As well as being at the forefront of expanding economies, Asia has long been respected as a hub for innovative business ideas. A lot of this is down to Asian customers being more receptive to ideas that are more innovative, and perhaps ‘quirkier' than those their conservative western counterparts would willingly take on-board.

Take the concept of the vending machine. Sure, in the UK they are fairly ubiquitous. You'll find one at your local gymnasium dispensing cool drinks. There'll be one at the railway station offering a range of chocolate bars or crisps. But they are not exactly the type of invention to inspire their customers with any sense of reverence. This is not the case in the Far East. In Singapore, vending machines can dispense a whole lot more than packets of crisps or fairly insipid coffee. You'll be able to order a carton of mashed potato smothered in piping hot, delicious gravy.

Korea is another burgeoning Asian economic power that treats its retailers with due respect. The Emart supermarket here has built-in three-dimensional QR (machine-readable) codes that will only work when the sun has arrived at a certain point overhead. The idea behind this simple but devilishly effective marketing ploy has been to ensure that sales are inspired at certain times of the day – previously it had been noted that sales tended to slump over lunch time.

These QR codes are one noticeable aspect of how innovation is being harnessed in Far Eastern markets. Mobile phones are another important tool. The technology is also filtering over to the west, with the Canadian grocery firm Sobey's using QR codes to provide information on products, such as point of origin. This helps customers in many ways – by hovering over items with their phones they can be taken to web pages with further data. This can also allow interactivity, or transactions to take place.

There are other incentives being offered to customers that make their shopping experience as pleasant as possible. In Sweden, the retailer ICA are allow about field communication. Shoppers buying their lunch at ICA can adopt contactless payment systems. Anyone taking regular advantage of this is rewarded with a free lunch.

Technology is increasingly being used in-store for the benefit of both retailers and customers. In Thailand, Tesco are growing lettuces in water, making for fresher food, and eye-catching displays. This is so much more appealing than the sight of rows of uninteresting green vegetables lined up on a supermarket shelf, slowly wilting beneath the bright lights.

Another revolutionary idea likely to pave the way for future Asian shopping experiences is ‘smart trolleys'. These will scan products the moment they are placed inside, allowing customers to keep a close eye on their goods and budget accordingly, as well as flagging up the fact they are still within the amount they originally wished to spend – so it is too early to stop!

Seeing as we just saw a whole ton of different Robots at CES 2017 including Laundroid, Aristotle by Nabi, Emotech Olly, Ewaybot MoRo, Black & Decker Smartech Robot Vac, Ubtech's Lynx robot and many more. SkyLabs team and been talking robot ideas ever since. When most of us hear the word ‘robots', what probably immediately springs to mind are image from hundreds of science fiction movies, from Star Wars to Blade Runner. The fact is, far from being the stuff of futuristic fantasy, robots are all around us today. And their presence is only set to continue expanding.

Of course, the conventional notion is of a synthetic human or android, an artificially-engineered person who will walk around just like the flesh and blood variety. But robots come in a variety of different shapes and sizes, depending on the tasks they have been designed to accomplish.

At their most basic level, robots are already installed in offices throughout the World. Think of the vast plants churning out cars. Practically every part of the production process is now in the hands of robotic components – machines that have been specifically pre-programmed to handle feats of precision engineering. Although the figures are difficult to collate with 100% accuracy, there may be upwards of one million fully functional industrial robots that are an integral part of plants across the globe.

At the lower end of the scale, there are some half a million cleaning robots working in offices in various sectors in many countries. While these won't exactly resemble C3PO with a duster and cloth, they will come in a diverse range of designs. Each of these will be designed to cope with everything from desk areas and rest rooms to robots that will deal with areas containing sensitive equipment, such as telecommunications or server stores.

You only have to consider the boom in sales figures of toy robots in the previous decade. This is one area where robots are predicted to truly explode in functionality and popularity over the next 20 years or so. Entertainment robots will enter more and more households, allowing robotics will make the leap from a mainly service tool - for cleaning or working on factory production lines - and into domestic environments.

The nature of robot design will be greatly influenced, allowing the look of robots to become more streamlined, tending towards the classical image of synthetic humans rather than simple machines. Robotics will begin looking into dealing with practical considerations, such as facial features, color schemes, and dimensions, as well as fluidity of movement, robustness, and how the units are powered. One of our current favs is

Asimo from Honda.

