Google+ has become a haven for high end photos by professional photographers who obviously care about image quality. Google’s solution to the huge bandwidth requirements for their free service is a technology called RAISR. Lower bandwidth is also a benefit to the end user by increasing loading speeds and lowering data costs. This is especially concerning outside of the United States where it’s rare not to have to pay for internet based on data usage.
Back in November Google introduced a machine learning technology called “RAISR: Rapid and Accurate Image Super-Resolution”, that creates high-quality versions of low-resolution images. “RAISR produces results that are comparable to or better than the currently available super-resolution methods, and does so roughly 10 to 100 times faster, allowing it to be run on a typical mobile device in real-time,” explained Peyman Milanfar, Lead Scientist at Google Research. “Furthermore, our technique is able to avoid recreating the aliasing artifacts that may exist in the lower resolution image.”
Given an image, we wish to produce an image of larger size with significantly more pixels and higher image quality. This is generally known as the Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) problem. The idea is that with sufficient training data (corresponding pairs of low and high resolution images) we can learn set of filters (i.e. a mapping) that when applied to given image that is not in the training set, will produce a higher resolution version of it, where the learning is preferably low complexity. In our proposed approach, the run-time is more than one to two orders of magnitude faster than the best competing methods currently available, while producing results comparable or better than state-of-the-art.
A closely related topic is image sharpening and contrast enhancement, i.e., improving the visual quality of a blurry image by amplifying the underlying details (a wide range of frequencies). Our approach additionally includes an extremely efficient way to produce an image that is significantly sharper than the input blurry one, without introducing artifacts such as halos and noise amplification. We illustrate how this effective sharpening algorithm, in addition to being of independent interest, can be used as a pre-processing step to induce the learning of more effective upscaling filters with built-in sharpening and contrast enhancement effect.
“RAISR, which was introduced in November, uses machine learning to produce great quality versions of low-resolution images, allowing you to see beautiful photos as the photographers intended them to be seen,” noted John Nack, Product Manager of Digital Photography at Google. “By using RAISR to display some of the large images on Google+, we’ve been able to use up to 75 percent less bandwidth per image we’ve applied it to.”
“While we’ve only begun to roll this out for high-resolution images when they appear in the streams of a subset of Android devices, we’re already applying RAISR to more than 1 billion images per week, reducing these users’ total bandwidth by about a third,” said Nack. “In the coming weeks we plan to roll this technology out more broadly — and we’re excited to see what further time and data savings we can offer.”
Silicon Valley thinks the election of Trump is a disaster, but some tech leaders are starting to realize that the real impact may not be so dramatic.
From Christopher Mims writing at the Wall Street Journal:
Mr. Srinivasan (Balaji Srinivasan, Partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz) views the collision between tech culture and Mr. Trump’s populist movement as inevitable, and potentially so divisive that tech’s global elites should effectively secede from their respective countries, an idea he calls “the ultimate exit.”
“It’s crazy to me that people in Silicon Valley have no idea how half the country lives and is voting,” said Ben Ling, an investment partner at venture firm Khosla Ventures. Many “coastal elites” attribute the results “to just sexism or racism, without even trying to figure out why [people] wanted to vote for Trump.”
Ultimately, the clashes may not prove so dramatic. Technology may fall short of visionaries’ lofty promises. And Mr. Trump may pursue policies that are more symbolic than detrimental to the tech industry, says Anshu Sharma, a venture capitalist at Storm Ventures and founder of artificial-intelligence startup Learning Motors.
“We’ll eventually find out whether he decides he does want to bring back an Apple factory from China,” says Mr. Sharma. “I think he’s going to pick on one or two companies and make an example, to show his base that he’s fixing America.”
When you think of Facebook, you think of data, but not so much technology. Get ready for an in-depth preview of how Facebook is and is further planning to use artificial intelligence and other key technologies that they see as critical to their future.
“Facebook’s long-term roadmap is focused on building foundational technologies in three areas: connectivity, artificial intelligence and virtual reality,” wrote Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer. “We believe that major research and engineering breakthroughs in each of these areas will help us make more progress toward opening the world to everyone over the next decade.”
Facebook Making AI Research Useful Now
Tying all of these crucial technology projects together is AI. “We’re conducting industry-leading research to help drive advancements in AI disciplines like computer vision, language understanding and machine learning,” he says. “We then use this research to build infrastructure that anyone at Facebook can use to build new products and services. We’re also applying AI to help solve longer-term challenges as we push forward in the fields of connectivity and VR. And to accelerate the impact of AI, we’re tackling the furthest frontiers of research, such as teaching computers to learn like humans do — by observing the world.”
Facebook has learned to quickly turn their AI research into productive uses by their development and production teams. “As the field of AI advances quickly, we’re turning the latest research breakthroughs into tools, platforms and infrastructure that make it possible for anyone at Facebook to use AI in the things they build,” said Schroepfer.
The backbone of their AI product development is FBLearner Flow, which allows their coders to easily reuse algorithms across products. Also, very importantly considering the billions using the Facebook platform, it lets their developers run thousands of experiments to test scaling.
Another advancement is AutoML, which according to Facebook automatically applies the results of each test to other machine learning models to make them better. This significantly improves the time to market on AI breakthroughs.
A brand new product that they developed based on their AI research is Lumos, a self-serve platform that enables teams that haven’t been exposed to the technology a way to “harness the power of computer vision” for their products and services.
How is AI Impacting Facebook’s Users?
Facebook is quickly and sometimes quietly adding AI capabilities right into the products that Facebook users love. For instance, AI is used to help translate posts automatically from foreign language speaking friends. It also behind the one time controversial ranking of everyone’s News Feed. Remember when this used to be in chronological order?
Facebook says that over the next 3-5 years AI will be used in features all across the platform.
AI Being Used to Improve Aspects of Video
Facebook sees video communication as its future and is working on ways to use AI to improve this experience.
“We started working on style transfer, a technology that can learn the artistic style of a painting and then apply that style to every frame of a video,” said Schroepfer. “This is a technically difficult trick to pull off, normally requiring that the video content be sent to data centers for the pixels to be analyzed and processed by AI running on big-compute servers. But the time required for data transfer and processing made for a slower experience. Not ideal for letting people share fun content in the moment.”
“Just three months ago we set out to do something nobody else had done before: ship AI-based style transfer running live, in real time, on mobile devices,” he added. “This was a major engineering challenge, as we needed to design software that could run high-powered computing operations on a device with unique resource constraints in areas like power, memory and compute capability.”
