Google's owner Alphabet has become a trillion-dollar company for the first time, making it only the fourth US firm to reach the bumper valuation. Alphabet's value, based on the price of its Wall Street-listed shares, passed $1tn (£776bn) in the final minutes of trading on Thursday night, with shares closing at a record high of $1,450.16 It marks a stellar rise for Alphabet, which floated as Google for $85 a share in 2004. After its initial public offering, the Silicon Valley firm was worth $23bn. It has followed its tech rivals Microsoft, Apple and Amazon over the $1tn mark, amid a long rally in so-called Faang stocks. Google's value has steadily surged as it has tightened its grip on the search market, boosted its advertising revenues from web searches and YouTube, created and grown its Android mobile operating system, and launched a series of smart-tech products including Google Home and Google Assistant.

From time to time, usually on garbage night, the animals wander into Sivasubramanian's backyard to pillage his trash. But try as they might, he and his family had never managed to spot the intruders. "My wife really wanted to see these bears in action," says Sivasubramanian, Amazon's VP of machine learning. "She will always try to stay up looking for bears to visit, and she wants me to give her company." He founded his solution in DeepLens, a new video camera system from Amazon Web Services that lets anyone with programming skills employ deep learning to automate various tasks.

A computer built in the 1970s that helped launch the personal computer age as well as a trillion-dollar company has sold for $375,000. The fully functioning Apple-1 auctioned by Boston-based RR Auction was sold at a live sale Tuesday. RR says the winning bid came from a U.S.-based businessman who wishes to remain anonymous. The computer is one of 60 or so remaining of the original 200 designed and built by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976 and 1977, and one of 16 that still works. A computer built in the 1970s that helped launch the personal computer age as well as a trillion-dollar company has sold for $375,000.

Apple announced stellar quarterly earnings; investors liked them; the stock rose; and Apple became the first US company to surpass $1 trillion in market value. In our love for big numbers, that made it a big story. Zachary Karabell is a WIRED contributor and president of River Twice Research. Never mind that if you adjust for inflation and go global, Apple isn't actually the first trillion-dollar company. PetroChina, the state-owned Chinese oil company, hit that number more than a decade ago, and in adjusted terms, Standard Oil did a century ago.

Apple has become the world's first publicly traded company to be valued at $1 trillion - 42 years after Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak began the firm in a Silicon Valley garage. The stock rose nearly 3 percent following a strong third-quarter earnings report earlier this week, briefly hitting a session high of $207.05 in midday trading before falling back below $207. This briefly pushed Apple over the historic trillion dollar mark. Apple chief executive officer Steve Jobs stands in front of a photo of himself, right, and Steve Wozniak, left, during an Apple event in San Francisco in 2011. Apple's stock market value is greater than the combined capitalization of Exxon Mobil, Procter & Gamble and AT&T. It now accounts for 4 percent of the S&P 500.

By now, everyone has heard of artificial intelligence: It populates our Facebook feeds and powers the virtual assistants we keep around our homes, including Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri. Perhaps you found this article through a Google search or a news aggregator app, which is also powered by AI. The average consumer interacts with AI multiple times every day -- despite a HubSpot survey that indicates that 63% of consumers don't even realize they have used AI -- but not everyone understands the full impact the technology will ultimately have on our economy. The founders of up-and-coming AI startups are poised to build multibillion-dollar enterprises. In fact, the immense value of AI technology is likely to spawn the world's first trillion-dollar companies -- a feat that tech giants like Amazon, Apple and Alibaba are racing to achieve.

A friend of mine has spent more than the value of his San Antonio home on Amazon Prime in the last five years. That is precisely why the next big battlefield for marketing and advertising lies with artificially intelligent digital agents like Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, Facebook M, and Cortana. And it's why the company that cracks AI-powered agents will be the next trillion-dollar corporation. Every communications technology that has ever been invented has been seized by brands as a new way to connect with customers. A marketing manager sent the first spam email in 1978.

A friend of mine has spent more than the value of his San Antonio home on Amazon Prime in the last five years. That is precisely why the next big battlefield for marketing and advertising lies with artificially intelligent digital agents like Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, Facebook M, and Cortana. And it's why the company that cracks AI-powered agents will be the next trillion-dollar corporation. Every communications technology that has ever been invented has been seized by brands as a new way to connect with customers. A marketing manager sent the first spam email in 1978.