As we've reported recently, Google is researching ways to make navigating the internet less URL-heavy.  Their reasoning for this is simple - URLs can be messy, confusing, and are easily abused by phishers who can hide their scheme within those characters.  Google does claim, however, that URLs are necessary and will stay - their goal is mainly to reduce the user's reliance on them.  Now, Google is putting their plans into motion.

This year at CES 2019, Segway announced its new Loomo Delivery product, a robot developed to handle deliveries in buildings and malls.  Fully autonomous, Loomo Delivery can navigate around obstacles and through crowds and handle tasks such as mail delivery (straight from the mail carrier) and moving documents through an office environment.  It could even bring you a snack.  They're smart enough to figure out where deliveries need to go, and feature interactive screens, and can even work an elevator.  Its cloud or 4G connectivity also handles dispatch, updates, scheduling, and monitoring.

In a humorous twist, this week it's the robots that have lost their jobs to humans.  The Henn-na Hotel in Japan was opened with bright hopes of a fully robotic operation, but was recently forced to shelve half of its 243 robots.

Among the layoffs:

Kroger, a large player in the American grocery chain market, recently launched a trial of smart technology to make shopping easier for consumers and managing stock easier on store employees.  This technology, developed by Microsoft on their Azure cloud platform, utilizes digital displays located on shelves in place of paper price tags as well as the customer's smartphone or a store-supplied device.

We all know the irritation of seeing our phones light up with a number we don't recognize - more often than not it's a spam call promising that we've won an exciting vacation or that the IRS is hunting us down.  Sadly, little progress has been made to stem the flow of these scams and they must be working because the spammers keep at it.  These calls, often coined "robocalls" due to the tech used to automatically dial numbers, sadly numbered over 5.1 billion in November 2018.  This is the highest number ever recorded and is up from 2.9 billion at the beginning of this year.

Black Friday 2018 has come and gone, and the results are in - more and more consumers are placing their holiday gift orders through mobile devices.  According to Adobe Analytics, nearly half of this year's holiday browsing (not always resulting in a purchase) was placed on smartphones - while millions of dollars worth of orders were placed on devices.

Users of Microsoft services such as Outlook, Office 365, OneDrive, Skype, and Xbox Live will now get to enjoy the benefits of not having to remember their passwords.  Now, with physical hardware keys using the FIDO2 technology, access to a Microsoft account is as simple as plugging into a USB port or using Bluetooth or NFC to pair a phone to the key.

Initially, the keys were used as part of a two-factor authentication policy, but new browser technology has enabled the elimination of the password requirement.  Now, Microsoft's no-password log on process offers three options:

Samsung, the popular electronics manufacturer, has announced headway into their work to develop technologies that allow televisions to be controlled with brain waves alone.  This technology is being developed with the disabled in mind - such as quadriplegics or people with other conditions that affect the use of their hands.  Samsung's goal is to create the ability for these people to change channels and adjust sound volume with their mind.

AirAsia, a Malaysia-based low cost airline, recently revealed insight on how it's utilizing Google Cloud services and a "data-first" attitude to help passenger experiences be "more personal and less friction-filled" across their network.  These insights were shared at the Google Cloud Next '18 conference in London by AirAsia CEO Tony Fernandes.

Car crashes at intersections account for 20% of annual traffic deaths, and automakers Honda and Volkswagen are working to lower that number.  Though the two companies aren't working together, they're approaching the problem in similar ways with the use of connected technology at smart intersections.