IoT: Customer Experience Leading the Way

Internet of Things Customer ExperienceI certainly have a biased perspective, having spent the past 27 years of my career working as a contact center industry analyst, but I believe that the Internet of Things (IoT) will find much of its early success improving the customer experience. I had the opportunity to hear a joint presentation by Dimension Data and Bosch at the Genesys G-Force event in Miami, Fla., in October 2016, and one...

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6 Hot Internet of Things (IoT) Security Technologies

IoT Security TechnologiesInternet of Things (IoT) security breaches have been dominating the headlines lately. WikiLeaks’s trove of CIA documents revealed that internet-connected televisions can be used to secretly record conversations. Trump’s advisor Kellyanne Conway believes that microwave ovens can spy on you—maybe she was referring to microwave cameras which indeed can be used for surveillance. And don’t delude yourself that you are immune to IoT attacks, with 96% of security professionals responding...

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Snapchat is losing twice as much money as it did last year

Snapchat Profit LossSnap reported its earnings for the first time since becoming a public company in March of this year. Its daily active user count clicked up to 166 million, a 5 percent increase over last quarter, up 36 percent from this time a year ago. That puts it behind Instagram Stories, a competitor launched by Facebook that copied heavily from Snapchat and has already passed 200 million users. It also means...

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Google Targets Mobile Back-End Development

Google Mobile Back End DevelopmentWith front-end mobile coding taken care of in the recent release of Android Studio 2.3, Google targeted cloud-based back-end development at its recent Google Cloud Next '17 conference. While the show addressed cloud development in general, Google's mobile focus was exemplified by new serverless computing initiatives that provide back-end functionality for Android, iOS and Web apps. These include an update to Google App Engine -- its nine-year-old serverless runtime environment...

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6 Mistakes Your Ecommerce Store Must Avoid

Ecommerce DesignEcommerce marketers have four basic objectives. To start, they must bring new visitors to their store. Next is to convert more of these visitors into customers. Then they must look at ways to increase the average revenue earned per customer session. Finally, they must create incentives for these customers to return for future purchases. Apart from bringing new visitors to your store, the rest of the marketing objectives are all directly influenced...

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Could Google give fintech apps a needed boost?

Google Chrome Mobile FinTech AppFintech companies that have developed products for the under-served have a big challenge — reaching their intended customers. Google and the Center for Financial Services Innovation are hoping to change that. The tech giant and CFSI, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting financial health, have been collaborating on ways to help customers wade through financial apps in the Google Play store. They are also trying to guide developers on building...

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Ready or Not – Healthcare Consumers Want a Mobile Patient Experience

Healthcare Patients PreferencesMost people don’t look forward to doctors’ visits. As kids, we dreaded the needles and the medicine. As adults, we dread the time off work, the commute to the doctor’s office, and worst of all, the wait. So it’s no surprise that modern healthcare consumers are eager to bypass all that. Accustomed to getting everything from banking services to entertainment on demand, they are ready to approach their healthcare...

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Ecommerce Technology Trends That Will Take Center Stage This Year

mobile ecommerceWith 2016 over and done with, the gears are turning. Q1 of 2017 is well underway, and with it does come the next ecommerce technology trends. Last year turned out some rather impressive numbers for ecommerce. According to eMarketer, ecommerce generated an estimated 8.6% of all retail spending in 2016, hauling in about $1.915 trillion.

Everything told, the retail industry as a whole raked in 27 trillion. China dominated the...

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3 Scenarios for Marketing with the Internet of Things

Internet of Things MarketingThe IoT itself can’t even be considered futuristic anymore. It’s here now. In fact, it’s become so big that this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas dedicated a whole track to it.In December, too, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) released a consumer study that showed that close to two-thirds of American consumers own at least one connected device.That includes connected cars, connected/smart TVs, fitness trackers, home control...

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DeepCoder: Learning To Write Programs

Business CodingA dream of artificial intelligence is to build systems that can write computer programs. Recently, there has been much interest in program-like neural network models (Graves et al., 2014; Weston et al., 2015; Kurach et al., 2015; Joulin & Mikolov, 2015; Grefenstette et al., 2015; Sukhbaatar et al., 2015; Neelakantan et al., 2016; Kaiser & Sutskever, 2016; Reed & de Freitas, 2016; Zaremba et al., 2016; Graves et al., 2016) , but...

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