As another busy week comes to a conclusion, we at Indianweb2 give you a quick rundown of the top 10 things that happened in the tech world this week.

1) This New AI Driven Earth Search Tool Lets You Search Satellite Images of Matching Object

US-based Descartes Labs has built a new tool called GeoVisual Search that gives anyone and everyone the power to scan the entire Earth through Artificial Intelligence (AI) “eyes” and instantly find satellite images of matching objects. This means, if you want to go on a world tour of all the major cricket stadiums on the planet, the tool will come to your help by churning out your itinerary for the same.

The tool is basically a new type of search engine that successfully combines satellite images of planet Earth with machine learning on a large scale. It allows its users to pick any object of their choice anywhere on Earth (the only condition being it should be visible from space), and then use the tool to churn out a list of similar-looking objects along with their locations on the planet.

2) Bosch, Nvidia To Develop AI-Powered Autonomous Vehicle System

Germany-based multinational engineering and electronics company, Bosch, has joined hands with US-based semiconductor company, Nvidia in a mission to gift the world an artificial intelligence (AI) system for autonomous vehicles.

The partnership will see both the companies coming together to give birth to an AI self-driving car computer, which will be built on Nvidia’s highly performing deep learning software and hardware. The AI will allow people to train their vehicles remotely, operate them autonomously and even update them easily via the cloud. The AI will be made available to the mass market.

3) Samsung To Finally Unveil Much Rumoured Foldable Smartphone

It has been around five years since the rumours of tech giant Samsung launching the world’s first foldable smartphone first started surfacing in the tech world, but till now all we have heard are words and no physical action has actually taken place. Well, according to a recent report from Korean news site ETNews, all this is expected to change soon and this much-awaited foldable smartphone will finally be unveiled to the world later this year.

According to the report, the South-Korean giant is gearing to launch a prototype of the device soon and make it available to its partners so that they can test them and assess its demand from consumers. The smartphone giant will only be producing about thousands of these devices for handing out purposes, meaning a commercial release will not be happening this year.

4) Meet ‘Chintu’ – An IBM Watson-Powered Robot by MIT Pune

A group of students from Pune's Maharashtra Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed ‘Chintu‘ — A two feet tall Robot Companion powered by IBM Watson Technology.

While the robot is from France-based Aldebaran Robotics (now SoftBank Robotics), the students made use of APIs of IBM Watson, along with the IBM Bluemix Cloud platform to create the actual intelligence behind the robot.

The cognitive assistant robot has been designed to assist the senior citizens in conducting everyday tasks, provide mood based entertainment services (dance/song) and generate reminders on their daily medication.

5) India is Building Its Own Self-Driving Cars Equipped for Indian roads

While tech world biggies like Travis Kalanick (Uber founder and CEO) and Karl Iagnemma, (nuTonomy CEO) might be skeptic about the future of self-driving cars in India, the youngsters in the country are focused on proving them wrong. Teams at the most prestigious technological institute in the country, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) are currently meticulously working on ‘autonomous vehicle solutions’ or driverless solutions of their own. The students are focused on developing the ideal technology for tackling Indian roads. The projects have reportedly already caught the attention of various leading Indian automotive companies.

6) What is Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) and Why Should We Care About It

A particular term has been garnering a lot of buzz in the IoT world lately. The term is, NB-IoT . An abbreviation for Narrowband IoT, it is a standards-based Low Power Wide Area technology developed to enable a wide range of new IoT devices and services. It is known to significantly improve the power consumption of user devices, spectrum efficiency and system capacity, especially in deep coverage areas.

According to tech experts, the technology which started rising to the fore in the past couple of years, is slated to take over the world in 2017. A preview of the same was seen at this years Mobile World Congress in the Mobile World Capital, Barcelona. A number of leading telecom players unveiled their respective rollouts of this IoT-enabler at the event. The names include Verizon, NTT DOCOMO, Deutsche Telekom, KPN and several others.

7) Sony Plans To Let PC Owners Play PS4 Games

The week started on a happy note for gamers when Sony in a blog announced its plans to let PC owners play its popular PlayStation4 (PS4) games right on their home computer.

Though Sony did announce the extension to its PlayStation Now streaming service but it didn't give any specific date as to when this would be made available.

8) UrbanX's Electric Wheel Powers Up Your Normal Bike

For people who have been vying to upgrade their ordinary bikes to electric ones, UrbanX's Electric Wheel is the product for you. Not only does it upgrade your ordinary, non-powered bike into an electric one, but it does so at a much cheaper cost than what it would cost you to go and buy a new one directly from the market. Currently retailing on crowd-funding platform Kickstarter, the electric wheel replaces the front wheel of your cycle to turn your ordinary pedal machine into a 15 mph electric beast.

9) Netflix Gives A Thumbs-down To Its Old Star Rating System

Following the footsteps of YouTube, popular movie-streaming service Netflix has decided to do away with its old five-star system for the Facebook-like thumb system.

According to Todd Yellin, Netflix's vice president of product innovation, "Five stars feels very yesterday now." He also added, that the previous star system really projected what a viewer wants to tell the world. But, the company wanted to make a move to a system where it's really clear, when members rate, that it's for them, and to keep on making the Netflix experience better and better.

10) Whirlpool's Wi-Fi Microwave Will Send A Notification To Your Phone When Your Food's Ready

In this past paced world, the one thing that almost everyone hates is waiting. The situation gets even worse when you have to wait in front of your microwave for the food to cook, but not anymore. The world's largest appliance manufacturer, Whirlpool has decided to create an over-the-range microwave oven that you can monitor right from your smart device while working, thus saving you precious time from waiting in front of a microwave for your food.

According to documents filed this week by the company with the US Federal Communication Commission, the Wi-Fi-enabled microwave oven will send push notifications to user's smart phone when their meal is finished cooking. The built-in Wi-Fi will also let them start the microwave from their phone.
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