VC Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz thinks it's a lot harder to predict financial cycles than it is to see a new computing platform coming down the pike.

GPS falls from the sky and costs nothing to use, but it may not reach a car roving the canyons of Manhattan or a forklift moving boxes in a warehouse. For uninterrupted autonomous driving, you need some backup. Sure, you can festoon your vehicles with a vast array of overlapping sensors, but even that won't always give you a clear sense of where you are. So, when the GPS satellites can't pinpoint you, why not resort to land-based beacons? That's the solution proposed by 5D Robotics, a Carlsbad, Calif.

Intel's keynotes can be fun, with robots parading on stage and drones zigzagging around the room. Now Intel's making new hardware to help enthusiasts join the fun by building robots and drones at home. The Robotic Development Kit and Aero Kit provide the necessary hardware and software tools to build robots and drones, respectively. The kits were announced at the ongoing Intel Developer Forum in Shenzhen, China. A major element of the developer boards is the RealSense 3D camera, which will ship with the kits and help the robots and drones navigate and avoid obstacles.

A Swiss data analytics and cybersecurity company is beefing up its Boston-area presence after grabbing 40 million in venture capital, led by Highland Europe. Nexthink established a U.S. presence three weeks ago with the opening of a sales office in Cambridge, MA. The company employs about 10 people there to start, but it plans to grow to 120 local employees over the next 18 months, a spokeswoman says. Nexthink helps IT departments analyze and monitor their businesses' applications, devices, and other network activity in real time. The goal is to sniff out cyber attacks and minimize software disruptions for end users.

Even before the blockbuster acquisition of Cruise Automation by General Motors for more than 1 billion, venture firms were looking for big ideas in autonomous vehicles. The latest company to attract a round of funding for driverless car technology is Palo Alto-based NAUTO, co-founded in 2015 by CEO Stefan Heck and CTO Frederick Soo. Andy Rubin's hardware focused venture fund, Playground Global, led the 12 million investment in Nauto, joined by Draper Nexus. Heck explained, "Our systems today help humans drive better, safer, smarter and faster in terms of avoiding congestion and traffic. They retrofit into existing cars, and eventually will enable true autonomy in new or older vehicles."

I never win raffles, but I finally did last week at the MIT Xconomy in Boston. My prize was a Roomba. These robotic vacuums have been around for years for personal use, but now hotels are using similar devices to not only automate the cleaning process but also most of the hotel functionality like check-in, check-out, food delivery, and the automatic folding of clothes. There's even a completely robot-powered automated hotel in Japan. As a service, automation is invaluable when done well.

Facebook has begun rolling out its new chatbot platform on Messenger, and it's available to try out right now. The long-awaited'Bot Platform' was unveiled by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the first day of the F8 developer conference, and the company hopes it's going to change the way we all use the web. Rather than browsing the latest news, communicating with businesses and buying goods through standard sites and apps, Facebook's bots make it possible to do it all through Messenger - theoretically, you should be able to get what you're looking for by speaking to the bots in natural language. The platform is currently the beta stage and it's only working with a few US-based companies. But it's already possible to get a little taste of what this technology can do.

While most of us are aware of Microsoft's digital assistant Cortana, her more unknown little sister Xiaoice, is taking China's social network by storm. Xiaoice, a chatbot, exists on WeChat and Weibo in the form of a chatty teenager. Capable of recognizing emotional the states of the user during the conversation, it is able to offer encouragement and listen well to your troubles. More interestingly, like any other 17-year-old teenager, it can be smart-alecky at times. It's this latter attribute of Xiaoice that allows it to simulate for more natural conversations and to pass off as being human-like.

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The battle for your online shopping dollars has largely been waged on websites and, more recently, smartphone apps. Now, retailers are looking to another digital tool to win your money and your loyalty: An army of chatbots. Chatbots -- the name for robots that simulate human conversation -- have been thrust into the spotlight in recent weeks amid a flurry of new experiments in how they might be used to shape the future of shopping. Retail heavyweights Sephora and H&M recently launched bots on messaging app Kik that help shoppers browse and buy their products. Taco Bell showed off its TacoBot, a way to use the messaging app Slack to place a meal order.