With 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.
How to Build Great Products in the AI World
When technology and human ingenuity gets together, everybody in society profits. If you look at graphs of GDP / capita over long time periods (850 years+), the trend is always upwards. The only things that drag this progress down are severe periods of sickness (like the black death) and widespread war (such as WW2). Overall though, technology makes everyone healthier and richer.
At this point in our society’s history – technology has...
3 Scenarios for Marketing with the Internet of Things
The 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...
Microsoft’s AI writes code by looting other software
Artificial intelligence has taught itself to create its own encryption and produced its own universal 'language'. Now it's writing its own code using similar techniques to humans.
A neural network, called DeepCoder, developed by Microsoft and University of Cambridge computer scientists, has learnt how to write programs without a prior knowledge of code.
First reported by the New Scientist, the system works by taking lines of code from existing programs and combining...
Adobe Is Building An AI To Automate Web Design. Should You Worry?
Adobe, one of the world’s largest and most powerful software companies, is trying something new: It’s applying machine learning and image recognition to graphic and web design. In an unnamed project, the company has created tools that automate designers’ tasks, like cropping photos and designing web pages. Should designers be worried?
The new project, which uses Adobe’s AI and machine learning program Sensei and integrates into the Adobe Experience Manager CMS,...
DeepCoder: Learning To Write Programs
A 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...
Deep Dive: Payments
Ninety percent of Americans have used a credit card, but far fewer understand the underlying systems enabling their payments. So let’s dive in to see what happens when you swipe your card!
Suppose you purchase some carrots from the grocery store. You take out your credit card to complete the purchase, and see a logo with “Visa” on it. That’s the card association. You’d usually see one of the four...
Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?
The digital revolution is in full swing. How will it change our world? The amount of data we produce doubles every year. In other words: in 2016 we produced as much data as in the entire history of humankind through 2015. Every minute we produce hundreds of thousands of Google searches and Facebook posts. These contain information that reveals how we think and feel. Soon, the things...
UX is UI
A meme can travel halfway around the world while nuance is putting on its shoes.
Ideas bounce around the Twitters, endorsed and adopted wholeheartedly through fear, surprise, or a fanatical dedication to the church of UX. Mobile-first, responsive over m-dot, prototypes over wire frames. These truths we hold to be self-evident. Complex and contextual ideas, reduced to tweetable dogma.
So too the images which attempt to explain User Experience. The...
Mark Cuban Says This Will Soon Be The Most Sought-After Job Skill
When Mark Cuban speaks, people listen. The billionaire investor and Shark Tank personality has a slew of wildly successful businesses under his belt. Whether he's commenting on the recent Time Warner and AT&T merger, recommending books for entrepreneurs, or sounding off about the 45th president, the internet hangs on Cuban's every last word.
Now his latest prediction about the future of jobs is picking up steam. In a recent interview with...