Wine growers have a neat, if unusual, trick for making more flavorful wine--don't water the vines. Let the vines go dry right before harvest, and they will yield smaller grapes with more skin and less juice. Smaller grapes produce wine with a deeper color and more complex flavor. Trinchero Family Estates in Napa Valley, California wanted to make sure it was watering its grapes just the right amount, so they worked with Ceres Imaging to map their fields. Ceres used fixed-wing aircrafts to capture color, thermal, and infrared images of the vineyard, and they used artificial intelligence to analyze those images to see if the wine producer was overwatering its grapes.

Tel Aviv-based startup Prospera has raised a $15 million Series B to expand the scope of its technology, which uses computer vision and artificial intelligence to help farmers analyze data gathered from their fields. The round was led by Qualcomm Ventures, with participation from Cisco Investments, ICV and returning investor Bessemer Venture Partners, and brings Prospera's total funding to $22 million (its Series A was covered by TechCrunch in July 2016). The startup's new capital will be used enter more global markets, add people to its delivery and customer-facing teams and broaden its services to cover more crops, "including making a key shift from indoor farms to outdoor farms, which has huge implications given that 40 percent of U.S. land is farmland," says co-founder and CEO Daniel Koppel. Since its Series A, Prospera has added new customers in Europe, Mexico, and the U.S. and now claims thousands of users, including produce growers for Walmart, Tesco, Sainbury's, and Aldi. Its technology has also evolved from its focus on automatically detecting pests and diseases to "every aspect of farm production," says Koppel.

Artificial intelligence (AI) gives machines the ability to "think" and accomplish tasks. AI already is a big part of our lives in areas such as banking, shopping, security and healthcare. Soon it will help us get around in automated vehicles. By 2025, the global enterprise AI market is predicted to be worth more than $30 billion. Israeli industry can expect a nice piece of that pie due to its world-class capabilities in AI and its subsets: big-data analysis, natural-language processing, computer vision, machine learning and deep learning.

Artificial intelligence (AI) gives machines the ability to "think" and accomplish tasks. AI already is a big part of our lives in areas such as banking, shopping, security and healthcare. Soon it will help us get around in automated vehicles. By 2025, the global enterprise AI market is predicted to be worth more than $30 billion. Israeli industry can expect a nice piece of that pie due to its world-class capabilities in AI and its subsets: big-data analysis, natural-language processing, computer vision, machine learning and deep learning.

Artificial intelligence (AI) gives machines the ability to "think" and accomplish tasks. AI already is a big part of our lives in areas such as banking, shopping, security and healthcare. Soon it will help us get around in automated vehicles. By 2025, the global enterprise AI market is predicted to be worth more than $30 billion. Israeli industry can expect a nice piece of that pie due to its world-class capabilities in AI and its subsets: big-data analysis, natural-language processing, computer vision, machine learning and deep learning.

NatureSweet, which grows tomatoes on six farms in the United States and Mexico, is using artificial intelligence to better control pests and diseases in its greenhouses. The technology, developed by the Israeli digital farming company Prospera, has already improved harvests and reduced labor costs. NatureSweet began testing the technology almost a year ago at one of its farms in Arizona. It plans to roll the tech out to all of its locations soon. Adrian Almeida, chief innovation officer at NatureSweet, believes artificial intelligence will eventually improve his greenhouses tomato yields by 20%.

We all know that the Internet of Things (IoT) represents game-changing transformation in the industrial application of technology...or at least we think we do. Perhaps more accurately, we sense that denying IoT's significance would be foolishly contrarian. And while we might have an innate sense of why IoT is so important, we also might come up short when pressed to describe specific applications of IoT technology. That's why I love learning about real use cases, especially ones that veer off the path of domains like preventive maintenance, which are almost cliché. Recently, I had the chance to learn of one such IoT application.