IBM

The dinosaur "toy" shown here is not what it appears to be. It's supposed to be a toy for smart kits - or, to be fair, goofball kids if they know how to press a button and speak. It looks like a toy, but it's not just that. This is the CogniToys Dino, and it's likely the smartest dinosaur-themed object in my living space. He's also the most-used children's toy here (used by children or their parents) over the past few weeks. He cannot be stopped.

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IBM and Hilton worldwide have announced a team up that brings to the hospitality industry the world's first robotic concierge. The little robot is called Connie and is the first IBM Watson-enabled robot concierge. Connie is able to use knowledge that Watson and WayBlazer have to give guests information on tourist attractions, dining recommendations, hotel features and amenities.

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IBM has announced a new app for iPhone and Apple Watch that aims to gather data on the relationship between sleep habits and overall health. Dubbed SleepHealth, the app does far more than reveal when users are waking up in the night like typical sleep trackers. The app is built on IBM's Watson Health Cloud, a platform that was developed in partnership with Apple and Johnson & Johnson, and connects with ResearchKit, the open-source framework from Apple.

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CogniToys’ Dino, a toy powered by IBM’s Watson, has entered production and is available for pre-order. CogniToys are smart toys that connect to the Internet and, according to the company, “grow alongside your child.” In addition to IBM Watson, the Dino toy — a fun-looking dinosaur that comes in a couple colors — features Elemental Path’s Friendgine tech. The Dino is priced at $99 USD.

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Researchers at IBM have made a breakthrough that they think may extend Moore's Law. Researchers at IBM have overcome one of the biggest challenges facing the microchip industry when it comes to bringing carbon nanotube transistors into the main stream. Researchers have been able to demonstrate the first carbon nanotube transistors that don’t see reduced performance when they are miniaturized.

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The Interbrand consultancy firm has released its 2015 list of the world's most valuable brands, and for the third year in a row Apple and Google have the number one and two spots, respectively. The list continues to be dominated by technology companies, with Microsoft, IBM, and Samsung also appearing in the top 10. Interbrand calculates each company's valuation as a combination of their financial performance, how much they can influence customer purchases, and their ability to maintain premium pricing.

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IBM's super smart artificial intelligence system Watson is heading West for a little sun, sand, and startups. IBM says the A.I., which became a Jeopardy champion when it beat humans on the game show in 2011, is getting a new West Coast headquarters in San Francisco next year. While the Watson Group will still keep its headquarters in Manhattan, New York, Watson West is aimed at serving as a hub that can easily reach out to startups in Silicon Valley.

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First nobody told IBM that servers were meant to be nondescript slabs, and now Big Blue has gone wild with Linux on its new open-source LinuxONE range. The angular behemoths look more like gaming PCs than they do enterprise hardware, but they open the door to what the Linux Foundation is calling its Open Mainframe Project, a push to better place open-source server software in businesses. IBM is kicking things off with a big chunk of code.

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IBM’s supercomputer Watson is trying its hand at discerning personalities, and it bases its guesses on text samples. A demonstration of the technology allows anyone to copy in their own snippet of text and get an assessment based on it — whether your own will prove accurate is another matter. This is the latest example of computers learning to predict and analyze; we saw a different example yesterday via a neural network that is learning to write.

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IBM is making a big deal of celebrating a tiny achievement, successfully producing a 7nm chip that could mean huge efficiency improvements in phones, laptops and more. Squeezing more than 20 billion transistors into a chip the size of a fingernail took figuring out new manufacturing processes and chewed through part of a $3bn investment IBM earmarked back in 2014, but it's shaping up to be worth every cent. Big Blue predicts a power/performance increase of more than 50-percent from the smaller processors.

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Moore's Law is something cooked up by Gordon Moore in a paper long ago. Moore would eventually go on to found Intel and the law states that computing power will double every two years. In the years since Moore came up with his law, it has held true but some scientists and researchers believe we are nearing the end of life for Moore's Law as we begin to reach limits on how small we can make chips.

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Last summer’s partnership between Apple and IBM has proven extra-special for the latter company’s workers -- as of yesterday IBM employees can choose to use a Mac as their work computer rather than a PC, removing the shackles from a company that has been out of the PC business for many years. The change took place on Thursday, and it didn't take long for IBM employees to praise the decision on their social accounts. A quick peek at Twitter shows that many will be requesting Macs instead of their PCs.

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