Toyota is partnering with Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to research artificial intelligence and robotics in order to bring greater autonomy to Toyota cars.

The car maker will contribute US$50 million over five years to two research centers that are being set up at Stanford and MIT.

However, don't expect a computer to completely drive your Camry any time soon.

Toyota will always assume a person will be at the wheel, said Gill Pratt, who oversaw the DARPA Robotics Challenge and is now joining Toyota as an executive technical adviser.

Toyota will focus on creating "human-centric systems" that are supplemented by technology, Pratt said Friday at a press conference in Palo Alto, California.

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Jawbone has issued the first major software update for its Up line of activity trackers to address some of the issues that people have had with the wearables.

The updates released Tuesday will help resolve some of the problems users have experienced with the Up2, Up3 and Up4, wrote Mimi Huggins, [cq] Jawbone's public relations manager, in an email.

An over-the-air firmware update via either the Android or iOS Up smartphone apps will allow the Up3 and Up4 to collect what Jawbone calls "passive heart rate" data.

Currently, those devices only gather "resting heart rate," which Jawbone defines as the number of times a heart beats when a person is completely at rest, particularly during sleep.

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Adblock Plus has released a browser for Android and iOS that is designed to shield mobile device users from ads while they browse the web.

Both the Android and iOS versions are available now for free, Adblock Plus said Tuesday. The AdBlock Plus browser can block all types of mobile ads, stop users from landing on malicious sites and turn off social media buttons.

An Adblock Plus app had previously been available from Google's Play Store, but the  program was pulled by Google in 2013, along with other ad-blocking apps. At that time, Google said it removed the AdBlock Plus app because it interfered with other services and products. A beta version of the Adblock Plus browser for Android has been available since May of this year.

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Blackberry has moved further into the mobile device management space by purchasing Good Technology for US$425 million [m].

Good Technology sells enterprise mobile security products and was Blackberry's competitor. In a January blog post, Blackberry called out Good for claiming it was the first company to add a special billing feature to its products.

A separate blog post on Friday discussing the merger made note of this history, saying the companies have taken "aggressive positions" through the years.

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IDC has revised its 2015 forecasts for the PC and tablet markets, saying shipments in both will fall more than it had anticipated due in part to economic challenges, a hardware surplus and waning interest among businesses and consumers to upgrade.

PC shipments will slide by 8.7 percent this year and will continue to fall through 2016, marking five consecutive years of declines, IDC said Wednesday. In an earlier forecast, IDC said PC shipments would decline by 6.2 percent in 2015.

A large inventory of notebooks, a strong U.S. dollar, which raises PC prices in other countries, and free upgrades to Windows 10 are hurting PC shipments this year.

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Google has shut down its website that predicted how influenza and dengue fever were spreading based on queries that people ran in the company's search engine.

Instead of running Google Flu Trends, the company will pass along the data gleaned from user searches to heath organizations that study infectious diseases so they can develop their own prediction models. Those organizations include the Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Boston Children’s Hospital and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Influenza Division, Google said Thursday.

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Google Translate is coming to Android Wear, courtesy of an update to the wearable OS that will also bring interactive watch faces to users.

Google Translate, which will be a native feature of the OS, will work with 44 languages and use a watch's built-in microphone. To use the feature, people speak into the watch and flip their wrist to display the translation to another person.

When that person replies in a foreign language, Android Wear users flip their wrist to view the message translated into the language they speak. Google Translate will automatically recognize what languages are being spoken, the company said Thursday.

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Samsung lost ground to Apple in the worldwide smartphone market for the second quarter of 2015, as the overall growth rate for sales of the devices slowed.

Buoyed by purchases of large-size iPhones, Apple's share of global smartphone sales increased to 14.6 percent during the quarter compared to 12.2 percent a year earlier, Gartner said Thursday. Sales of iPhones totaled 48 million during the second quarter compared to 35 million in the year-earlier quarter.

