Why User Experience Matters – for Customers and Employees

User Experience DesignCompanies know that at scale, small details can make a big difference. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the realm of design. While some in the C-Suite deride design as superficial, design isn’t just the way something looks. Design dictates the way we do our jobs, build our businesses and live our lives. For design skeptics, there’s plenty of data to back up these claims. A study by DMI and Motiv...

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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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How to Build Great Products in the AI World

AI ProductsWhen 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...

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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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Microsoft’s AI writes code by looting other software

Artificial Intelligence CodingArtificial 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...

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Adobe Is Building An AI To Automate Web Design. Should You Worry?

AI Web DesignAdobe, 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,...

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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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Deep Dive: Payments

Credit Card Digital PaymentNinety 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...

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Big Data and Artificial Intelligence’s Implications for Democracy?

san francisco, bay area, digital staffingThere is no doubt that the digital revolution has been on full throttle over the past few years. However, for those who understand the magnitude of the situation, the pondering question still remains, "how will such advancements change our world?" Various outlets report that with each passing year, the amount of data produced doubles. For example, in 2016 we were able to...

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Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?

Democracy in the Artificial Intelligence AgeThe 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...

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