All of this work has resulted in a new deep learning platform called Caffe2Go, which can capture, analyze and process pixels in real time on a mobile device, according to Facebook.
“We found that by condensing the size of the AI model used to process images and videos by 100x, we’re able to run deep neural networks with high efficiency on both iOS and Android. This is all happening in the palm of your hand, so you can apply styles to videos as you’re taking them.”
Within 10 years, IBM believes that it’s artificial intelligence driven Watson will literally predict the future. “It won’t be long before Watson is predicting the future,” said Dr. John E. Kelly III, IBM senior vice president of Cognitive Solutions and IBM Research, at the World of Watson conference in Las Vegas yesterday. “Doctors, for example, may use Watson to help predict when a diabetic patient is about to have a blood sugar spike.”
He added, “When that happens, then we truly, truly, have changed the world.”
“The technology is not even moving fast,” he says. “It’s accelerating. It’s moving faster and faster every day. Honestly, it blows my mind and I’m an optimist.”
Can Watson ever become creative? He noted the difficulty of that question and then realized that Watson is already being creative with Chef Watson and Cognitive music, where it’s actually writing songs.
We are potentially reaching a world-changing moment with AI and its capability to think, create and even predict.
Microsoft is changing folks, it’s no longer the hated technology company that hoards power and technology. Today, Microsoft released to developers an updated version of the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit that uses deep learning so that computers, using huge data sets, can learn on their own.
For instance, developers could feed CPUs and NVIDIA® GPUs millions of images of vegetables and it would learn over time which are cucumbers, no matter how distorted and different they appear. It will match was is similar and over time become very good add it. This matching and learning technology is applicable to an infinite number of software solutions.
It’s free, easy-to-use and open-sourced, that Microsoft says trains deep learning algorithms to learn like the human brain. In fact, it’s helping to change the world while simultaneously changing Microsoft.
“This is an example of democratizing AI using Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit,” says Xuedong Huang, who is Microsoft’s Chief Speech Scientist.
Microsoft originally created the Toolkit for internal use. “We’ve taken it from a research tool to something that works in a production setting,” noted Frank Seide, a principal researcher at Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research and a key architect of Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit.
The current version of the toolkit can be downloaded via GitHub with an open source license. It includes new functionality letting developers use Python or C++ programming languages and allows researchers to do a type of artificial intelligence work called reinforcement learning.
The latest version is also much faster when adding big datasets from multiple computers, which is absolutely necessary in implementing deep learning across multiple GPUs. This allows developers to create smart AI enabled consumer products and enables manufacturers to connect more smart devices, empowering the IoT revolution.
Deep learning, according to Microsoft, is an AI technique where large quantities of data, known as training sets, literally teach computer systems to recognize patters from huge quanities of images, sounds or other data.
In an historic breakthrough, Microsoft’s AI team has developed technology that recognizes speech as well as humans. Their research team published a paper (PDF) showing that their speech recognition system makes errors at the same rate as a professional transcriptionists, which is 5.9%.
The IBM Watson research team published a word error rate (WER) of 6.9% earlier this year. They noted that their previous WER was 8%, announced in May 2015 and that was 36% better than previously reported external results.
Clearly, artificial intelligence technology is on a pace that will make machine word recognition superior to human word recognition in just a matter of months. Of course WER is only one way to measure and the technology must continue to improve for perfect comprehension and to prompt human level responses.
Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Google, Amazon and a host of other companies are on a mission to use AI to integrate speech recognition technology into virtually every device. In order to truly make the IoT meaningful to people, we will need to be able to communicate with them in our language. By 2020, there will be over 30 billion things connected to the internet, according to Cloudera.
“We’ve reached human parity,” said Xuedong Huang, who leads Microsoft’s Microsoft’s Advanced Technology Group and is considered their chief speech scientist. “This is an historic achievement.”
Microsoft says that the milestone will have broad implications for consumer and business products including consumer devices like Xbox and personal digital assistants such as Cortana.
“This will make Cortana more powerful, making a truly intelligent assistant possible,” notes Harry Shum, the executive vice president who heads the Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research group. “Even five years ago, I wouldn’t have thought we could have achieved this. I just wouldn’t have thought it would be possible.”
“The next frontier is to move from recognition to understanding,” said Geoffrey Zweig, who manages the Speech & Dialog research group.
The holy grail according to Shum is “moving away from a world where people must understand computers to a world in which computers must understand us.”
At the rate the technology is advancing, that goal now seems within reach.
Apple CEO Tim Cook recently visited Japan for the opening of their state-of-the-art research and development facility. He described it as a “center for deep engineering that will be very different from the R&D base Apple plans to build in China.”
“I cannot tell you the specifics,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told Nikkei Asian Review while riding on a bullet train in Japan. “The specific work is very different.”
According to the report Cook is seeking to integrate artificial intelligence into all of their product offerings including presumably the iPhone. “AI is horizontal in nature, running across all products and is used in ways that most people don’t even think about.”
“We want the AI to increase your battery life and recommend music to Apple Music subscribers,” he said. “AI could (even) help you remember where you parked your car.”
“Smartphones are 9 years old,” he said. “We are not even teenagers yet. We just got going. I think there is an incredible future ahead.”
Apple Seeks to Promote Cashless Society
Apple’s CEO sees Apple Pay as the beginning of the end of cash worldwide. “We would like to be a catalyst for taking cash out of the system,” said Cook. “We don’t think the consumer particularly likes cash.”
Likely, Cook is talking about what everyone predicts, we are on a course toward a cashless society over the next 20-40 years and Apple would like to be a leader in making that happen.
Cook said Apple intends to increase their push into mobile payments in Japan and all of Asian, with Apple Pay finally coming to Japan later this month. The iPhone 7 will become their first mobile phone to work with Japan’s FeliCa contactless payment system. “Japan is important to us,” said Cook. “FeliCa was born in Japan and so by extension, FeliCa is important.”
Of course, it’s not the first time that Tim Cook has predicted the end of cash. “Your kids will not know what money is,” Cook told students at Trinity College in Dublin last year.
A group of Microsoft engineers have built an artificial intelligence technique called deep neural networks that will be deployed on Catapult by the end of 2016 to power Bing search results. They say that this AI supercomputer in the cloud will increase the speed and efficiency of Microsoft’s data centers and that their will be a noticeable difference obvious to Bing search engine users. They say that this is the “The slow but eventual end of Moore’s Law.”
