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Netflix is going to launch in Australia and New Zealand in March of 2015, the company announced Tuesday. The launch will bring the number of countries Netflix is available in to over 50, and the announcement is not unexpected: Netflix CFO David Wells said earlier this month that the company plans a “sizeable expansion” for 2015, and Netflix has reportedly been preparing to enter Australia by hiring local agencies for a launch campaign.

A couple years ago, a big event would happen and Twitter would tell the world how many tweets it generated per minute or per second. It was a useful, but not particularly illustrative metric. Today, the company is trying a lot more things in order to help people make sense of what’s happening on the social network.

In a session at our Roadmap conference on Tuesday, Twitter data editor Simon Rogers walked through some of those approaches. They included watching the sun rise virtually by visualizing the time and location of tweets mentioning “sunrise,” and showing how visualizing tweets by geolocation can paint an accurate map of the United States — down to the level of large roads and even the Staten Island ferry.

But the most promising aspects of Twitter’s attempts to do something useful with its data might be those that go beyond simply mapping who is tweeting…

Two separate groups of researchers at Google and Stanford have merged best-of-breed neural network models and created systems that can accurately explain what’s happening in images.

Although their approaches differ (full papers are available here for Stanford and here for Google), both groups essentially combined deep convolutional neural networks — the type of deep learning models responsible for the huge advances in computer vision accuracy over the past few years — with recurrent neural networks that excel at text analysis and natural language processing. Recurrent neural networks have been responsible for some of the significant improvements in language understanding recently, including the machine translation that powers Microsoft’s Skype Translate and Google’s word2vec libraries.

(Coincidentally, University of Toronto research and Google Distinguished Scholar Geoff Hinton was asked in a recent Reddit Ask Me Anything session, which we recapped here, about how deep learning models might account for various elements and objects present in…

The Finnish infrastructure-as-a-service company UpCloud has finally launched in the U.S., well over a year behind schedule. However, the firm says this is because it has only just finalized its new high-performance storage backend, MaxIOPS.

MaxIOPS, [company]UpCloud[/company] claims, results in big overall savings over rival IaaS offerings from [company]Amazon[/company] Web Services, [company]Google[/company] Cloud Platform and [company]Microsoft[/company] Azure, due to performance of up to 400,000 input/output operations per second – “comparable to the mperformance of 8 enterprise-grade SSDs,” UpCloud founder and CTO Joel Pihlajamaa said in a statement.

It was launched on Tuesday at the Slush Festival in Helsinki, where the opening of UpCloud’s Chicago data center was also announced. This was supposed to open in mid-2013, but CEO Antti Vilpponen told me on Monday that UpCloud “didn’t want to make the investment into the U.S. with just a standard set of features and functionalities.” The planned Singapore data center…

Nokia — not the handset business that Microsoft bought and renamed Microsoft Mobile, but the remaining Finnish firm — has made a shock announcement. It’s launched an Android tablet called the N1.

This will be confusing, because Microsoft is also selling a Nokia-branded Windows tablet, the Nokia Lumia 2520. It’s a shock, because while Nokia has recently made rumblings about its brand returning to the consumer market, it seemed to indicate that this would merely be a matter of licensing the brand to others.

Now we know more about that strategy. The industrial design for the N1 came from Nokia, but the company is no longer in the manufacturing business and has licensed that design — along with its Z Launcher and various intellectual property — to Chinese manufacturer Foxconn, which rather interestingly will handle distribution and sales and customer care, and will even be responsible for liabilities and…