Microsoft's planned $68.7 billion purchase of video game giant Activision Blizzard is, literally, one of the biggest deals ever. By raw dollars and cents, it appears to be the biggest acquisition an American tech behemoth has ever made. It dwarfs not just any deal Microsoft has done, but also anything struck up by Apple, Amazon, Google, or Facebook. It makes Microsoft's $26.2 billion LinkedIn shopping spree in 2016 look small. And it's notable not just for its size but for its timing: The deal comes in the midst of months of uproar at Activision Blizzard over its treatment of workers, many of whom have alleged a toxic, sexual harassment–filled culture at the game publisher. The companies expect the deal to close some time in the 2023 fiscal year, but it'll take longer than that to sort through all its ramifications.

More than half of Americans faced coronavirus-fueled cabin fever last year by playing video games. SuperData, a Nielsen company, reports 55 percent of people turned to console, PC and mobile games during the first phase of COVID-19 lockdowns. Video games and interactive media generated $139 billion in 2020, a 12 percent spike, with digital games alone raking in $126 billion. 'Consumers had to turn to games as other forms of entertainment such as professional sports and movie theaters were on pause,' the report indicates. Free-to-play games like Fortnite and Call of Duty: Warzone generated 78 percent of the total games revenue.

The report, based on more than 200 interviews with industry players as well as a host of workshops, concludes that AI is "fundamentally changing the physics of financial services". This is largely because big FS firms are taking a page from the AI book of big tech firms. Rather than a proprietary mindset, they are developing applications and making them available as a service through the cloud. For example, in China, Ping An's One Connect sells AI-powered services ranging from credit adjudication to instantaneous insurance claims settlement to hundreds of small and mid-sized Chinese banks and is expected to fetch up to $3 billion at public sale. Meanwhile, in the US, BlackRock's Aladdin, which provides risk analytics and portfolio management tools that leverage machine learning to asset managers and insurers, is expected to provide 30% of the firm's revenues by 2022. Jesse McWaters, AI in Financial Services project lead at the WEF, says AI "is turning what were historically cost centres into new source of profitability, and creating a virtuous cycle of self-learning that accelerates their lead."

As a world, we are caught up in an exciting period of rapid technological advances and innovations. And healthcare is similarly in a period of rapid innovation and technological advances. So how do these two trends merge or connect? Does every technological advance or tool have application in healthcare? How do we decide what technologies will add value to our healthcare organization and to the patients we serve?

In a year in which the Nasdaq hit an all-time high, venture capital dollars flowed like cheap champagne and the majority of earnings surprises were on the upside, there were plenty of winners. Holding onto a 40 percent-plus share in a $30 billion market that's growing at 40 percent a year seems all but impossible, but by most accounts, Amazon Web Services Inc. actually grew its market share in 2017. With an annual run rate of $18 billion in cloud infrastructure-as-a-service, the company is the size of its next five largest IaaS competitors combined, according to Synergy Research. Amazon pursues a shock-and-awe product strategy to feed its customers' seemingly insatiable appetite for more services. At its sixth annual re:Invent conference in November, it rolled out 22 new cloud services at the same time.

I was asked on Quora what Google will look like in 2030. Since that is one of the most important issues the world is facing right now, I took some time to answer it in full. Larry Page, one of Google's two co-founders, once said off-handedly that Google is not about building a search engine. As he said it, "Oh, we're really making an AI". Google right now is all about building the world brain that will take care of every person, all the time and everywhere.

More businesses will be using machine learning to get the job done in 2018, while over 15 million Canadians will be using their smartphones to create augmented reality content. That's according to Deloitte's 17th annual Technology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT) Predictions, which this year reprises 2017's emphasis on AI and machine learning, along with highlighting smartphone tech, digital media and in-flight connectivity, all of which will see advances in 2018. "Deloitte is predicting yet another machine learning big bang," says Duncan Stewart, Director of TMT Research for Deloitte Canada, in conversation with Cantech Letter. Stewart says the visible change will be in the number of companies of all sizes that will be able to take advantage of machine learning, due to an industry shift away from graphics processing units (GPUs) to using more advanced chips to power their massive data-crunching systems. "These new chips are allowing machine learning to be done a lot more cheaply, particularly when it comes to power consumption, and so it expands the market for the product," says Stewart.

Artificial intelligence will be the chief beneficiary of the financial services industry's pivot to new technologies in its bid to improve performance and cut costs in the coming years. Octavio Marenzi, chief executive of the consultancy Opimas, which this week published a report entitled Fintech Spending and Innovation in Capital Markets, said AI would be "be the big winner" as banks, brokers, fund managers and other firms poured money into new technologies and data sources. His comments come with some of the biggest names in finance, including Goldman Sachs, BlackRock and Deutsche Bank, already looking for cheaper and faster ways to transform business lines that have until now relied on a human touch. The report from Opimas found that AI would have the most potential to transform banks' sales and trading divisions and the way fund managers make investment decisions. Opimas wrote: "The capital markets industry is awash in massive amounts of data. How that data gets harnessed, analysed and used across the value chain will increasingly not be up to humans, but rather machines that, eventually, will operate faster, smarter, and with a razor-sharp predictive view of what's to come in the markets, from a trading, marketing and processing point of view."

The Hugo Awards, widely considered the most prestigious science fiction and fantasy prizes, were announced Friday, with female authors dominating and N.K. Jemisin winning the award for novel for the second year in a row. Jemisin, who became the first black author to win the Hugo's novel award last year (for "The Fifth Season"), won again with the book's sequel, "The Obelisk Gate." The third and final book in Jemisin's trilogy, "The Stone Sky," will be released Tuesday. The awards were announced at a ceremony at Worldcon 75, a science fiction festival held this year in Helsinki, Finland. Female authors also took home the awards for novella ("Every Heart a Doorway" by Seanan McGuire), novelette ("The Tomato Thief" by Ursula Vernon) and short story ("Seasons of Glass and Iron" by Amal El-Mohtar).

I was asked on Quora what Google will look like in 2030. Since that is one of the most important issues the world is facing right now, I took some time to answer it in full. Larry Page, one of Google's two co-founders, once said off-handedly that Google is not about building a search engine. As he said it, "Oh, we're really making an AI". Google right now is all about building the world brain that will take care of every person, all the time and everywhere.