“Utilizing the FPGA chips, Microsoft engineering (Sitaram Lanka and Derek Chiou) teams can write their algorithms directly onto the hardware they are using, instead of using potentially less efficient software as the middle man,” notes Microsoft blogger Allison Linn. “What’s more, an FPGA can be reprogrammed at a moment’s notice to respond to new advances in artificial intelligence or meet another type of unexpected need in a datacenter.”
The team created this system that uses a reprogrammable computer chip called a field programmable gate array (FPGA) that will significantly improve the speed of Bing and Azure queries. “This was a moonshot project that succeeded,” said Lanka.
What they did was insert an FPGA directly between the network and the servers, which in bypassing the traditional software approach speeds up computation. “What we’ve done now is we’ve made the FPGA the front door,” said Derek Chiou, one of the Microsoft engineers who created the system. ““I think a lot of people don’t know what FPGAs are capable of.”
Hyperscale datacenter providers have struggled to balance the growing need for specialized hardware (efficiency) with the economic benefits of homogeneity (manageability). In this paper we propose a new cloud architecture that uses reconfigurable logic to accelerate both network plane functions and applications. This Configurable Cloud architecture places a layer of reconfigurable logic (FPGAs) between the network switches and the servers, enabling network flows to be programmably transformed at line rate, enabling acceleration of local applications running on the server, and enabling the FPGAs to communicate directly, at datacenter scale, to harvest remote FPGAs unused by their local servers.
We deployed this design over a production server bed, and show how it can be used for both service acceleration (Web search ranking) and network acceleration (encryption of data in transit at high-speeds). This architecture is much more scalable than prior work which used secondary rack-scale networks for inter-FPGA communication. By coupling to the network plane, direct FPGA-to-FPGA messages can be achieved at comparable latency to previous work, without the secondary network. Additionally, the scale of direct inter-FPGA messaging is much larger. The average round-trip latencies observed in our measurements among 24, 1000, and 250,000 machines are under 3, 9, and 20 microseconds, respectively. The Configurable Cloud architecture has been deployed at hyperscale in Microsoft’s production datacenters worldwide.
Technology is impacting sales in a way never seen before as evidenced by Salesforce’s massive integration of artificial intelligence into all of their various clouds and products. At the Salesforce Dreamforce event much of the discussion is about how technology is changing the sales landscape requiring salespeople to adapt or fail.
There are so many trends really impacting sales right now,” says Tim Clarke, Director of Product Marketing at Salesforce. “You can’t lead with products anymore, as Brent Adamson of CEB said, 57% of the buying process is completed before they engage the salesperson. We know that with a lot of the purchasing decisions that we make we’ll just do our research online, so the professional sales person now needs to truly add value.”
He noted what we all know, that the most effective sales strategy relies on having the right conversation at the right time, at the right place and on the right channel. However, it’s really more than that, it’s about standing out knowing everything there is to know. “We’ve probably all received those prospecting emails which are just generic, and then you get the second one saying, I didn’t hear from you and then the third one asking, did you get hit by a car?” said Clarke. “Clearly, prospecting and sales development is really an exciting area right now and there’s so much technology that really can support sales professionals to be successful.”
Salespeople Must Stand Out From the Herd
An extreme depth of knowledge about the customer is becoming more important. “First, the customer is obviously much more educated today than they were even 5 or 10 years ago,” said Will Anastas, SVP of Enterprise Corporate Sales at Salesforce. “The proliferation of technology that enables customers to be smart is also at our disposal as well in sales.”
He noted that it is key for salespeople to “stand out from the herd of salespeople” that literally have the same information as we do. “So how do we change our perspective and how do we do discovery so that we can show up literally like your customers customer?” Anastas asks. “By providing that point of view that is authentic, genuine and empathetic that will help you break through and separate yourself from really everyone that is trying to sell to this individual. I think it’s a challenging time, but I think it is full of opportunity.”
Try Different Things to Get in Front of Your Prospects
“We launched a project with a company called Somersault Innovation which is led by Ashley Welch and her co-founder Justin Jones,” said Anastas. “What they did was take the principals of design thinking and applied it to a sales process, a sales discovery methodology. There were 3 main components of it, empathy, customer centricity and curiosity.”
Salesforce rolled out their program internally in order to improve their own sales. “What I’ve noticed is that as we’ve rolled out this training to our salespeople they have found themselves in situations that they didn’t expect to find themselves in,” noted Anastas. “For instance, one of my executives has Greyhound as a prospect account and we been trying to get into Greyhound for years, doing the same thing over and over again, looking at LinkedIn and looking at the available information on the web.
“Finally, after we did this training, our account executive just went and got on a bus,” he said. “Instead of flying to LA for the weekend, he took a Greyhound from San Francisco to LA, he talked to a bunch of people at Greyhound and he figured out a bunch of insights that he would never have gotten by sitting at his desk and looking at the web.”
Later, Anastas said that when the salesperson phoned up Greyhound he was able to talk about his personal experience of the bus ride and as their customer. “That warm, empathetic intro has taken him all the way to the office of the CEO at Greyhound in a very short period of time.”
“So to me, it’s really about separating yourself out and trying different things to get you in front of your prospects faster.”
The Personal Connection is Also Important
The CEO of CCI Global Holdings, Walter Rogers, says that technology has become available that really allows a seller to become much more knowledgable about their buyer, their buyers customers, their buyers needs, both personal and professional. However, he says making a personal connection with these individuals and leveraging all of this information enables the salesperson to make an “impact” on the potential customer.
“We talked a lot about the impact of technology on sales,” he said. “I want to sidestep and talk about the personal connection with a human being. That’s something that I personally experienced working in partnership with Amazon Web Services. I’ve actually gone deep into their sales cycles as they try to convince customers to move from on premises to a cloud based infrastructure.”
“There was one customer that we were working with that just did not want to move,” Rogers said. “They were very efficient in how they were running their operation and they felt they would not save any money. However, when we dug really really deep, his personal motivator was impacting the public education system.”
He said that showing the customer that moving their data from to the cloud, would allow them to correlate information across many other databases and build out a predictive analytics model. “This let them spot students before they got in trouble, by looking at various trends, such as did the parents just go on welfare, those types of things,” says Rogers. “Because we are able to make that human personal connection, this company is beginning to make a migration across the AWS infrastructure.”
