The REX allows your machine to accomplish a specific set of eye-tracking gestures, including scrolling, zooming and selecting items.

ENGADGET: Hands-on with Tobii REX, a peripheral that brings eye-tracking to any Windows 8 PC (video)

And remember, FlipShare has to be running and streaming video over the dongle the entire time you're using the set-top, so a lower-powered machine might feel the strain -- and if your computer goes to sleep, hangs, or crashes while you're watching the FlipShare, well, you won't be watching it any more.

ENGADGET: FlipShare TV review

Earlier this year Granite set up an Internet site and bought a cheque-scanning machine to cut processing costs and help with marketing.

ECONOMIST: Small banks in America

Huddled in a damp fire-station a young man connects a laptop, a binocular-style iris scanner and a glowing green machine that records 30 points from a set of fingerprints.

ECONOMIST: India��s UID scheme

In the unstructured data world, especially text, the big trend is predictive coding or predictive analytics that identify high-risk communications, flag them for followup and use machine learning to train a data set.

FORBES: Watch Your Tone -- Bloomberg Vault Now Archives Voice Too

Within months Smith had set up a 1, 000-person plant in Yanzhou filled with equipment from his defunct machine shop and others.

FORBES: The Jobs Gambit

Thanks to a rural development grant under the European-funded Leader programme and technical assistance from the Department of Agriculture, he set about installing a wind machine in his most vulnerable orchard.

BBC: Graham Hewitt and his wind machine