FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Nearly a decade after the iPhone broke the mould for mobile phones the question is now being asked whether the evolution of the smartphone has finally come to an end as even Apple now treats older, smaller 4-inch screens as something new. Industry experts believe innovation in smartphones is giving way to phone functions popping up as software or services in all manner of new devices from cars to fridges to watches and jewellery rather than remaining with handheld devices. And analysts and product designers said fresh breakthroughs are running up against the practical limits of what's possible in current smartphone hardware in terms of screen size, battery life and network capacity. "Everything in the phone industry now is incremental: slightly faster, slightly bigger, slightly more storage or better resolution," said Christian Lindholm, inventor of the easy text-messaging keyboards in old Nokia phones that made them the best-selling mobile devices of all time. The financial stakes are high as the futures of Apple, Google, and Microsoft, the world's three biggest listed companies at the end of last year, may turn on who gets the jump on making handsets redundant.

The concept of artificial intelligence has been around for a long time. In written fiction, AI characters show up in stories from writers like Philip K. Dick, William Gibson and Isaac Asimov. Sometimes it seems like it's touched on by every writer who has written sci-fi. While many predictions and ideas put forward in sci-fi have come to life, artificial intelligence is probably the furthest behind. We are nowhere near true artificial intelligence as exemplified by the characters mentioned above. Sometimes it seems like we've been waiting forever.

The new Apple TV is about to get a lot easier to manage and use. At its March 2016 event out of its headquarters in Cupertino, California, today, Apple announced a free update to newer versions of its streaming media set-top box (the ones released last fall, with the black Touch Remote and Siri built-in). The update, which is available today, will give you folders to organize the apps on home screen. It will also add a voice dictation mode for Siri, allowing you to speak the digits of your usernames and passwords directly to Apple's digital personal assistant, in lieu of fumbling with the swipeable on-screen keyboard. You can also search for TV apps using your voice.

Well, now I am just wondering how I've lived so long without a holographic butler. See also: Sorry, Tesla: The world's fastest electric car is made in... Croatia? Ignoring my deep disappointment of living sans digital manservant aside, the concept actually makes some sense. That's because Bentley imagines a future when elite drivers won't want simply speak commands to a faceless digital assistant à la Siri. Instead, they'll want to have a personalized experience when in their ultimate luxury machine.

Amazon Echo has already taken over my home -- it was only a matter of time before it took control of my finances, too. On Friday, Amazon announced a new "skill" you can download to your Echo device. If you bank with Capital One, you can access information about your checking and savings accounts, check your balance, and more. Capital One is the first company to provide people's banking information through Amazon Echo. According to Capital One, here's a sample of some questions you can ask: "Alexa, ask Capital One for recent transactions on my checking account."

The field of intellectual property is rapidly evolving, both with respect to the law and the technologies being considered for protection. This session provides a primer about what a patent is, current best practices for protecting speech technologies and defending against assertion, and the recent evolution of intellectual property law in the United States, with emphasis on speech, software user interfaces, and mobile technologies. Fraudsters are using robodialing and ANI spoofing to wreak havoc on call centers. From the illegal practice of toll-free traffic pumping and international revenue-sharing fraud, to the more villainous acts of financial account fraud, identity theft, and drug trafficking, this seminar explores the unusual ways criminals are hacking our businesses. We also examine simple and cost-effective practices to protect our businesses, and our customers.

I am really excited to announce that, after several months of development, the new version of Datumbox is out! The 0.7.0 version brings multi-threading support, fast disk-based training for datasets that don't fit in memory, several algorithmic enhancements and better architecture. The focus of version 0.7.0 is to finally bring multi-threading support to the framework and make the disk-based training ultra fast. Moreover it brings several algorithmic enhancements in all the Regression-based algorithms, the Collaborative Filtering model and the N-grams extractor which is used in NLP applications. The architecture of the framework has been redesigned to separate the project into multiple modules (note that the artifactId of the main library is now datumbox-framework-lib) and to simplify its structure.

"I wish I could touch you," Theodore says, laying in bed. Until she speaks up, tentatively. "How would you touch me?" It's a famously poignant scene from the movie Her, as the character Theodore is about to make vocal love to an artificial intelligence living in his ear. But according to half a dozen experts I interviewed, ranging from industrial designer Gadi Amit to the usability guru Don Norman, in-ear assistants aren't science fiction. In fact, a notable pile of discreet, wireless earbuds enabling just this idea are coming to market now. Sony recently released its first in-ear assistant, the Xperia Ear. Intel showed off a similar proof-of-concept last year. The talking, bio-monitoring Bragi Dash will be reaching early Kickstarters soon, while fellow startup Here has raised 17 million to compete in the smart earbud space.

Apple introduced Liam, a new research and development project for older iPhones that deconstructs the device and separates all parts and materials so they can be used again. Are Liam and Siri a thing? That's what the Twitterverse wants to know. It took mere seconds after Apple announced Liam, the new machine that deconstructs the old iPhones, for people on social media to launch into conversation about what exaclty Liam's intentions are with Siri, Apple's voice-activated personal assistant. What is the meaning of this? BREAKING: Liam & Siri spotted together, probably dating.

Artificial intelligence (AI), one of 20 core technologies I identified back in 1983 as the drivers of exponential economic value creation, is rapidly working its way into our lives from Amazon's Alexa and Facebook's M, to Google's Now and Apple's Siri. An example of how far AI has come is the recent news that a Google supercomputer, using its advanced AI software, was able to win a stunning 3-0 victory in a man vs. machine face-off against Go grandmaster Lee Sedol, one of the game's all-time champions. For those who are not familiar with Go, it is a 3,000-year-old game that is widely considered to be the most complex game ever invented because it is reported to have more possible board configurations than there are atoms in the universe. Until just a few months ago, it was thought that a computer could not defeat a human grandmaster for at least another decade due to the game's complexity. How did Google's AlphaGo program advance so much faster than many expected?