“We can’t ever overlook the impact of the human connection,” he said. “You’d be amazed at what a difference it can make in getting email response when you take the words me, I and we out of your emails completely and focus them all on the word you and what’s important to the other person. The response rates will go up about 50%.”
In a major initiative that has been in the works for two years, Salesforce is integrating artificial intelligence into all of its CRM cloud platforms. It enables any business to use clicks or code to build AI-powered apps that get smarter with every interaction. Their AI system learns from all of the data you enter about your customers and prospects (CRM data, email, calendar, social, ERP, and IoT), and makes predictions and recommendations on actions you should consider. It can even automate tasks it certain situations.
Salesforce Einstein is designed to help their customers take advantage of the huge amounts of data produced by making sense of it and seeing trends before humans typically do. What Salesforce has done is to make the use of artificial intelligence possible for all businesses, without have to employ their own data science teams.
“Powered by advanced machine learning, deep learning, predictive analytics, natural language processing and smart data discovery, Einstein’s models will be automatically customized for every single customer, and it will learn, self-tune, and get smarter with every interaction and additional piece of data,” writes Jim Sinai who is VP of Marketing at SalesforceIQ in their company blog announcement. “Most importantly, Einstein’s intelligence will be embedded within the context of business, automatically discovering relevant insights, predicting future behavior, proactively recommending best next actions and even automating tasks.”
Salesforce Einstein is designed to be a simple and intuitive approach to deliver AI to companies using their cloud CRM products. They say that by “removing the complexity of AI” they are “enabling any company to deliver smarter, personalized and more predictive customer experiences.”
“We couldn’t be more excited to finally unveil Salesforce Einstein after two years of hard work and targeted acquisitions,” added Sinai. “As we continue to build out AI for CRM, we are committed to understanding the next generation of AI technology and how it can best be applied to Salesforce. This effort will be led by Salesforce Research, a new research group focused on the future of AI, under the leadership of Dr. Richard Socher, our Chief Scientist.”
Bringing Artificial Intelligence to Sales
Adam Blitzer, the EVP & GM of Sales Cloud at Salesforce sees significant value in companies using AI within the sales process. “At Salesforce, we are focused on helping companies evolve from the first level, where the CRM is a one-dimensional system of record, to the second level, where the CRM is a system of engagement. And finally, we are helping companies make the leap to the highest level, where the CRM works for them as a predictive system of intelligence.”
“AI arms teams with more intelligence, enabling them increase productivity and predictive capabilities across everything they do,” adds Blitzer. “Importantly, it gives sales teams better insights that build human relationships, an area where sales reps far excel beyond machine capabilities.”
“This (Sales Cloud Einstein) makes people, teams and entire companies, better able to discover insights from data, recommend actions that help close deals, automate processes that give reps more time to build 1:1 relationships, and predict outcomes or hiccups that enable reps to be proactive and remain a step ahead of each customer’s needs and competitor’s potential attack,” stated Blitzer. “I’m excited for our customers to start experimenting with the features we’re announcing today—Predictive Lead Scoring, Opportunity Insights and Automated Activity Capture, you can learn more here. And, I’m even more excited about the business growth these AI solutions are going to drive.”
Bringing Artificial Intelligence to the Service Industry
“Until now, most customer service leaders have been unable to put intelligence in action,” stated Mike Milburn who is head of the Service Cloud at Salesforce. “With Service Cloud Einstein, companies of any size will be able to deploy a connected customer service experience that is predictive, automated and intelligent, bringing AI to the forefront of customer service like never before.”
Milburn says that with Service Cloud Einstein, organizations of all sizes will be able to resolve customer service cases faster by utilizing history and trend data, automate routine inquiries and predict case resolution times.
He also offered a bigger picture of how the Salesforce Cloud Platform could be integrated within devices far removed from CRM and marketing. “Consider this: a connected device–like a dishwasher–could self-diagnose that it needed routine maintenance from a field tech. The dishwasher is connected to Salesforce IoT Cloud, where it’s performance is monitored. When IoT Cloud identifies an issue, it triggers a case in Field Service Lightning and a dishwasher repair tech is dispatched automatically–without a customer or agent needing to be involved. That’s the future of service, and the amazing thing is that with Einstein and the Customer Success Platform, it’s possible today.”
Bringing Artificial Intelligence to Marketing
AI in marketing is about combining historical and real-time data in order to see trends, predict what’s likely to happen and offer contextual suggestions on what to do next. “We are giving marketers the ability to shift away from using analytics that only look at past behavior to analytics that predict the optimal timing, channel, content and audience for any marketing message,” says Bob Stutz, CEO of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and their Chief Analytics Officer.
Einstein integration within their marketing cloud enables companies to take advantage of Predictive Scoring which puts a percentage on the likelihood of a customer taking a certain action such as making a purchase, or unsubscribing from an email blast. With the Predictive Audiences feature marketers can group predictive actions based on their scores in order to more effectively modify marketing strategies. Finally, Automated Send-time Optimization predicts the best time to send new marketing messages.
Stutz says that Marketing Cloud Einstein has been in beta for about a year with “tremendous” results. He says that ecommerce and coupons company ShopAtHome redefined customer engagement around predictive scores and experienced a 23% increase in email clicks, and a 30% increase in email opens.
Bringing Artificial Intelligence to the Entire Salesforce Platform
“What is most important to Salesforce Community Cloud customers is that Einstein’s intelligence will automatically discover and surface relevant insights, predict answers to solve questions fast, and proactively make recommendations,” said Mike Micucci who is the SVP of Product Management at Salesforce. “It will even automate certain tasks. And you don’t have to do a thing. Einstein puts the best alternative right in front of you.”
“With IoT Cloud Einstein, our customers will be able to unlock a whole new wave of innovation for the Internet of Things by pairing their IoT data with services powered by Salesforce’s new artificial intelligence platform,” notes Woodson Martin, the head of Thunder & IOT Cloud at Salesforce.
Salesforce is also making it possible for companies to build custom apps using their Einstein AI technology. “Today, as we launch Salesforce Einstein, we’re democratizing the technology necessary for any business to build AI-first apps,” said Adam Seligman, Executive Vice President and GM of the App Cloud at Salesforce. “Einstein combines all of our adventurous reaches into data science, data management and modern app development into one set of platform services enabling anyone to build the next generation of apps, powered by AI, that customers will love.”