Meanwhile, Samsung's share slipped to 21.9 percent from 26.2 percent during 2014's second quarter. Though the company managed to sell more phones in the second quarter than it did a year earlier, 76 million compared to 72 million, it did not keep up with Apple's growth.

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Google has scrapped plans to use Puerto Rico as the initial test market for its Project Ara modular-smartphone initiative, but interested developers and DIYers need not despair. The company apparently intends to continue to develop the program.

The first phones coming from Project Ara, which is part of Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects Group, were expected to go on sale in the Caribbean island during the third quarter as part of a pilot program.

Google, however, is no longer launching the test program in the U.S. territory, spokeswoman Iska Saric said by email Friday. She declined to provide more details.

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Samsung will launch its mobile payment service next week, a crowded market which includes heavyweights Apple and Google.

Samsung Pay will be available in South Korea on Aug. 20 followed by the U.S. on Sept. 28. The system will eventually be rolled out in the U.K., Spain and China, Samsung said Thursday, although it didn’t offer a time frame for this expansion.

Samsung’s original rollout plans, announced in March at Mobile World Congress, called for Samsung Pay to appear first in the U.S. this summer.

Unlike rival contactless payment systems like Apple Pay and Android Wallet, Samsung Pay doesn’t exclusively use NFC technology to communicate with credit card terminals.

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Apple has updated Boot Camp, its utility that allows Windows to run on a Mac, to support Windows 10, two weeks after Microsoft launched its latest OS.

Only the 64-bit version of Windows 10 will work with Boot Camp, Apple said Wednesday in a support document. Additionally, Windows 10 will only work on Macs running OS X Yosemite.

Apple reminded users that only Macs with Intel processors work with Boot Camp, a requirement since the multi-boot utility debuted in 2006.

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Fidelity National Information Services is buying financial software vendor SunGard for US$9.1 billion to broaden its range of enterprise banking and capital market offerings.

The deal, announced Wednesday, ends SunGard’s bid to go public. The Wayne, Pennsylvania, company filed for an initial public offering in June, about 10 years after being acquired by a group of private equity firms. The firms that purchased SunGard for approximately $11 billion in 2005 include Bain Capital, Silver Lake Management and Blackstone Group.

Some of the firms involved with the 2005 buyout were also SunGard customers. The vendor’s software covers a range of financial services functions including tax and compliance, insurance, retail banking and retirement administration. SunGard’s annual revenue totals $2.8 billion.

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Tesla has issued a security update to its Model S car after security researchers discovered six flaws that allowed them to control its entertainment software and hijack the vehicle.

With access to the entertainment software, Kevin Mahaffey, CTO of security startup Lookout, and Marc Rogers, a security researcher at CloudFlare, turned off the engine while a person was driving, changed the speed and map information displayed on the touchscreen, opened and closed the trunk and controlled the radio.

The pair, who will discuss their findings Friday at the DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas, also uploaded a remote access application that allowed them to lock and unlock the car using an iPhone.

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A lawsuit alleging that Apple mishandles the text messages of people who switch from an iPhone to an Android smartphone can’t proceed as a class-action case.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh ruled there isn’t enough evidence to determine whether everyone who could be part of a group suit would have been impacted by a possible “contractual breach or interference” related to Apple’s iMessage application.

Even If plaintiff Adrienne Moore’s allegations are correct, and iMessage contains flaws that interfere with text messages, there is not enough information for the court to determine whether the issues affect all users who would join in on the case, Koh said.

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Google’s Project Tango tablet development kit is going on sale this month in 12 additional countries.

The tablet and associated tools were released in the U.S. in May, and as of Tuesday they’re now available in South Korea and Canada as well, Google said in a blog post. On Aug. 26, the development kit will also go on sale in Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.K.

While anyone in those countries will be able to buy Project Tango from the Google Play Store, the company stressed that it’s intended right now for developers.

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