International food and catering services supplier Nestlé has chosen Telefónica Business Solutions to provide a 50-country internet of things(IoT) communications network for its Nestlé Professional coffee business as part of a major digital transformation. Alongside other Nestlé products, Nestlé Professional supplies both staff and user-operated coffee machines – including the Nespresso range – to caterers and small businesses. It hopes to use IoT telemetry to improve customer experience and business efficiency by monitoring the working parameters of its machines.

Alexa’s on a quite a roll of late. Amazon’s AI assistant is adding new skills all the time, and this week the company’s adding one of its highest profile partners. On November 19, Alexa will get the Send Message skill, allowing AT&T subscribers to text one of ten predetermined contacts using their voice. The skill works pretty much as you’d expect. Ask Alexa to text a friend on your contacts list and she’ll prompt you to speak the message, freeing you up to wash the dishes, your plants, play the glockenspiel and whatever it is people do with their hands while …

Just like credit cards, smartphones or search engines, autonomous cars will carry a trove of information about their owners as they make driving more comfortable, raising new concerns about privacy. Automakers are engaged in a fierce race to develop the first driverless car, which experts say should hit the road by 2020. Apart from legal obstacles facing the industry as the technology evolves—such as who is responsible in the event of an accident—a digital battle is being waged over the huge amount of technical data that will be stored in such vehicles.

A business trip to London in the not-too-distant future: just as the freeway exit for the airport comes into view, the mailman rings the doorbell at home. Not a problem, as long as the smart car is connected to the smart home. After a brief video chat with the mailman, the traveler gives a touchscreen command to open the front door. Next stop: the airport parking garage. The vehicle automatically takes over the job of finding a free spot while the traveler goes through security. After the plane has landed in London, the traveler’s smartphone reports “congestion on all access …

Google’s DeepMind and the University of Oxford are using AI to master the science of lip-reading. “The AI vastly outperformed a professional lip-reader who attempted to decipher 200 randomly selected clips from the data set,” New Scientist reports. “The professional annotated just 12.4 per cent of words without any error … But the AI annotated 46.8 per cent of all words in the March to September data set without any error.”

BMW Group and Chinese internet giant Baidu will end their joint research on self-driving cars, executives for the two firms said Friday, with Baidu now searching for new global research partners. Wang Jing, the head of autonomous car development at Baidu, told Reuters the company was now using cars from Ford's Lincoln in its U.S. testing, declining to elaborate. "I'm open for any partners, actually I'm talking to many," Wang said, speaking on the sidelines of China's third World Internet Conference in the eastern Chinese city of Wuzhen.

NuTonomy, a self-driving car startup spun out of MIT and based in Cambridge, Mass., will soon begin testing its autonomous vehicles in Boston. The company, which launched a commercial self-driving pilot in Singapore in August, has been given permission to operate its vehicles in the city’s Raymond L. Flynn Marine Park. NuTonomy, which also recently forged a partnership with Southeast Asia’s homegrown ride-hail player Grab, is moving relatively quickly toward its goal of launching a full-fledged on-demand network of self-driving cars in Singapore by 2018. (We rode in the self-driving car that is now operating in Singapore’s business district.)

Wireless VR will do a lot to help the tech become more viable, since dealing with your heavy cable umbilical on Oculus and HTC Vive right now is a pain. MIT has created a new wireless communication system designed specifically for VR that could unburden us for truly immersive VR experiences. MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab came up with “MoVR” as a way to let VR headsets talk to PCs wirelessly, without sacrificing important things like graphics fidelity and frame rates, which are key in terms of making sure virtual reality experiences are smooth and not prone to making users …

Every morning, Austin Knowles pulls on his rubber boots, dodges the manure in his farmyard, and opens the creaky wooden door of his 200-year-old barn on a hilltop in Worcestershire, 130 miles northwest of London. Inside, his dairy cows are busy uploading data to the cloud. Each animal has a half-pound sensor in her stomach, which is linked via Wi-Fi to a service that helps Knowles analyze the health and well-being of his herd. If an animal falls ill, the system e-mails the vet days before the cow is visibly sick. When one is about to go into heat, Knowles …

Apple has reportedly shuttered a division that develops wireless routers. Sources tell Bloomberg that the decision represents “another move to try to sharpen the company’s focus on consumer products that generate the bulk of its revenue. Starting last year, the tech giant has been “dispersing engineers to other product development groups, including the one handling the Apple TV.”