May’s “Captain America: Civil War” is the first mainstream movie to co-star three black superheroes: War Machine (played by Don Cheadle), the Falcon (Anthony Mackie) and the Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman). That same month, “X-Men: Apocalypse” will spotlight Storm (Alexandra Shipp); and in August, DC Comics’ “Suicide Squad” will be led by Viola Davis and Will Smith.

Messenger’s push into branded mini interfaces called chatbots via the new Bots on Messenger platform follows several weeks of escalating news around the quickly growing space for marketers to communicate directly with users of a variety of messaging apps, including Kik, Slack and others.

Two new technologies aim to deliver the Internet to people who live in cities where networks are routinely jammed. The earthbound experiment uses wireless antennas that can improve Internet in urban and rural areas through two projects called Terragraph and Project ARIES, executives said Wednesday at Facebook's annual developers conference here.

It's clear that U.S. consumers have little to no desire to manually enter all of their information, so e-commerce retailers need to figure out a way to streamline this process for them. Amazon's 1-Click Ordering, for example, allows a shopper to use their saved payment and shipping information to literally make a purchase with one click of a button.

Sponsored Mobile has moved on from being “the new black” in ecommerce to become the default experience. And while customer engagement can be a journey, making a purchase should never be — customers want push-button purchasing ability that they can do wherever whenever.

Microsoft researchers have come up with a novel way of getting computers to tell stories about what’s happening in multiple photographs by using artificial intelligence (AI). Today the company is publishing an academic paper (PDF) describing the technology, which could one day power services that are especially useful to the visually impaired.

Tesla pulls this off with an extraordinary amount of investment in advanced robotics, most of which is designed for flexibility and interaction with several thousand workers on the shop floor. Extremely high sticker prices have historically helped also, but this week’s explosion of pre-orders for close to 400,000 Model 3s for $35,000, affordable cars can be made in the US, so long as the end-to-end value chain is architected for growth.

Twitter generates 1.5 percent of traffic for typical news organizations, according to a new report from the social analytics company Parse.ly that examined data from 200 of its client websites over two weeks in January. (You'll need to give Parse.ly your email address to access the full report.)

Chat bots (and chatty bots) are the new [insert 2015 journalism trend of your choice]. In particular, as the team messaging tool Slack takes over newsrooms, Slack integrations eager to help with this or that productivity thing have proliferated.

Consumers rated more than 1,600 brands on the three key attributes that make up authenticity, according to Cohn & Wolfe. These were: "reliability," "respectfulness," and "reality." The report found that consumer cynicism is currently high globally, with four out of five consumers stating that brands are not “open and honest."

By now most of us who work in this industry know the Walmart story: A determined entrepreneur re-wrote the rules of retail with a relentless focus on reducing costs. He passed the savings on to shoppers in the form of everyday low prices. Walmart invested in new distribution centers and tapped into big data to drive better logistics and decision-making long before this was an industry buzzword.

Instagram is rolling out a way for you to discover videos on its iOS and Android app. The Facebook-owned company announced that it has added video channels within its Explore section that will surface those videos you might like. This update is only available to those in the U.S., but the company plans to release this worldwide “soon.”