Every industry is getting involved in the Internet of Things in one way or another. Global brewer Anheuser-Busch is buying an IoT startup that focuses on analytics.

Smart speakers have been entering homes for some time and now food retailers are getting involved. Some are linking smart speakers into their ecommerce efforts.

Among topics discussed at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year, artificial intelligence was high on the list. The term itself appeared in more than 20 Bloomberg headlines around the meeting.

An Internet of Things consortium is in the planning stages in Los Angeles. The idea is to create an IoT system that lets residents and businesses generate community-run data marketplaces.

One smart speaker deal goes head-to-head with Apple’s HomePod. Sonos just launched a deal of two of its smart speakers for the same price as one of Apple’s HomePod Siri-enabled speakers.

The use of drones keeps expanding into new areas. Now one country is using them in place of aircraft such as helicopters to perform search and rescue operations.

Bitcoin goes up and it goes down. Stripe, the payments platform, has noticed and has decided to stop supporting it.

A fire truck parked at a freeway accident was hit by a Tesla Model S reported to be in ‘autopilot’ mode, according to authorities. The car suffered significant damage and the driver was reportedly not seriously injured.

Augmented reality is now being used to help train passengers. The leading travel marketplace in India has launched an AR feature that lets passengers locate their coach positions for more than 13,000 passenger trains.

To date, driverless cars being tested have typically been required to have a driver, just in case. Now Uber and others seem to be getting closer to eliminating that back-up driver.