LinkedIn Influencers provided some advice on the future impact of artificial intelligence in the workplace. “The first thing that artificial intelligence will take over is the microphone on your laptop or computer,” said Reid Hoffman, Executive Chairman and co-Founder of LinkedIn in a new 30 second Influencer video.. “What will happen is, it will start listening to your meetings, when you are talking and other things. It will record you in order to help take notes, suggest action items, and suggest other people to communicate with.”
“I wrote about this in a recent article in the MIT Sloan Management Review“, said Hoffman. In the article, Using Artificial Intelligence to Humanize Management and Set Information Free he says that “we are on the cusp of a major breakthrough in how organizations collect, analyze, and act on knowledge” and he thinks this will bring important changes to business decisions.
“Artificial Intelligence is about to transform management from an art into a combination of art and science,” he says. “Not because we’ll be taking commands from science fiction’s robot overlords, but because specialized AI will allow us to apply data science to our human interactions at work in a way that earlier theorists like Peter Drucker could only imagine.”
“Artificial intelligence, machine learning, chat box, guided conversations are coming at us faster than ever,” notes Steve Anderson, President of The Anderson Network and an expert on insurance technology, productivity and innovation. “I think the first functions that will be taken over in an organization is augmenting existing employees and helping them enhance their ability to create a great customer experience. Getting those routine questions answered automatically to free up their time to deal with customers more detailed questions.”
“I pray anyhow that it will be in every aspect of my schedule and every aspect of meetings and all the notes taken in meetings and all the followup that can be executed from them, cutting meetings massively and making much more efficiency,” says Christopher Schroeder, CEO-in-waiting, Advisor and Venture Investor and Author. “I can only hope that the robots are as kind to me as the executive assistants that I’ve been blessed to have over the last decade, but we’ll see.”
“The first thing that artificial intelligence is going to take over in my office is scheduling meetings,” says Nicholas Thompson, Editor of NewYorker.com, the website of The NewYorker Magazine. “It’s going to take over lots of stuff in the long run, but the first stuff that it’s going to get is stuff where the language inputs are relatively simple and relatively contained. That’s true of meetings, where you say I’m going to meet with you Wednesday and Friday. That’s a complex sentence, but it’s something we’re close to figuring out. The companies trying to do this, I’ve used one called x.ai, there not totally there but they will get there. I’ll be grateful when they do because scheduling meetings stinks!”
“The first thing that my office AI will take over is customer service,” said Leila Janah, CEO of Sama Group, Co-Founder and CEO of Laxmi, and an award-winning social entrepreneur. “It’s already taken over things like security, and probably some texting with customer service via bots. I think bots are impacting so many different businesses. I already have a bot that replies to most of my messages. We already have an auto-reply on Facebook to my company page, I’m sure it’s going to take over more.”
“First thing in my office AI will take over is probably the social media feed,” says Ian Bremmer, President of the Eurasia Group. “Let’s face it, we spend too much time on it and they will be better at it. They’re going to make us look shinier and even more attractive than we already are. They’ll optimize for it and we will be able to do other things with our lives. How awesome! That’s great… before they take over.”
“Let’s face it, we are already seeing AI systems improve text entry, thinking about Google’s Inbox app where it can predict likely response,” commented Azeem Azhar, who is Vice President, Venture & Foresight for the Schibsted Media Group. “I think we will be seeing more of that coming into Gmail and word indexing software. These machines are going to help us compose our messages, either to automate replies or help us to be better writers.”
“Email. That’s the first thing that artificial intelligence is going to take over in the office,” replied Tomasz Tunguz, Venture Capitalist at Redpoint. “I already dictate most of the email I send everyday, and because we can speak about 3 times faster than we can type, it’s far more efficient.”
“One of the ways artificial intelligence is going to take over my office, is that it’s going to replace in some situations coaches, if you can believe that,” says J.T. O’Donnell, CEO of CAREEREALISM & CareerHMO. “In career coaching there are a lot of typical situations that people will encounter where they need to have an interaction with a coach and get the information and the feedback they need in that moment. But believe me or not, there are so many of those that are similar that we could use artificial intelligence to engage people through those conversations. I expect to see us use that a lot in the future.”
“The first thing I would like it to take over is the sales cycle,” said Sramana Mitra, Founder at One Million by One Million (1M/1M). “A lot of people come to our website to find out about us and then contact us whether it’s by email or phone or whatever. I think the most productive thing would be to really automate and personalize in a meaningful way, using AI and the application of AI to meaningfully impact the sales cycle.”
“I have to believe that the first thing in my office that AI will take over is making phone calls,” says Jon Steinberg, Founder and CEO of Cheddar. “Making phone calls is actually the only thing that has gotten worse over the past ten years, whether it’s the signal, the process for dialing, everything. I have to think that soon when we want to get in touch with people you will be able to just express a desire or it will look at the documents or processes you are working on and the voice call or video call will be automatically initiated.”
“We believe retail is at a tipping point,” said Robert Peck of SunTrust Robinson Humphrey in a note to clients. “E-Retailers are leveraging new capabilities in old business models to expand existing and new markets like apparel, grocery and personal care, where e-Commerce had only limited penetration till now.” According to BusinessInsider, Peck calls it “E-commerce 2.0.”
Shopping online is growing fast, but still only represents a fraction of total shopping dollars, just under 8%, according to US Census data.
As of the first quarter 2016, the total amount of retail spending online (ecommerce) was $92.8 billion, which was only 7.8% of all retail sales. Ecommerce is in its infancy, which means that there are huge opportunities ahead, not just for the types of Amazon, but for small merchants and startups as well.
Worldwide retail sales, including in-store and internet purchases, surpassed $22 trillion in 2015, up 5.6% from 2014, according to a study by eMarketer. They say that retail ecommerce sales, those purchased over the internet, will make up 7.4% of the total retail market worldwide, or $1.671 trillion. By 2019, that share will jump to $3.578 trillion, yet retail ecommerce will still only account for 12.8% of all retail purchases.
Even though the internet and technology is the source of major disruption for retailers, brick and mortar is alive and well for the foreseeable future.
The study says that retail ecommerce sales are accelerating faster than previously anticipated and will jump 25.1% year on year in 2015. “Online sales growth will outpace brick-and-mortar sales growth by a more than 3-to-1 margin over our forecast period,” the report predicts.
Amazon Reshaping Ecommerce
Amazon recently passed Facebook to become the the fourth-largest US company based on stock market value. By 2020 analysts Rob Sanderson, Managing Director, Senior Research Analyst at MKM Partners, predicts that Amazon will be the largest US company by 2020.