Yes most of this weeks press is around the new MacBook Pro built on groundbreaking ideas. It's faster and more powerful than before, yet remarkably thinner and lighter. It has the brightest, most colorful Mac notebook display ever. And it introduces the Touch Bar — a Multi-Touch enabled strip of glass built into the keyboard for instant access to the tools you want, right when you want them. However if you have an older Mac this article could help you get some more speed out of it.

Undoubtedly, when you took your brand new Mac out of its packaging and got ready to work with your sleek new Apple apparatus, it felt as it you were clutching a piece of the future? But how do you feel now? After downloading all those apps and storing countless photographs, not to mention having filled your iTunes library to overflowing, your machine has probably transformed from a speeding falcon to a dodo.

The good news is that there are various ways in which you can boost your Mac, so that its position in your affections is faithfully restored!

Start Up

The longer it takes for your equipment to boot up, then the slower its performance will be once it does get up and running. How many times have you stared at the desktop waiting for the likes of Firefox or Chrome to stop all that irritating hourglass spinning so you can start opening applications, or browsing the internet?

What you want to do is to go to your System Preferences and then select Users & Groups. Here you click on your username, and then click on Login Items. Check the box of each program you don't immediately require at the moment your Mac starts up. By applying these simple amendments you should notice a considerable difference at start up time.

Understandably, a lot of users get cold feet when it comes to looking at ways of improving Mac performance by considering your operating system. But Macs are perfectly able to take care of themselves. The latest Apple software makes it very easy to speed up your machine. You can go online to check the latest version of the Mac OS (navigate to http://www.apple.com/osx/). Now compare what you see with what is currently installed on your machine – by clicking the Apple icon on your screen, top-left, then clicking About This Mac. The main reason Apple provides these free upgrades is to improve speed and efficiency. There are many other benefits from installing the latest OS, so ensure you follow these simple steps.

Hardware upgrades are more time-consuming and costly than simply downloading the latest version of the OS. Certain machines won't allow this task to be performed anyway. However, a hardware upgrade is often the best option available. The best advice is to go online and stick the hardware upgrade question into your favourite search engine, and read up on the advice. If you don't want to tackle this yourself, seek counsel from your local computer repair shop.

The race to get men into space was once the principal driving factor behind the science and technology of the east and the west. Thankfully, the moon has been conquered, the USA and Russia collaborate on space station missions, and since the late 1980s the Cold War has been experiencing – for the most part – a prolonged thaw. If there is any part of the human experience that is still undergoing a race, it is in technical innovation, particularly in the retail sector.

Where Silicon Valley in California was once considered the most likely place on the globe for new business ideas to emanate, the fact is that it is now open season. New suggestions for technological excellent are coming from places as far apart as China and the Philippines.

One aspect that caused retailers to have a serious think about how they addressed their customer base was the great worldwide recession that kicked-off in 2008. The constraints that this placed on consumer spending power meant that management teams had to start thinking outside the box. Traditional retailing methods were out the window, and the ongoing search for innovative ideas became all the rage.

Most retailers embraced the need to think ahead and challenge the status quo. A simple example would be the Tesco Clubcard, awarding shoppers for continually returning to one particular store. Of course, there are now 1,001 outlets offering similar scenarios. But the key matter here is that the retailer and shopper relationship has entered a new phases. There is far more interactivity between the two. Gone are the days when you walked into a shop, paid your money over the till, then walked away with the product, completely switching off thereafter. Today's transactions are all about stoking and then rewarding customer loyalty. A raft of other innovations have been introduced by modern outlets, such as home deliveries, mobile scan-and-shop services and self-service tills.

As for innovations lurking on the horizon? There is no doubt that gadgetry is going to feature strongly. The mobile phone may well be most self-respecting inventor's target of choice these days. But there will be others. Research is currently being undertaken into smart fridges that will possess the capability to order items when they run low. Shopping trolleys will follow shoppers up and down the supermarket aisles, scanning items as they are placed inside them.

Retailers also appreciate a simple enough truth. All the gimmicks in the world are no substitute for simply grabbing customer attention, either through careful marketing strategies or gaining trust through branding. The retail landscape is growing more populated and ‘noisier' all the time. But a combination of originality, innovation and inspiration will still reap rewards.