Essential is planning its international foray with launches in the UK, western Europe and Japan, although it has yet to launch its minimalist $699 handset in the US.

Advanced Micro Devices, in releasing the Zen architecture and the Ryzen product family for consumer PCs, started down a path of growth in the processor market that it had been absent from for a decade.

Intel has axed the division that worked on health wearables, including fitness trackers, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Apple and its Asian contract manufacturers are hitting back at Qualcomm with legal claims that try to undermine the chipmaker's attempt to force them to pay licensing fees.

Facebook already tailors its feed of news, sports scores and viral videos to show you what you want. Now Google is going to do it too. In a classic case of Silicon Valley "Anything you can do I can do better," the search giant on Wednesday updated its free Google app for iPhones and Android phones with a feed that uses artificial intelligence to show you things like news stories or movie trailers.

It is increasingly looking like the future belongs to artificial intelligence. Two of the hottest stocks in that industry are Nvidia and AMD. The strength of those stocks is largely attributable to the excitement around the artificial-intelligence capabilities of their processors.

IBM has unveiled IBM Z, the next generation of the world's most powerful transaction system capable of running more than 12 billion encrypted transactions per day. The new system also introduces a breakthrough encryption engine that, for the first time, makes it possible to pervasively encrypt data associated with any application, cloud service or database all the time.

AMD's new Ryzen processors offer quite a bit of bang for your buck, and have been a hot ticket item for the last few months. Unfortunately, scammers will find a way to take advantage people's eagerness to get their hands on a product no matter what. Reports from at least two users have indicated that counterfeit AMD Ryzen processors are being sold by Amazon or Amazon retailers, and the processors customers are receiving aren't even made by AMD at all.

The Labor Department will not get access to the full details it has requested on 21,000 Google employees as part of its investigation of equal pay, an administrative law judge has ruled, saying that the agency's demand for data is too broad and could violate workers' privacy.

During California's Gold Rush, it was often the sellers of pickaxes and shovels who made the most money. In the frenzy to get rich quick from cryptocurrencies, some investors are calling computer chipmakers the modern-day equivalent.

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), the birthplace of the Robot World Cup in 1996, now presents a new technology matchup, the AI World Cup this November. The event is being organized by the Machine Intelligence and Robotics Multi-Sponsored Research and Education Platform (MIR-MSREP) of KAIST. The online, simulated AI soccer game, based on rolling updates, will be a draw for avid online gamers and tech-savvy university students from around the nation.

Dell's new Latitude 7000 series of 12-inch 2-in-1 laptops has begun shipping, with a number of firsts and impressive capabilities baked into the hardware. The Latitude 7000 series is the thinnest and lightest system Dell has ever built. It also offers integrated wireless charging, courtesy of a partnership with Witricity; the first specific model to launch with this is the Latitude 7000 12-inch 2-in-1 (7285). Dell reports that interest in its 2-in-1s and total shipments have both been growing rapidly, and were up 1.48x in Q1 2017 alone.

With 43 zones, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the globe's largest public cloud, but Google is working hard to match AWS. On July 13, Google opened its latest region, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) London (europe-west2).

Look out StyleSeat and other salon booking apps, starting today Google will let people book hair and spa appointments. "So that fresh haircut or palm tree-green mani is only a couple taps away," a post on Google's blog tells us. The addition is an expansion through Reserve with Google, which rolled out a feature last year to book wellness and fitness classes right from a business listing within Search and Maps. Google has since partnered with several salons and spas to give us the same options there.

Last summer LeEco announced it intended to purchase the US-based TV maker Vizio for US$2 billion. The deal fell through in March amid myriad problems surrounding LeEco, including a major cash crunch. Allegedly the deal included a US$100 million buyer-termination fee and now Vizio has filed suit in a California court to collect payment.

Huawei, which has been one of the main contributors towards standardizing NB-IoT technology (4.5G technology), has developed the first NB-IoT Smart Meter in partnership with JANZ CE and u-blox.

Intel is shedding nearly 140 staff from its Internet of Things business lines. The layoffs were probably inevitable, since during June, Intel discontinued three of its IoT product lines - the Joule, Edison and Galileo compute modules and boards.

It follows Tag Heuer's Connected watch, the Apple Watch Herm癡s and Michael Kors's Access line (in collaboration with Fossil) in an effort to, according to Michael Burke, chief executive of Louis Vuitton, combat the fact that when it comes to wearable technology, "there's a lot of ugliness out there."

With the launch of Bixby and reports that Samsung is building its own competitor to Amazon's Echo, the consumer electronics giant has now made an acquisition that could help power its next generation of voice-powered services.

Sales analysts have cited wireless charging as one of the features compelling enough to help the upcoming iPhone 8 shatter sales records. Now, the always-churning Apple rumor mill suggests that feature won't be in place in time for the new phone's release (which may or may not come this year) and that it might not be quite as cool as some had hoped.

Microsoft is to cut "thousands" of jobs worldwide as it attempts to beef up its presence in the cloud computing sector. The technology giant wants to strengthen its cloud computing division but is facing intense competition from rivals such as Amazon and Google.

Samsung Electronics is expected to report its best-ever quarterly profit in the second quarter, with soaring memory chip sales pushing it past Intel as the biggest semiconductor maker by revenue for the first time.