“Amazon has a significant position in two of the largest secular growth opportunities there are,” Sanderson told Barron’s recently. What he was referring to were online retail and cloud computing.
As I said during my keynote @SohnConf, $AMZN is the most durable business in the world. $3T here we come…ps, you’re welcome.
Venture capitalist and part owner of the Golden State Warriors Chamath Palihapitiya of Social Capital said to a crowd at the Sohn Investment Conference recently that Amazon will be a $3 trillion dollar company within 10 years, almost ten times more than its current $366 billion market cap.
“Consider Amazon’s potential in retailing, said a Barron’s post. “It holds a 35% to 40% share of U.S. e-commerce, on its way to 50% by 2018, according to estimates from Doug Anmuth at JPMorgan published last month. And e-commerce is just 11% to 12% of U.S. retail, not counting gas, food and cars, on its way to more than 30% eventually, and 14% by 2018, according to Anmuth. In other words, Amazon is securing a quickly growing slice of a quickly growing pie.”
Internet Is Crushing Department Stores
There is one simple truth, internet retail is booming while brick & mortar department stores are in a free fall. The chart below from Standard Chartered Research tells the story
“U.S. private consumption has shown ongoing resilience,” says a note from Standard Chartered Plc via Bloomberg, “but this macro story masks sizeable divergence at the micro level, and this explains the wide interpretation of ‘how’s the U.S. consumer doing?’ The micro story is characterized by a parabolic rise in internet sales at the expense of ‘bricks and mortar’ stores, particularly department stores.”
The above stat isn’t as bad as you think considering that every department store also has an online presence and are working hard grow that aspect of their business. But even with that department stores are struggling online. “Digital sales continued strong, still growing double digits, but it too grew less rapidly than anticipated,” said Macy’s Chief Financial Officer Karen Hoguet during their May earnings call (PDF).
Internet business guru and financial analyst Robert Peck sees a shift in online shopping toward specialty boutiques and well run mom & pop stores. He says that as the internet generation grew up they don’t have reservations against online shopping like their parents did.
Presumably, one of the main drivers of online shoppers to Amazon was a belief that you wouldn’t get ripped off or have your credit card info passed around. This fear has dissipated over time but is completely non-existent with those that grew up with the internet.
Online Retail Will Diminish Need for Offline Stores
The Ovis report sees an “increasingly fragmented physical footprint,” with branded products moving to the internet. “Demand for large-footprint physical retail space will continue to fall,” says the report.
“Physical retail will still exist, but it will need a good reason to exist.” according to Dunkin’ Brands quoted in the Ovis report. The report portends that most new retail businesses will start online and later add some physical retail for showcasing products. They note that this is already the case in furniture. Retail will only play a supporting role in the future with new online retail stores in order to add trust with customers.
Existing pure-play online retailers will also continue to create physical locations, primarily to “enhance fulfillment and customer service.” They believe that much of this will take the form of the “click-and-collect models” which are common with UK retailers. “The UK today is the most advanced market for click-and-collect models, examples of which include ASOS and Boots, and eBay and Argos, a partnership that started in the UK and has been extended to Ireland,” says the report.
Click and collect is where the shopping is done online, but the items are physically picked up by the consumer at a fulfillment center or a retailer. Walmart in the US is one of the largest retailers offering this service.
According to the 2016 eCommerce Trends Report by Absolunete, an eCommerce agency based in Canada, depending on the types of products sold and the retailer’s network of physical stores, the proportion of consumers who prefer to pick up their purchase in store can reach up to 40%.
“Better still: offering customers the option to “Purchase & Pick-Up” often increases the average purchase value,” says the Absolunete report. “That’s right: 7% of customers who pick up their purchase in-store increase their spending while they’re on site (7% as measured in net sales). In Canada, where the prohibitive cost of residential shipping is an important challenge (the opposite is true in the U.S., where residential shipping is extremely inexpensive.), Purchase & Pick-Up becomes a win-win proposition!”
Absolunete says that “Purchase & Pick-Up” has advantages to the retailer:
Increasing net sales once the consumers is at the store picking up their online order.
Increasing conversion rates by making it easy for consumers to get their merchandise.
Decreasing return due to in-store exchange options.
Decreasing shipping costs and thereby increasing profit margins.
“We expect further partnerships to be made in order to allow Internet-based retailers to build up physical collection points,” states the Ovis report. “We also foresee noncompeting physical retailers collaborating to allow the collection of each other’s products in each other’s stores. This will allow them to maintain a virtual geographic presence despite the need to reduce their own physical store networks.”
From a showroom perspective, Amazon Books is a good example, where it has physical samples of not just popular books but all of Amazon’s products such as the Kindle, Echo and Kindle Fire tablets.
“The already blurred lines between physical-heritage retailers and Internet-heritage retailers will have been eradicated by 2026,” predicts the Ovis report. “The former will continue to reduce the amount of physical space they hold, switching their investment emphases online, while the latter will invest further in establishing physical presences to support the showcasing of brand and private-label products. While the large pure-play Internet retail brands will survive, the term pure play will be rendered obsolete.”
In-Store Digital
The Absolunete report predicts the rise of what it calls “in-store digital”, where consumers make online purchases while inside the physical store. Technology will be used to improve the customer experience and to make it a personal by “integrated gathering that allows retailers to better understand customers and customer behavior.”
The report suggest that it is increasingly common to see in-store advertising screens and tablets, enabling the consumer to search for products and to make online purchases while in the store, presumably of products that aren’t available in the store itself. “Going forward, customization tools and possibilities will go even further to improve customer experience. Paper posters and printed displays, for example, are being replaced by connected kiosks and displays which allow real-time, contextually-relevant messages to be displayed.”
Absolunete one interesting example by Rebecca Minkoff, partnering with Magento and eBay to create a Smart Dressing Room. They say that the system tracks what customers try on at the store and the sizes tried and what they buy and don’t buy. The store uses this data to send updates to the shopper if an item tried on is now available in her size or color. There are many more customization option being experimented with that may be available in the future. They say, “Think of it as cookies (like in your browser) that follow you around in the real world.”
“Engagement with the technology in Minkoff stores has been greater than expected,” said David Geisinger, who was previously eBay’s head of retail and mobile innovation but now is with Magento Commerce. “Engagement is on the customer’s terms, which I think is key, because it’s not intrusive.”
