The digital devices that will have the biggest impact on your kids may not be the ones you expect. Increasingly, the next generation’s earliest relationships with technology will be shaped by the consumer ‘Internet of Things’ creations we call connected toys, as opposed to mundane and obviously-technological devices such as laptops and smartphones.
State of the market: shot in both feet In 2015, the McKinsey Global Institute predicted that Internet of Things (IoT) products and services will become an $11.1 industry by 2025. “Our central finding is that the hype may actually understate the full potential,” they reported, joining legions of others in buzzing over the potential efficiency […]
As GPU deep learning becomes more common, data managers will have to navigate several new layers of complexity in their quest to build or buy suitable data infrastructure. AI-related deep learning and machine learning techniques have become a common area of discussion in big data circles. The trend is something for data managers to keep […]
In the last post, we highlighted the disruption that chatbot technologies are poised to make in call centers. To recap, we are seeing the trend that Generation X and Y have now shown a preference for text-based communication over voice. This results in consumers increasingly wanting to talk with brands via messaging platforms like Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger. Simultaneously, there has been an explosion of conversational A.I. technology tools and frameworks in which natural language processing can be used to automate customer support inquiries. As the last installment discussed, this trend provides a compelling opportunity for companies to drastically reduce the costs of running their call centers.
In 2014, Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion. That astronomical number set off waves of speculation as to what value Facebook could possibly see in a company with just 55 employees and roughly $20 million in revenue, although it had 500 million users. At last week’s F8 conference, that vision became a lot clearer, and it’s big. Chatbots will cause a near-term disruption in how businesses interact with consumers, and a long term paradigm shift in how people will interact with machines.