Over the course of the last weeks and months you couldn't escape news and stories about messaging platforms going after B2C use cases à la "order me some food", "book me a hotel room" or "I need a ride downtown in 30 minutes". Pioneered and taken to huge success in Asia by platforms like Weixin/WeChat, LINE and Kakao, especially Facebook with its two behemoth platforms Messenger and WhatsApp is taking decisive actions to bring businesses and consumers together on their platforms. Kik is even faster, having just launched such a botstore for brands. In their launch line-up are 18 well-known brands such as Sephora, H&M or The Weather Channel. And with these moves, communications platforms will tap into significant revenue streams in the form of rev shares and commissions for being the facilitator between businesses and consumers in everyday Transactions.

Deploy and start monitoring in less than an hour. MetaMind, a startup focused on deep learning, this week announced that it has been acquired by Salesforce. The company's expertise is in natural language processing -- letting computers analyze relationships between words. "With MetaMind and Salesforce coming together, we'll be able to offer customers real AI solutions with breakthrough capabilities that further automate and personalize customer support, marketing automation, and many other business processes," MetaMind CEO Richard Socher said. The acquisition will see MetaMind, whose backers included Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, embed deep learning within the Salesforce platform.

The company's expertise is in natural language processing -- letting computers analyze relationships between words. "With MetaMind and Salesforce coming together, we'll be able to offer customers real AI solutions with breakthrough capabilities that further automate and personalize customer support, marketing automation, and many other business processes," MetaMind CEO Richard Socher said. The acquisition will see MetaMind, whose backers included Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, embed deep learning within the Salesforce platform. Meanwhile, Microsoft Dynamics CRM got AI-powered predictive marketing capabilities in March through integration with EverString's platform.

MetaMind, a startup focused on deep learning, this week announced that it has been acquired by Salesforce. The company's expertise is in natural language processing -- letting computers analyze relationships between words. "With MetaMind and Salesforce coming together, we'll be able to offer customers real AI solutions with breakthrough capabilities that further automate and personalize customer support, marketing automation, and many other business processes," MetaMind CEO Richard Socher said. The acquisition will see MetaMind, whose backers included Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, embed deep learning within the Salesforce platform. Socher has been named chief scientist at Salesforce.

Imagine strapping an enormous VR headset to a car. Now, place that car inside a facility the size of a football field that simulates a full range of motion. Toyota Research Institute CEO Gill Pratt provided a peek inside that incredible facility during a keynote speech to a crowd of more than 3,000 at our GPU Technology Conference in Silicon Valley Thursday. Pratt also announced that Toyota will be opening a new autonomous driving research facility in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that will be staffed by about 50 researchers to complement Toyota's ongoing efforts in Japan, Silicon Valley, and Cambridge, Mass., near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Pratt is a legendary figure in the robotics community.

Or did he deliberately damage his car? It's a question insurance companies face every day. Deliberate deception is a contributing factor in one out of ten insurance claims. A joint project by IBM and SAP is intended to make estimating easier for claims adjusters in the future. The two tech giants are developing a program that searches through large numbers of damage reports to uncover irregularities.

You cannot, it appears, afford to ignore Artificial Intelligence (AI) these days. In March, Google Inc.-owned AI firm, DeepMind's computer programme, AlphaGo, beat Go champion, Lee Seedol. And this very year, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg chatted about building personal AI projects at home while International Business Machines Corp.'s (IBM's) supercomputing engine Watson trended, and other headlines screamed Big Oil tapping into Watson, Big Data for Medicine and Smart Concierge Robots. Not one to be left behind in the AI news race, Microsoft Corp. released its conversational chatbot--Tay, which had learnt about the world from 18–24 year olds on microblogging and chatting sites like Twitter, GroupMe and Kik. However, Tay turned racist and sexist within 24 hours because the people she spoke to, crammed her with hate and anger.

Salesforce, creators of the world's leading CRM platform, has acquired MetaMind, a deep learning startup to leverage its expertise in artificial intelligence (AI) to better tailor and automate customer support. Founded in late 2014, by Richard Socher, MetaMind focused on creating recursive neural networks which Socher actively worked on while pursuing his Ph.D. at Stanford University. The terms of the deal are yet to be disclosed, but the acquisition was backed by Marc Benioff, Co-Founder and CEO, Salesforce. Richard Socher, Co-Founder, CEO, MetaMind, wrote in his blog, "With MetaMind and Salesforce coming together, we'll be able to offer customers real AI solutions with breakthrough capabilities that further automate and personalize customer support, marketing automation, and many other business processes. We'll extend Salesforce's data science capabilities by embedding deep learning within the Salesforce platform."

SAN JOSE, Calif.--Nvidia for much of its two-plus decades of life made most of its money by manufacturing and selling GPUs for gaming systems. While the bulk of the company's revenues still come from its mainstream graphics technologies, Nvidia over the past several years has been aggressively pushing into new growth areas, particularly virtual reality (VR), connected cars, and deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI). That pivot into these emerging markets has been on full display here this week at the company's GPU Technology Conference (GTC), an event whose growth has mirrored the rise in importance of GPUs in such areas as accelerated computing and high-performance computing (HPC). In 2012, 2,350 people attended GTC; this year, more than 5,000 are here. In his keynote address April 5, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang made announcements in all the new target areas, from technologies designed to make VR worlds more real to products aimed at accelerating innovation in deep learning.

NOT since the era of imperial Rome has the "thumbs-up" sign been such a potent and public symbol of power. A mere 12 years after it was founded, Facebook is a great empire with a vast population, immense wealth, a charismatic leader, and mind-boggling reach and influence. The world's largest social network has 1.6 billion users, a billion of whom use it every day for an average of over 20 minutes each. In the Western world, Facebook accounts for the largest share of the most popular activity (social networking) on the most widely used computing devices (smartphones); its various apps account for 30% of mobile internet use by Americans. And it is the sixth-most-valuable public company on Earth, worth some 325 billion.