently been swiping. The service called Swipe Buster costs 5 and uses public information from the dating platform to'bust' a suspected cheater.

Cortana is slowly emerging as Microsoft's secret mobile weapon. While the software giant hasn't fared well with its Windows Phone operating system, Cortana is key to Microsoft's mobile future. Microsoft appears to be taking a similar approach to Google with its Toolbar app. At the Build developer conference last week, the message was clear: Microsoft wants Cortana to be everywhere. Cortana will help power Microsoft's new bot platform, showing up in Skype to help you talk to bots, schedule meetings, and generally digitally manage your life.

There's a brand new reason to worry about updating your iPhone -- if you've got one of the latest devices, anyway. People can worm their way into private photos and contacts stored within iPhone 6S and 6S Plus devices thanks to a glitch in iOS 9.3.1, the just-released version of Apple's mobile operating system. YouTube user EverythingApplePro explained the bug in a video Monday, and Mashable confirmed Tuesday that it's the real deal. The Huffington Post was also able to bypass an iPhone's lock screen using the steps outlined by EverythingApplePro. From the lock screen, you activate Siri and ask it to search Twitter for an email address.

The growing capabilities and widening use of artificial intelligence applications (AI apps) in mainstream consumer devices (eg Siri on the iPhone 6S and Amazon's Alexa being just two examples, plus the whole conversations-as-a-platform development) are converging to poise interesting intellectual property challenges. While currently the most sophisticated of these apps are, at best, in an advanced-alpha or early-beta version, this technology is fueled by innovation moving at an exponential rate. About six months ago I became involved in an intellectual property infringement case involving artificial intelligence applications. But – finally – my academic work in AI was bearing fruit. The case involves what are called Level B apps, part of a computational capability-continuum first proposed by Eran Kahana who is a technology and intellectual property attorney with extensive IP experience and a senior Fellow at Stanford Law School.

The roots of modern Artificial Intelligence, or AI, can be traced back to the classical philosophers of Greece, and their efforts to model human thinking as a system of symbols. More recently, in the 1940s, a school of thought called "Connectionism" was developed to study the process of thinking. In 1950, a man named Alan Turing wrote a paper suggesting how to test a "thinking" machine. He believed if a machine could carry on a conversation by way of a teleprinter, imitating a human with no noticeable differences, the machine could be described as thinking. His paper was followed in 1952 by the Hodgkin-Huxley model of the brain as neurons forming an electrical network, with individual neurons firing in all-or-nothing (on/off) pulses.

A video of a newly discovered bug in Apple's iOS 9.3.1 operating system is making the rounds, showing that it's possible to access an iPhone user's contacts and photos without entering a passcode or scanning a fingerprint. It does require a very particular set of circumstances. For one, you have to allow Siri to have access to your Twitter account, which should require your passcode or fingerprint. You also have to have a phone that can use Apple's pressure-sensitive Force Touch, namely an iPhone 6S or iPhone 6S Plus. Finally, at least according to the video, you have to find a tweet that contains someone's e-mail address (or just something formatted like an e-mail address) in order to use 3D Touch and call up the contacts menu.

You may not have the resources to do everything, and you may not have the capacity, the bandwidth, the processing power to do everything in an individual product, so you have to make selections," says Tom Kerber, an analyst with Parks Associates. "Limiting those choices to the critical few is important." Meanwhile, consumers are left to untangle a spider web of product integrations. Samsung SmartThings devices, for instance, are controllable through Amazon's Alexa system, but not through Siri. August smart locks are controllable through Siri, but not through Alexa. Philips Hue lightbulbs have some neat integrations with Nest, but Cree lightbulbs don't.

What does the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) mean for consumers and marketing departments? The growth of connected devices and systems is changing the nature of business and marcomms as decision-making networks develop powered by artificial intelligence. Four giants (Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple) are all taking significant steps to build their AI capability, either through development or by extensive acquisition of other AI companies. AI is now a significant priority for these global leaders. Google has purchased approximately 15 AI-focused businesses in the past three years alone, pushing towards a billion dollars of investment.

Tinder isn't as private as many of its users think, and a new website which aims to exploit that is causing concern among users of the dating app. Swipebuster promises to let Tinder users find out whether people they know have an account on the dating app, and even stalk them down to their last known location. The website charges 4.99 ( 3.50) to let someone see whether the target is using Tinder, and can narrow down results by first name, age, gender and location. But it doesn't do so by hacking into Tinder, or even by "scraping" the app manually. Instead, it searches the database using Tinder's official API, which is intended for use by third-party developers who want to write software that plugs in with the site. All the information that it can reveal is considered public by the company, and revealed through the API with few safeguards.