David Marcus, who heads Facebook's Messenger platform, tells Jefferson Graham how automated chat bots can improve the shopping and customer service experience, on #TalkingTech. SAN FRANCISCO - Clicking a buy button on a website is so 20th century. Now the next big thing is conversing with a computerized robot. Used by 900 million people, Messenger has a major new look and mission, thanks to former PayPal chief David Marcus, who left the payment giant in 2014 to transform Facebook's hugely popular Messenger app into a commerce engine. This week, Marcus did a major overhaul of Messenger.

The fledgling sport of drone racing is about to fly onto more screens. In drone racing, competitors maneuver small flying drones around a course and wear goggles that show the drone's perspective of the track. At home, viewers will see a version of that perspective. The 2016 National Drone Racing Championships, held in New York City in August, and the 2016 World Drone Racing Championships, set for Kualoa Ranch, Hawaii, in October, will be streamed live on ESPN3, the network's online streaming service. Imagine careening through the forest chasing Stormtroopers on speeder bikes as Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia did in a famous scene from "Star Wars," flying around trees and ducking under branches.

Despite working on self-driving cars, virtual reality, and other side projects, Google still makes most of its money from the web. That's why the company pays so much attention to protecting users from malicious content online. In recent years, Google has beefed up its Safe Browsing initiative to protect Chrome users--as well as users of other browsers--from a wide array of devious online threats. If you've ever used Chrome you've likely seen this protection before, which appears as a giant red warning screen where you expected to see a webpage. You can still visit the page by clicking through via the details link, but Google's advice is to stay away until the site creators fix the problem.

RE•WORK will host its annual East Coast events on Deep Learning and the Internet of Things in Boston on 12 & 13 May. Over 300 machine learning and IoT enthusiasts and experts will come together to hear keynote presentations, panel discussions, fireside chats and to explore the startup showcase area. The Deep Learning Summit brings together leaders from industry, academia and startups to explore advances in deep learning methods and techniques, as well as their business applications in areas including finance, manufacturing, healthcare & transportation. Confirmed speakers and presentations include: -Keynote presentation from deep learning expert Yoshua Bengio, Full Professor at Université de Montréal Professor Bengio is also Head of the Machine Learning Laboratory, Co-director of the CIFAR Neural Computation & Adaptive Perception program, and editor of many prestigious machine learning publications. Daniel is also a Research Affiliate at the MIT Media Lab.

Cylance, the company that is revolutionizing cybersecurity through the use of artificial intelligence to proactively prevent advanced persistent threats and malware, announced that its Founder, President and CEO Stuart McClure will be a speaker at the 2016 Edison Awards on April 21, 2016, in New York, NY at the New York Academy of Sciences. McClure will deliver remarks on how truly innovative technology often arises from--and may even require--a process of invention involving a high degree of risk and no guarantees of success. The company's groundbreaking artificial intelligence and machine learning based endpoint security product, CylancePROTECT, was chosen as a finalist for a 2016 Edison Award in the Security Solutions Category. The distinguished awards, inspired by Thomas Edison's persistence and inventiveness, recognize innovation, creativity and ingenuity in the global economy. "I'm honored to speak at an event named for one of the greatest inventors of all time," McClure said.

Chatbots are big news in Silicon Valley right now. "Bots are the new apps!" said Microsoft chief Satya Nadella recently, Facebook's just announced a large collection, while Wired's latest article on the subject puts the phrase "post-app internet" right up in the headline. In the short term, many chatbots are basically glorified search boxes. It's very early days, judging by the first wave of Facebook Messenger bots, which launched its chatbot platform this week. I've been chatting to six of them, and most provide information and links in response to keywords and/or selections from multiple-choice menus.

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.