Google's Chirp May Try to Drown Out Amazon's Echo.

Google is rumored to be developing a direct competitor to Amazon's Echo, code-named "Chirp." The device, which might resemble the OnHub router (pictured above), would incorporate its Google Now voice assistant technology.
Google likely will launch the product later this year, according to a Wednesday Recode article that debunked earlier reports suggesting Google would launch the new system at its annual I/O developer conference next week.

Google likely will preview the system at I/O, as well as reveal some of its emerging technology in the virtual reality market, Recode said.Echo's Success
 Echo has been one of Amazon's biggest product launches in years. It combines a speaker with the Alexa personal digital assistant -- voice recognition software that answers questions, sounds alerts, maintains lists, reorders Amazon Prime products, plays music, and controls compatible door locks, lights and other home automation systems, among other things.
Amazon has sold more than 3 million Echo units since the product's launch in late 2014, Consumer Intelligence Research Partners reported last month.
Consumers are using the Echo for many different purposes, according to CIRP's research, with more using it to stream music and answer questions than to control home utilities and security.
Google has substantial experience in integrating its hardware and software, noted Michael Levin, cofounder of CIRP.

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Groupon Sues 'Once-Great' IBM Over Patent

The online marketplace Groupon Inc. has sued IBM Corp., accusing it of infringing a patent related to technology that helps businesses solicit customers based on the customers' locations at a given moment.
Groupon filed its lawsuit on Monday with the federal court in its hometown of Chicago, two months after IBM accused Groupon of patent infringement in a separate lawsuit.
Doug Shelton, an IBM spokesman, said: "This counter suit is totally without merit." IBM's full name is International Business Machines Corp.
The latest lawsuit concerns IBM's WebSphere Commerce platform, which Groupon said lets merchants send messages to customers with GPS-enabled devices based on their real-time locations, and their use of social media including Facebook.
Groupon said the platform infringes a December 2010 patent, and that it deserves royalties based on the "billions of dollars" of revenue that Armonk, New York-based IBM has received through its infringement.
"IBM, a relic of once-great 20th Century technology firms, has now resorted to usurping the intellectual property of companies born this millennium," Groupon said in its lawsuit.
On March 2, IBM accused Groupon in a federal lawsuit in Delaware of infringing four patents, including two related to Prodigy, a late-1980s forerunner to the Internet.

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Samsung just patented smart contact lenses with a built-in camera

Samsung just took another step into science fiction. South Korea has just granted the tech giant a patent for contact lenses with a display that can project images straight into the user's eye.

The lenses are equipped with a built-in camera and sensors that can be controlled simply by blinking. Content is sent to your smartphone through embedded antennas. This is where the data is processed.It seems that Samsung is developing the smart contact lenses as an alternative to creating improved augmented reality experiences over the current crop of wearables, reports SamMobile.With this development, Samsung joins Google in the arena, which also owns two patents for smart contact lenses. Google's contact lenses are mainly intended for medical use, with sensors and flexible electronics to read tear fluid chemicals to determine blood sugar levels.

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Artificial intelligence

Google AI program has restrain the champion of the game 'Go', which many expert have believed that needed years to happened. Also Google’cloud vision  highly capable in recognizing  the contenc of images as the human know. Facebook’AI have build a program on  recognizing of faces,which can be the most advanced technology in the world .Still we aren't talking for 'AI' which frighten Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking. As the biggest part of automatic works will be executed by robots,artificial intelligence will be a financial treasure from which many businesman will have benefits. 

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Intel to cut 12,000 jobs globally

Tech giant Intel will cut up to 12,000 people from its staff globally, or about 11% of its workforce, the company announced Tuesday.

As of the end of last year, Intel employed about 107,300 staff members.Intel said most of the employees affected by the layoffs will be notified in the next 60 days, while some of the cuts may happen through mid-2017.Intel (INTC, Tech30) is and has been the largest computer chipmaker in the world. The company bet heavily on the stability of the PC business years ago, and its microprocessors have dominated the PC industry.But the company has failed to replicate that success across mobile devices that have now replaced traditional desktops and laptops.

Nearly 60% of Intel's sales and profits came from its microprocessor and chip business, which means that any changes to the PC business have a big impact on Intel's bottom line.The company says it expects to save $750 million this year and $1.4 billion by the middle of next year from the job cuts and related expense reductions.At the same time, Intel said it plans to invest more in "growing" areas of its business, such as convertible laptop-tablet devices, as well as gaming.

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Upcoming Nvidia GTX 1080 pictured, may not use HBM2

It’s no secret that AMD and Nvidia are planning to launch new GPUs in the next few months, but there are still questions about configurations and technology. Initially, we expected these new cards to use the HBM2 memory standard, but the persistent rumor has been that AMD’s upcoming Polaris would be GDDR5 based. That now appears to be true for Nvidia as well.
Leaked photos of the GP104 die show the chip with a standard memory interface — either GDDR5 or GDDR5X (it’s difficult to tell). PC Perspective is reporting that there’s an ongoing rumor the GTX 1080 will use GDDR5X, which could be possible, but would honestly seem to be a bit early — when we spoke to Micron about the memory, the company implied that the production ramp would be later in the year. With JEDEC qualification and good initial production yields, however, it’s possible that Nvidia could deploy GDDR5X on high-end GPUs, and it wouldn’t be the first time that a GPU manufacturer used a limited memory run. AMD was the only company to make significant use of GDDR4 or HBM, after all.

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Apple Patents Learning Computer Vision For Gesture Control

Apple has a new patent (via AppleInsider) for 3D gesture control, specifically describing the tech used to help a computer identify hand motions made by a user. The patent goes into detail about how the system can not only recognize gestures, but learn them so well that it can even spot them when part of the hand making the gesture is blocked or not visible by the camera, leading to greater accuracy overall.

Apple’s tech would allow Kinect-style recognition to be more forgiving of less-than-ideal conditions, meaning it would make gesture interaction theoretically less painful for users, and therefore more likely to be used at all. The key innovation Apple made with the iPhone’s interaction model was getting touch-based input right – its capacitive screens and rigorously engineered touchpoint response was completely unlike the kludgy resistive touch-based experiences customers were used to.

In 2013, Apple acquired PrimeSense, the company which powered much of the tech that went into the original Kinect sensor. Some speculated at the time that Apple might be interested in using PrimeSense tech to add gesture-based input to Apple TV, among other possible uses. Apple successfully transferred PrimeSense patents to itself last year, and this new one contains key ingredients for improving the accuracy and efficacy of gesture recognition over time.

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