Ford Wants Smart Cars and Homes to Talk to Each Other

A highlight of Ford's Tuesday CES event was its announcement of plans to connect its Sync smart car technology with smart home applications from Amazon and Wink. The integrations will give consumers remote control of things like home security and lights from their vehicles, along with the ability to unlock car doors and turn on the ignition from their living rooms. Ford will link its new Sync Connect technology with Amazon's cloud-based Alexa software, to let drivers use voice commands to manage functions such as checking fuel levels.

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Human Computation May Be Key to Solving World's Wicked Problems

Combining human and computer intelligence could help solve the world's most vexing problems, researchers envisioned in an article published Monday in the journal Science. Researchers from Cornell University and the Human Computation Institute want more humans to help out in accelerating research and finding solutions to life's most difficult problems, such as cancer, HIV, climate change and drought. Crowdsourcing analysis of research materials isn't new. So-called "games with a purpose" offload some of the work of analyzing data to humans.

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Zuckerberg Resolves to Invent, Encourages Girls to Invent Too

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's 2016 resolution to challenge himself outside his work is to build a simple artificial intelligence assistant to run his home and help him do a better job juggling his business responsibilities. "You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in 'Iron Man,'" he suggested. Zuckerberg first will explore the available technology, then train it to understand his voice to control everything in his home. At work, the AI will allow him to visualize data in virtual reality to help him build better services and lead his organizations more effectively.

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The Future of Deliveries Will Be Driverless

Thanks to Google, self-driving passenger cars have gained a lot of media attention, but the immediate future of driverless vehicles may lie in home deliveries. Starship Technologies in 2016 will launch two pilot projects -- one in the UK and one in the United States -- to test a driverless vehicle designed to make short-distance deliveries. The vehicle, which looks like an oversized slow cooker on wheels, can carry loads equivalent to two bags of groceries from a distribution center or retail outlet to customers.

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Gadget Ogling: A Smart Home Hub, a Tiny Drone, and a Whispering Camera

LG's SmartThinq Hub seeks to bring together all of your connected appliances and smart sensors under one roof. As extras, it sprinkles on top music streaming, through radio stations or whatever you happen to play on your smartphone -- and reminders, through its 3.5-inch display. The hub can monitor and control robot vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, ovens and air conditioners, among other things, while it can absorb data from connected devices through its SmartThinQ sensors. It can deliver the data either through notifications on the display, or as an audio readout through the speaker.

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Hats Off to Chapeau Linux's Better Fedora Concept

The Chapeau project's latest version arrived last month and is a good choice for enterprise users who want something a step above the traditional Fedora distro. An iconic Linux distro, Fedora is a very popular choice in enterprise shops, but it's less than ideal for home and SMB use without an IT staff to make it work. That is where Chapeau 23 comes to the rescue. Fedora is the community distro supported by Red Hat Linux. In essence, Fedora is the proving ground for what eventually will filter into the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS.

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CES Insanity in 2016: The Cannabis Defense

CES is probably the best example that folks who work around tech are just a tad insane. While no big product has yet emerged, there will be a ton of crazy stuff to see. Yes, there will be robots, smartwatches, tablets, PCs, smart appliances, exoskeletons, body monitors, head thumpers, drones, self-driving cars, augmented reality, virtual reality, holographics, 3D printers, and a ton of junk that someone thought someone else would want to buy, but that we'll never see again.

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