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The recent Google I/O developer conference at which the company reveals its new products and directions brought with it several surprising announcements that mark significant changes for the way the company approaches its online business.

The first was the admission by Google chief executive, Sundar Pichai, that Amazon had taken the lead in voice-activated devices when it launched Echo last year when he announced the company’s own Google Home, a similar table-top, voice-controlled AI assistant. These devices have been made possible by the rapid improvement of voice-recognition technology and AI fast enough to respond in real time to questions and answers. But under the surface, the devices are deeply integrated with the cloud, and in the case of Echo, Amazon’s online marketplace.

This is significant because Echo now boasts more than 400 different “skills” and connected suppliers through which users can order food, look up calendar appointments, pay credit card bills, search for information and many other things – just by asking with their voice. The ecosystem of companion products around these intelligent assistants is growing too: just by asking, you can switch on the lights in any room, control the thermosat, security system and fire detectors, automate perimeter doors or fences.

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Like anything else there are fundamentals around when, what, and why to use certain technologies and methods to achieve real value and return out of an investment; and bot technology is no different.

Bots are not only cheaper and faster to build than apps, they let companies engage consumers where they spend most of their mobile time: messaging platforms. Join us to understand why Facebook is going all in on chatbots for Messenger and brands as diverse as Staples, Bank of America, and Taco Bell are leading the bot charge — and bots are literally changing the conversation.

Register here for free.

The robot invasion has begun! Or, to put it more accurately, the bot invasion has begun.

Continue reading “The business case for bots: Understanding the bot landscape (VB Live)” | >

Another article on the growing importance and usage of synthetic diamonds in semiconductors especially in QC. In QC synthetic diamonds has been found through their complex crystalized structures to help stablelize processing and transmission of data. I strongly advise investors, labs, etc. to seriously look at this market. Also, some of the most proven laboratories are located in Russia, and US.

It might surprise you to learn that we can, in fact, grow diamonds in labs. Here’s the story.

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Syncing of optical photons.

A fundamental element of quantum information processing with photonic qubits is the nonclassical quantum interference between two photons when they bunch together via the Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) effect. Ultimately, many such photons must be processed in complex interferometric networks. For this purpose, it is essential to synchronize the arrival times of the flying photons and to keep their purities high. On the basis of the recent experimental success of single-photon storage with high purity, we demonstrate for the first time the HOM interference of two heralded, nearly pure optical photons synchronized through two independent quantum memories. Controlled storage times of up to 1.8 μs for about 90 events per second were achieved with purities that were sufficiently high for a negative Wigner function confirmed with homodyne measurements.

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As a result of deforestation, only 6.2 million square kilometers remain of the original 16 million square kilometers of forest that formerly covered Earth. Apart from adveserly impacting people’s livelihoods, rampant deforestation around the world is threatening a wide range of tree species, including the Brazil nut and the plants that produce cacao and açaí palm; animal species, including critically-endangered monkeys in the remote forests of Vietnam’s Central Highlands, and contributing to climate change instead of mitigating it (15% of all greenhouse gas emissions are the result of deforestation).

While the world’s forest cover is being unabashedly destroyed by industrial agriculture, cattle ranching, illegal logging and infrastructure projects, Thailand has found a unique way to repair its deforested land: by using a farming technique called seed bombing or aerial reforestation, where trees and other crops are planted by being thrown or dropped from an airplane or flying drone.

The tree seed bombing in Thailand is one of the greatest examples of ‘Conscious Entrepreneurs’ or ‘Spiritual Entrepreneurs’ out there right.

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According to a paper posted to the arXiv pre-print server last week, the difference between an everyday supermassive black hole and a space-time tunneling wormhole may be a lacing of dark matter. While it sounds like crank fodder of the sort that not infrequently winds up on arXiv, the idea may hold actual water.

The theory pertains to one particular proposed form of dark matter known as axionic dark matter. Axions, a hypothesized fundamental particle of matter relating to the strong nuclear force, aren’t the only proposed candidate for dark matter, but as searches for WIMPs (weakly-interacting massive particles)—far and away the favored proposed particle comprising dark matter—come up empty, axionic dark matter has become a more and more plausible scenario. As theorized, dark matter axions would permeate the universe as an energetic condensate, interacting only very weakly via the electromagnetic force and existing as a kind of ghostly cosmic foam.

Crucially, while individual axions would be very light, they would together make up enough mass to account for the dark matter halos that form the gravitational scaffolding of galaxies. Axions are currently being hunted for via experiments involving giant Earth-based mirrors.

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