According to Gartner’s annual top-10 list of strategic predictions, robots, robotic systems and automation will have an expanding role.

Source: www.cio.com

More on the article link but here are top three predictions:

Here are Gartner’s predictions:
1. Writers will be replaced. By 2018, 20% of all business content, one in five of the documents you read, will be authored by a machine, Plummer said.
“Robowriters” are already producing budget reports, sports and business reports, and this trend is sneaking in without notice. One advantage for machines: They don’t have biases or emotional responses, he said.
2. By 2018, 6 billion connected things will be requesting support. These non-human “things” are nonetheless customers requesting services and data, and other methods of support. Marketing to them (and by extension their human owners) can help build a business.
3. By 2020, autonomous software agents outside of human control will participate in 5% of all economic transactions. Smart algorithms are already beginning to perform transactions without our help.

Verifone launched its new point of sale offering, Verifone Engage, which introduces a new line of connected commerce-enabled devices.

Source: www.pymnts.com

In what the company is calling the “next generation” of payment devices, Verifone Engage products come equipped to support a variety of payments methods, including all mobile payments wallets, while also preparing merchants to wrap additional value around the point of sale opportunity. Multimedia displays enable two-way customer interactivity and multilayer security safeguards data via encryption and tokenization.

The launch stands as a major shift in the way Verifone approaches the point of sale. While the hardware is slick and modern, that’s only a small part of the Engage proposition. Vlugt emphasized the importance placed on what’s happening behind the scenes as well.

“It’s not just a shiny new device; there is a whole infrastructure and ecosystem and value that’s associated with it,” Vlugt noted.

Central to the Verifone Engage platform is the Verifone App Marketplace. Verifone is opening the door to developers to channel their creative energies and create new apps that respond to the personalized POS experiences that merchants seek, and value-added services that consumers demand. Vlugt emphasized that the apps marketplace is architected in such a way that developers don’t need a payments knowledge base to add value. They simply build on top of the equivalent of a “Verifone Engage Inside” payments layer.

JPMC has stepped up to fill in where Square left off at Starbucks. The question now is: Will JPMC be able to make money on a deal that lost Square $71 million.

Source: www.pymnts.com

Hopefully, JPMC can make the deal work better than its predecessor over at Square. Data made public in the Square’s IPO filing last week made it clear that processing for Starbucks was a losing proposition for Square, which lost $71 million for the firm over the course of three years.

The new Chase deal will cut short the Square contract, which is technically set to go until Q3 2016. JPMC will take up at least some of the processing duties immediately, with the total transition forecasted for spring next year.

Kevin Johnson, COO of Starbucks, noted that the new pair-up will prepare his company for the “coming wave of innovation in our digital payment ecosystem

The Treasury Department may have offered banking suggestions for the emerging legal pot industry, but it may all be for naught, since the Fed said no.

Source: www.pymnts.com

Weirdly, the Treasury Department seems less concerned about that part. The Fourth Corner Credit Union (the bank that suffered a denial in Colorado) was designed using rules issued by the Treasury last year for how banks can accept drug money from states where those drugs are legal. Fourth Corner was chartered specifically to service the state’s $700 million a year industry and create a safe place to bank for it.

The credit union now wants a federal judge to step in and order the Federal Reserve to change its mind.

The disconnect between the Fed and Treasury — whose stated goal is to “enhance the availability of financial services for, and the financial transparency of, marijuana-related businesses” — is a little bit peculiar.

But the Fed says it is in a strange position and that while it does not intend to lock anyone up for this, it also simply can’t allow the banking system to house the proceeds of an illegal industry.

The Fed further compared the state asking for approval to a situation where “Colorado enacted a scheme to allow trade in endangered species or trade with North Korea.”

Which means, for the time being, pot is a cash business, even in states where it is a legal and regulated cash business.

Burritobox originally launched in 2014, but after a year of making improvements, the new Burritobox Model II is ready to go — and we got to try it.

Source: www.businessinsider.com

          Robots have fascinated us humans since time immemorial so much so that there have been wide debates and fictitious portrayals of them even

Source: www.linkedin.com

Nice writeup on robots for floor cleaning.