The potential of 3D printing in manufacturing is starting to move beyond the testing phase into applications with measurable impact on product design, supply chains and maintenance and repair, according to a manufacturing insights survey by International Data Corporation.

Aircraft manufacturer Airbus is among a handful of European manufacturers and logistics companies that are testing a new radio frequency identification solution that offers the benefits of active real-time location system (RTLS) RFID technology without the cost of an active system or the need for batteries.

Wu Haishan was at Princeton studying how schools of fish swim together when the crowd behavior of a much bigger group grabbed his attention: his 1.35 billion fellow Chinese. It was Lunar New Year back home in 2014, and Baidu, operator of the country's biggest search engine, had created an animation showing all the trips the Chinese had made during the holiday, which demographers say is the largest annual human migration anywhere. Wu, who'd seen the animation, soon joined Baidu as a data scientist in Beijing. With the company's vast amounts of user location information, he's come up with ingenious ways to measure economic activity.

Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy predicts that as more workloads move to the public IaaS cloud, companies will reduce the number of servers they will manage and the new definition of on-premises infrastructure will increasingly be Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

Amazon.com Inc. has introduced an image recognition program, a speech-to-text service dubbed Polly, and tools for building conversational apps, highlighting its push to add artificial intelligence to its cloud-computer offerings.

Ocado, an online-only grocer and retail solution provider, has developed a 4G-based protocol to communicate with the thousands of robots powering its new automated warehouses. These highly-automated warehouses will be offered as part of a managed service called the Ocado Smart Platform which enables international partners to build scalable, sustainable and profitable online retail businesses, the company says.