Technology is the Driving Force
eBay is in full preparation for the next commerce revolution and believes the heart of it is technological advancements coming together to reshape online selling. eBay CEO Devin Wenig believes that it is these innovations that will create an enormous opportunity for companies that are prepared to take advantage of them. And eBay is battle ready to just that, for years now seeing itself as both a great technology company… and a great ecommerce company too.
“We have seen the pace of tech innovation advance significantly — in artificial intelligence, cloud computing and virtual reality, all of which have the potential to reshape global technology dramatically in the next few years,” commented Wenig in a company announcement last week. “We are building eBay to be a vibrant and dynamic global technology leader for years to come, and we are starting to see results.”
“Everything we’ve done so far has been about positioning eBay for a future we can see advancing quickly towards us, in which innovations in technology platforms have the power to dramatically reshape the commerce experience,” Wenig says.
“We are entering what we call the Age of Everywhere — the profusion of cloud-connected devices that will bring the Internet to you, globalize the market, and make things faster and more on-demand,” said Wenig.
A report by Ovum, The Future of E-commerce: The Road to 2026 (PDF), predicts that over the next ten years instant gratification, powered by technology, will be a driving force in ecommerce. The report concludes that online retail today is “largely driven by price and convenience”, but by 2026 consumer expectations of the “ecommerce experience” will change dramatically.
“The desire for instant access and fast turnaround, 24/7, will be the norm by 2026, driven in particular by millennials (born approximately 1980–95) and also by Generation Z consumers (born
approximately 1996–2010),” the report says. “Generation Z are digital natives to the power of 10, with technology use their second nature. These generations are constantly connected and inhabit an online environment where events happen in real time without them having to wait, and where social media enables them to dictate terms.”
By 2026 the report predicts that consumer expectations will force online retailers to vastly improve customer support, will have to live up to expectations on the goods or services being delivered and shoppers will expect free delivery anytime and anywhere.
“Smartphone penetration is reaching new heights around the globe, and we are fast approaching the point where being an internet user means being a smartphone user,” commented Felim McGrath, who is the Trends Manager at GlobalWebIndex, in a blog post presenting the report. “This means that mobiles have the potential to become essential online commerce devices.”
McGrath backed up his comment with examples of how in Asia people are just as likely to shop online with their smartphones as they are a desktop computer. “Last month, close to half of South Koreans used their mobile to shop online,” he said. “And in China, mobile commerce has become the norm, with consumers now almost as likely to complete a purchase online via their mobile as via a laptop/PC.”
McGrath says that even though most consumers in Europe and North America are not mobile shoppers at these levels yet, it’s only a matter of time before they are.
The Ovis Report thinks that the trend toward more powerful smartphones with larger screens will help drive ecommerce and that retailers are optimizine the shopping experience for mobile. “Together, these developments are turning the smartphone into a platform that can support the whole shopping journey, from product search and discovery, to comparisons, recommendations,
and payments,” says the report.
The report notes that Android will continue to dominate iOS and that competition for payment systems won’t just be between Apple and Android, but will include multiple payments sytems on the the Android platform.
Social Media is a Key Driver of Ecommerce
Felim McGrath also believes that social media will be a driving force encouraging online shopping. He says that one third of the world’s population is now on social media, which is up an astounding 10% over last year.
“With such a significant amount of online time devoted to social media, there’s clear potential not only for advertising and marketing via social networks, but also for directly monetising users via ‘social commerce’,” said McGrath. “The last year has seen some of the world’s biggest social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest, testing or introducing integrated commerce options, acting as the middle-men between buyers and brands. The networks themselves have a clear interest in pushing this trend, both to increase engagement with their platforms and to open up healthy new revenue streams.”
The research from GWI shows that consumers are now becoming brand aware because of social media and are also using it to research products. McGrath sees this as an important step to using social to complete purchases. “Social commerce has a bright future,” says McGrath.
The Ovum report also predicts that the need for people to document their experiences on social media will motivate retailers to “increasingly align not only their brands but also the
shopping experience itself to this consumer desire for encounters worth sharing.”
“This can already be seen with the emerging trend for integrating social media with in-store retail, with the aim of creating socially driven shopping experiences,” the report notes. “In 2015, Victoria’s Secret encouraged shoppers to take selfies in front of displays and show them to sales assistants in return for a free gift – and hopefully share their selfies/experiences with friends.”
“Any doubters about social media’s powerful role in converting prospects into customers need to immediately re-evaluate their position,” notes the Absolunete report. “Like, now. Though their pure conversion rates are lower than those of organic results or Email, they are powerful tools that promote brand loyalty and are a great way to share the brand’s values. Through community-logic, social media is a valuable resource to convert curious prospects into new customers.”
According to Absolunete, with good social media management online stores can generate results that are sometimes superior to search marketing strategies such as Google Adwords. Social platforms such as Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter are working to enhance their value to online retailers by adding functionalities that will guide the shopper towards a products pages with goal to convert their users into online retail customers.
“You may have noticed more and more “direct purchase” options popping up on social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and most notably Facebook, which is responsible for 64% of social sales worldwide,” noted the report. “Retailers need to move quickly to capitalize on this; once the big, established eCommerce players will have fully implemented these tools, it’s going to be a lot harder – and more expensive – to stand out.”
On Instagram, for instance, you can now go directly from a picture to a product page which are being used by brands such as Banana Republic via StylePick. What’s more, celebrity endorsers are now being used by brands in this process leveraging their huge numbers of followers to create commerce.
93% of Pinterest users have bought something online in the last 6 months, according to Absolunete. They also note that Pinterest is the source of 16% of all social sales, with their “Rich Pins” allowing retailers to fully integrate online stores and automatically synchronizing product pages with the products “Pin”. J. Crew, Gap and Nordstrom all utilize this effective Pinterest ecommerce motivator.
Ecommerce while Messaging
Another emerging trend is the integration of ecommerce into messaging apps, which is already happening in Asia. McGrath notes that Line and WeChat have already integrated multiple commerce features and other “opportunities for monetization.” He believes this revenue opportunity is the “inspiration” behind Facebook’s move to make Messenger a separate app and their motivation to focus on messaging so aggressively. Indeed they are very focused on messaging, having paid $22 billion for WhatsApp in 2014, a startup that only had revenues $10.2 million in the year before its acquisition.
Again, Asia shows the way forward here. Messaging apps like Line and WeChat have pushed beyond simple chat apps to integrate a broad range of commerce options and opportunities for monetization, forming the clear inspiration for Facebook’s recent development of Messenger Platform. All these developments mean that social commerce has a bright future.
