The race to acquire artificial intelligence talent has inverted the "laws" of M&A, with pre-revenue AI firms such as UK-based Magic Pony being sold to Twitter for about 10m per employee. Magister Advisors, the global M&A advisory firm to the technology industry, notes that AI firms without revenues are more valuable than those with, as buyers look for pristine competitive advantage, and that Britain is amongst top tier for AI innovation. Twitter just paid 150m for 14-person Magic Pony, a UK-based AI visual search company barely anyone had heard of before the deal. At 10m per employee it marks a high water mark in AI for what is essentially a team acquisition. Magister has tracked 26 AI driven deals since 2014 in the US, Europe and Israel, 11 of which involved companies with less than 50 employees which were acquired largely, or entirely, for the team and capability.

So everyone in China has been following the European Championship in France, and this time it's the game between France and Iceland that made a lot of noise, generating 2.8 billion media impressions! It was fascinating for Chinese people as they really admired this team from Iceland. They discovered that Iceland is a country of only 330 thousand people, which is just a city for them. Shanghai for example has 25 million inhabitants! For a country so small to reach that stage of a Soccer Championship was just amazing for them.

The production company behind True Detective and Mr Robot, Anonymous Content, will be working alongside Paramount on the project, with Academy Award winner Michael Sugar and Ashley Zalta taking up executive producer roles. Since it was launched in 2002, Battlefield has proven to be an enormously successful videogame franchise, taking players from World War Two, to the Vietnam war, to the year 2020, circling back to World War One with this year's upcoming Battlefield 1 release. Considering its wide array of time periods and the fact that it doesn't have an established cast of returning characters for players to become attached to, Battlefield might not seem like the most obvious choice for a televised narrative adaption. However, success that's not based on player love of specific characters and the wide variety of settings to choose from could give the show's creators the freedom required to do something interesting and exciting whilst still pleasing fans of the series. Though it could also result in a war programme that's tied to Battlefield in name and little else.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and a world in which machines threaten humanity's status quo has been the preserve of science fiction for decades. In the Eighties, Terminator was set in a post-apocalyptic world in which cyborgs rule, RoboCop's protagonist was part-man, part-machine and Short Circuit toyed with the idea of robots developing human-like minds, with rather more endearing results. The reality is the bot has bolted. AI is walking and talking among us. In 2016, we use voice-recognition systems, driverless cars are being trialled and robotic hotel receptionists work in Japan.

Language is becoming the new main user interface (UI) layer in an increasingly rich ecosystem of conversations that includes people to people, people to their personal digital assistant, people to bots and in the future – even personal digital assistant to bot! Microsoft also recently announced that it would be making its bot framework available to all. This adds weight to its belief that new technologies should be available to everyone, regardless of their circumstances. Dr Hon finds this incredibly meaningful, as anyone, not just the wealthy, can have their own personal assistant to make their lives more productive. It was a meeting of minds between Buck Song, an advocate of smart, sustainable cities, and Dr. Hon, a believer in the industrial application of Big Data. Dr. Hon has been with Microsoft since 1995, joining Microsoft Research Asia in 2004.

BEIJING--An auto startup backed by internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. TCEHY 0.52 % plans to start selling premium electric cars globally by 2020, joining other Chinese car makers in taking aim at an increasingly crowded luxury market. Four month-old Future Mobility Corp. seeks eventually to sell several hundred thousand fully electric, highly automated, China-built vehicles a year. The company is also backed by Chinese luxury-car dealer Harmony New Energy Auto and Foxconn Technology Group, 2354 1.89 % which assembles iPhones for Apple Inc. AAPL 0.31 % Apple has been working on its own autonomous electric car. Deep-pocketed tech companies have backed a wave of new auto companies in China, where a drive to cut fuel consumption and pioneer the auto industry of the future has encouraged startups. Analysts, citing increasing competition and uncertainty over a subsidy-fueled boom in electric vehicles, question how such ambitions can be turned into reality.

With machine learning and AI being the hottest trend in tech, eBay is also bolstering its efforts with the acquisition of Israel-based advanced analytics startup SalesPredict. And its not just efforts-bolstering thats happening, this could well be eBay's attempt to become more like Amazon and automate processes within the company. SalesPredict is the second addition to the carousel of machine learning powered analytics startups acquired by eBay in the recent past. It follows in the footsteps of Expertmaker, another startup that specializes in providing intelligent solutions powered by artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data analytics. SalesPredict, in a similar manner, provides a software platform that monitors individuals' buying preferences and tries to predict consumer behavior for online shopping.

Singapore is looking to tap artificial intelligence technology to enable more natural and simpler interactions with its e-government services. Led by industry regulator Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the new initiative would see the use of Microsoft's "conversations as a platform" pitch to explore opportunities in developing the country's next-generation government services based on "conversational computing". According to Singapore's Minister for Foreign Affairs and Minister-in-Charge of Smart Nation Vivian Balakrishnan, IDA and Microsoft would co-develop "chatbots" to support selected public services. These intelligence software tools would assume the role of digital representatives, simulating human behaviour, and enable interactions that were more user-friendly and consistent, said the minister, who announced the new initiative at this week's World Cities Summit. New proof-of-concepts would be built to integrate conversational intelligence into public services, with efforts focused on making these more "anticipatory" and engaging for the general public.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. on Tuesday unveiled a robot that can operate in the presence of flammable gases, such as after a gas leak following a disaster. A joint project with Chiba Institute of Technology, the Sakura No. 2 is the country's first mobile inspection unit that can operate in the presence of high concentrations of explosive gases such as methane and hydrogen. There is an increasing need for an inspection robot that is not a fire hazard as Japan steers toward becoming a hydrogen-based society, said Ken Onishi, a senior engineer in charge of the project for Mitsubishi Heavy. "There was a debate over whether to develop robots that can operate near hydrogen gas, as doing so requires an extremely high level of technology," Onishi said. "As we may encounter accidents such as collisions involving hydrogen cars or a truck loaded with hydrogen tanks rolling over inside a road tunnel, we decided to develop a robot that can deal with such situations."

Today eBay announced it will acquire SalesPredict, an Israel-based company that leverages advanced analytics to predict customer buying behavior and sales conversion. SalesPredict is eBay's latest acquisition that will support its artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science efforts. It follows eBay's recent acquisition of Expertmaker, in order to further bolster our structured data efforts. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Upon the close of the transaction, a number of SalesPredict's employees will join eBay's structured data organization, working from eBay's Israeli Development Center in Netanya.