Singaporean incumbent telecommunications provider Singtel has announced the upcoming launch of its Transit NFC SIM, enabling customers to pay for train and bus trips using smartphones with near-field communication (NFC). Singtel customers across the island will be able to pay for MRT, LRT, and bus rides using an NFC phone that has the telco's Dash app installed. According to Singtel, Dash is the leading mobile payment merchant in Singapore, with customers already able to pay for Comfort and CityCab taxis. Launching in late April, the SIM was developed by Singtel in collaboration with Singapore's Land Transport Authority (LTA), EZ-Link, and the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA). The SIM is embedded with an EZ-Link purse, and can be used with compatible NFC smartphones.

An independent drone delivery company called Flirtey (presumably because they're flirting with the ire of shotgun toting reactionaries) successfully completed the first fully autonomous, FAA-approved urban drone delivery in the United States. The STEM robot wars are heating up. Cubetto is the latest reason why you wish you were still a kid. In an uninhabited residential setting in Hawthorne, Nevada, the company successfully delivered a package that included bottled water, emergency food and a first aid kit by drone. The test was performed at one of six FAA-designated Unmanned Aircraft Systems Test Sites, and the Flirtey operation is investigating rescue and crisis response in disaster-prone areas.

The man behind the first untethered bionic exoskeleton is back with a new robotic suit. Homayoon Kazerooni led the team that developed BLEEX, the first viable actuated suit that didn't need to be plugged in, back in 2005. Groundbreaking at the time, the technology was eventually spun off into Ekso Bionics, long a darling of the Bay Area hardware scene. Kazerooni, whose reputation as a genius with a stormy personality is a touchstone among ex-colleagues, split from the company soon after it was formed and has been pursuing his own projects. His latest is suitX, a robotics company in Berkeley that's developed a new exoskeleton called Pheonix that's designed to enable paraplegics to walk.

The UK Parliament is set to examine how jobs, the workplace and wider society will be affected by the rise of robotics and artificial intelligence, along with the social, ethical and legal issues which could arise alongside the technology. The launch of the inquiry, which will be carried out by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee comes shortly after Google's DeepMind AlphaGo AI comprensively won a series of Go matches against South Korean champion Lee Se-dol Nicola Blackwood MP, Chair of the Science and Technology Committee, says this historic achievement is just scratching the surface of artificial intelligence, and its therefore important that UK society is ready for the radical changes AI might bring. "Robots are now beating humans at even the most complex games, like Go. Artificial intelligence will play an increasing role in our lives over the coming years. From navigation systems to medical treatments and from new manufacturing techniques to unmanned vehicles, new applications are rapidly being developed that involve robotic decision making," she said. "It is important that the UK is ready with the research, innovation and skills to be able to fully take advantage of the opportunities and manage any risks," Blackwood added.

Google wants to extend its services into your home, past the Nest, mobile phones, and tablets. Amazon's Echo is something special. In this hands-on, ZDNet's David Gewirtz explains why, once you understand its limits, you might really want an Echo. The Information reports there is "secret Google project" to make a competitor to the Amazon Echo, a speaker/voice assistant that sits in your home and listens to commands. The publication doesn't specifically mention features of the Amazon Echo-like device, as the anecdote was included in a story about Google's Nest division struggling to integrate within the company.

The matrix might not turn out to be so bad after all. The Matrix is coming, but it might not look quite how you might expect. A study by advisory firm Leading Edge Forum titled Embracing'the Matrix' and the Machine Intelligence Era, suggests that the combination of cloud computing and artificial and machine intelligence (MI) "will increasingly be able to perform just about everything that companies and individuals do, and many things that we cannot". This combination of technologies, the LEF believes, will mark a major new phase of innovation which it has dubbed'The Matrix' in a nod to the cyberpunk films released across the late 90s and early 2000s. In essence, the Leading Edge Forum suggests "an ever more capable digital ecosystem" is increasingly underlying business infrastructure, helping organisations to radically transform not only their business, but society in a way which will only get stronger over time as consumer expectations rise.

App marketplace vendor AppDirect has acquired Xendo, a two-year-old startup behind a hosted enterprise search product. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Xendo's product is similar to Apple's Spotlight Search, except for cloud apps. For instance, a user can type a query asking, "Who at my company knows a lot about Big Data" and Xendo can retrieve answers based on data in connected cloud apps companywide. Because it's built with machine learning techniques, Xendo's search capabilities grow more predictive and prescriptive over time.

Wearable fitness startup LifeBEAM has nabbed 16 million in venture financing to expand its product line for consumers. LifeBEAM was founded in 2011 by former Israeli air force pilots looking for new ways to monitor human physiology. The company first developed a sensor platform that could be integrated into fighter pilot and astronaut helmets in order to unobtrusively monitor health and performance. The tech was eventually picked up by NASA and the U.S. Air Force. Since then LifeBEAM has released several consumer-focused biometric monitoring gadgets based on its hardware and software platforms designed to track things like heart rate, blood flow and oxygen saturation.

Tay fell silent after making several provocative and controversial posts on Twitter. Microsoft's millennial-talking AI chatbot, Tay.ai, has taken a break from Twitter after humans taught it to parrot a number of inflammatory and racist opinions. Microsoft had launched Tay on Wednesday, aiming it at people aged between 18 and 24 years in the US. But after 16 busy hours of talking on subjects ranging from Hitler to 9/11 conspiracies, Tay has gone quiet. "c u soon humans need sleep now so many conversations today thx," Tay said in what many suspect is Microsoft's effort to silence it after Tay made several provocative and controversial posts.

Microsoft has been stepping up its game around connecting its Azure cloud services to Internet of Things (IoT) devices. But few may realize the company also is simultaneously working to bring its various speech capabilities to IoT devices, too. I recently stumbled onto a Microsoft presentation from its February WinHEC China 2016 workshop in Taipei. That presentation, "Natural User Interface Technologies for IoT," which was targeted at developers, explains the company's multipronged strategy on the IoT-speech front. Microsoft provides IoT developers with various tools for integrating speech with their devices.