Experimentation with voice-activated assistants and text-triggered chatbots blossomed in 2016, enabling users to order from Taco Bell using Slack’s messaging interface, check the status of UPS packages and order office supplies from Staples. In 2017, some of these tools won’t make the cut while others will proliferate across consumer and enterprise sectors, creating new workflows, operational efficiencies and opportunities for improved customer service.
We zeroed in on measuring something called “phubbing” (a fusion of “phone” and “snubbing”). It’s how often your romantic partner is distracted by his or her smartphone in your presence. With more and more people using the attention-siphoning devices—the typical American checks his or her smartphone once every six-and-a-half minutes, or roughly 150 times each day—phubbing has emerged as a real source of conflict. For example, in one study, 70% of participants said that phubbing hurt their ability to interact with their romantic partners.
Marketing is once again about to enter a new era. The writing is on the walls and the wheels are already in motion for the next big shift in how businesses will interact with their customers. This tectonic change will bring about considerable transformations in the tools, teams, techniques and technologies employed by both big and small firms.
Every now and then it’s fun to take a break from fighting real-life bloodsucking mutants and spend an hour slaughtering some virtual zombies. Luckily, there is now a convenient way for you to escape this waking life for the world of the undead. Two brick-and-mortar locations for virtual reality gaming have opened in New York City this winter, giving New Yorkers the opportunity to experience the cutting edge of VR and thus the cutting edge of the zombie apocalypse.
Ramo’s core thesis is that today’s world of networks and connectivity may be the biggest game-changer of the future, whether the game is business competition, public health, political success, or even life on this planet, to cite just a few examples.Networks enable mind-bending progress–but offer the potential of indescribable chaos in everybody’s personal life and society at large. Just ask Democratic members of the US Congress whose email accounts were systematically hacked recently. According to Ramo, networks profoundly change anything or anyone connected to them. They may affect us when we least expect it.
Researchers develop a wearable technology that can detect magnetic fields and translate the signal into a visual display—a first step toward equipping humans with an entirely new sense.
THERE ARE TWO important new things to know about Snapchat. First, it’s just Snap now. That’s easy enough. The second may be a little bit harder to process: The ephemeral chat mavens will sell video-grabbing sunglasses, called Spectacles, starting this fall.
In the first scene of House of Cards, Kevin Spacey’s character strangles an injured dog. Netflix’s own data show that a lot of people stopped watching the show after that scene. In a broadcast world, that information might lead you to cut the scene: broadcast space is scarce and you need to get as many people watching as possible. Netflix was able to keep this scene because it isn’t selling a specific program in a specific broadcast slot — it is selling an integrated platform, with no fixed broadcast times. From Netflix’s perspective, viewers who were repulsed by this scene, probably found something else on Netflix that better matched their interests.
Millennials don’t have a uniform media palate. Their lives are in rapid transition as they finish their educations, join the workforce, move into their own homes and start families. And how they connect and what they connect with follows suit.
Even if the HoloLens, Rift, and Vive don’t themselves grow into the kind of mass-appeal gadgets that inspire mainstream acceptance, the breakthrough solutions they offer could lead to generations of ever-more-sophisticated VR products. And to be sure, the devices make you gasp with wonder when you use them for the first time; it’s one thing to read about the promise of virtual reality, and quite another to experience how utterly transporting the technology can be.
With chatbots rapidly infiltrating every aspect of our personal lives, it’s no surprise that student technology is an area full of processes ripe for bot intervention. With both students and faculty embracing bots in their personal lives for things like checking the weather, ordering pizza, or finding a cab, it’s about time that campus tech caught up.
We are splintering what was the “camera” and its functionality—lens, sensors, and processing—into distinct parts, but, instead of lenses and shutters, software and algorithms are becoming the driving force. And this is not just happening on smartphone cameras. You can expect the software to define and enhance what lenses, sensors, and processing units in other settings can do. Dash cams, security cams, adventure cams, driving cams—these are just early examples of devices that have specific applications, cameras that could become much more powerful in the future. In the coming era of augmented and virtual reality, these new cameras will also create content to be consumed within V.R. headsets like Oculus and Magic Leap.
With the current chatbot revolution, along with the extraordinary growth of messaging applications, there is an opportunity to save money and deliver a better experience in customer support.
“Surroundie” – a term coined by CCS Insight analyst Ben Wood – refers to a selfie taken with a 360 degree camera. Wood, the chief of research at CCS, believes that the time is now for this form of content to take off.
Visual analytics turn pattern discovery into a process that does not necessarily require programming, although automation often helps. These tools empower data scientists to explore massive data lakes of history and match up models that can be used in real time to analyze conditions.
Analytic applications put simple point-and-click interface atop sophisticated math so non-data scientists can visualize the effects of, for example, clustering customers with a variable importance algorithm.
Streaming analytics inject algorithms directly into streaming data as it flows into or across a company to continuously monitor live conditions like watching for patterns of fraud as transactions happen.
Predictive analytics networks help data scientists crowdsource the best algorithms that, when checked in real time, can help reduce billions of events to the few that matter. The Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) repository of more than 7,800 R packages helps crowdsource expert statistical and graphical techniques.
Continuous streaming data marts can be used to monitor an algorithm’s behavior in real time, with feedback used to tweak their behavior.
Machine learning helps accelerate the fitting of models and continuously retrains analytics to constantly refine parameters, allowing the analysis to always improve.
Harvard University neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman, who is attempting to map the human brain, has calculated that several billion petabytes of data storage would be needed to index the entire human brain. The Internet is currently estimated to be 5 million terabytes (TB) of which Google has indexed roughly 200 TB or just .004% of its total size. The numbers involved are astounding especially when considering the size of the human brain and the number of neurons in it.
Some have argued that chatbots booking flights, calling cabs and even overturning parking tickets could spell doom for apps, especially since messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger and Skype are allowing developers to add these convenience bots. But the numbers still show an upward trend for smartphone apps.