Artificial intelligence also plays a role in messaging. “During this time, we’ve seen artificial intelligence reach an inflection point,” Wenig said. “This innovation is already beginning to take hold of the messaging space with the arrival of conversational assistants. Artificial intelligence has the potential to bring an era of deep personalization to the commerce space.
VR, AR and Wearable Devices
“Due to the proliferation of wearable devices and technology, smart TVs, connected cars and household appliances, beacons, and other technologies, the consumer journey in 2026 will increasingly look like a pretzel that twists, turns and loops back on itself,” noted the Ovum study. “Consumers can start and end their shopping experiences on a mobile platform, in store or online. It is a fluid movement that by 2026 will be even harder for retailers to keep up with or predict because it will include a growing number of devices and touchpoints.
It is key for retailers to not only keep track of consumers across many devices and touchpoints, but to also accurately measure where sales are coming from. This will require retailers and their advertising partners to build to significantly improve ad tracking technology.
One of the key drivers of wearable technology is virtual reality and augmented reality. “Virtual and augmented reality will be the next platform revolution,” says Wenig. “This is already prevalent in the gaming world, but it has the potential to be far more disruptive.”
The Ovum report predicts that by 2026 consumers will expect a more “real” shopping experience which will mean an integration of augmented reality into online stores. Consumers will expect an an “event experience” that will rival walking into a brick and mortar store.
“This will translate into interactive, highly engaging online and real-world retail environments where augmented reality (AR) plays a key role,” the report says. “The provision of distinct and tangible shopping experiences, online and real-world, will become a key means to enhance and differentiate a brand’s value proposition.”
One of the key drivers for augmented reality being used by online stores is increasing the conversion rate. Generally, retailers do much better when a consumer walks into their physical store locations compared with internet shopping, because there is no human connection.
Epson’s Moverio smart glasses are one solution for retailers, where an online shopper can click the the “GoInStore” button and a sales associate at the physical store will walk the customer through high value products with wearing the smart glasses. Clicking the button initiates a two way voice call and a one way video stream of whatever the sales person is looking at.
Luxury car dealer Amari in the UK uses the glasses to show off their extremely expensive cars to online prospects. “Our sales team know every single detail of these cars, even to the level of knowing the tyre pressures,” said Sheikh Amari, CEO of Amari SuperCars in an Internet Retailing post. “This knowledge is difficult to bring across online and we have been looking for ways to bring our expertise into the online environment.”
“This new technology enables our customers to travel to our showroom in real-time and experience the cars remotely – giving us a competitive edge and the ability to close sales quicker, providing our customers a totally unique, convenient and trusted car buying experience,” said Amari. “Our customers – who include investors and collectors – are very busy people, based all around the world, who typically know what they want but often have to rely solely on the pictures that are on the website.”
Jeff Bezos talked Tuesday about the impact of its Echo product and the Alexa platform as science fiction becoming reality. He stated, “It has been a dream since the early days of science fiction to have a computer that you can talk to in a natural way and actually have a conversation and ask it to do things for you. That is coming true.” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was interviewed by Recode’s Walt Mossberg at the Recode Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. The entire video interview is below.
Bezos sees these artificial learning products as just in the very beginning of their development. Bezos told the audience, “There’s so much more to come. It’s just the tip of the iceberg of what you can do with these types of technologies! It’s the first inning. It might even be the first guys up at bat. It’s really early and I think we are on the edge of a golden era. It’s going to be so exciting to see what happens.”
Amazon has a family of products called Echo and they are driven by a platform called Alexa and they are actually licensing the technology to be embedded in applications that other companies are developing as well. Bezos elaborated, “We’ve exposed different SDK’s for Alexa. One is the Alexa Voice Service which lets you embed through a set of API’s. You can embed Alexa in your own device or app and do with it what you want. If you make an alarm clock, for instance, you can embed Alexa Voice Service in it. We also have the Alexa Skills Kit which lets you teach Alexa new skills. Those two things work together.”
Bezos was asked about the the gains in AI through machine learning and if this will be the underpinnings of tech over the next 10 years as we move from the period of frantic growth and development in smart phones? Bezos replied:
“I think its gigantic. I think natural language understanding and machine learning in general and artificial intelligence… it’s probably hard to overstate how big of an impact it is going to have on society over the next 20 years. It is big. It doesn’t mean that phones are going to go away. Its’ not like voice interfaces are going to replace screens. As long as people have eyes they are going to want screens and they still want to touch things and so on. But it has been a dream since the early days of science fiction to have a computer that you can talk to in a natural way and actually have a conversation and ask it to do things for you. That is coming true. You’re seeing similar amazing progress with extreme vision. The combination of new and better algorithms, vastly superior compute power and the ability to harness huge amounts of training data — those 3 things are coming together to solves previously unsolvable problems. They’re going to drive a tremendous amount of utility for customers and customers are going to adopt those things.”
Jeff Bezos added, “We’ve exposed to different SDK’s for Alexa. One is the Alexa Voice Service which lets you embed through a set of API’s. You can embed Alexa in your own device or app and do with it what you want. If you make an alarm clock you can embed Alexa Voice Service in it. We also have the Alexa Skills Kit which lets you teach Alexa new skills. Those two things work together.”
Mossberg asked if Amazon is “deeply committed to this being a huge part of Amazon’s business”? To which Bezos replied, “Absolutely. We’ve worked on it behind the scenes for 4 years. We have more than a thousand people dedicated just to Alexa and the Echo ecosystem. We have now a set of third party apps that people have built using are SDK. There’s so much more to come. It’s just the tip of the iceberg of what you can do with these types of technologies!”
What about competitors? “All of the major tech companies will do this, but there will also be hundred’s of startup companies. There will also be new advances. One of the things is that right now bigger companies like Amazon have an advantage, especially because of the training data sets that are required to do this because you need a lot of data to the extraordinary things with the current algorithms we have. Just remember that humans learn in a very different way. Humans are unbelievably data efficient. We learn these incredibly complex things. You don’t have to drive a million miles to be able to drive a car. But the way we teach a self driving car to drive today is we have the algorithms drive a million miles and they are still not as good in certain scenarios as a human would be. So humans are doing all kinds of things to make that possible. We’re also very power efficient. For instance, Alpha Go, which is a really impressive achievement beat the world’s best Alpha Go player. He’s operating on about 50 watts, Humans are just doing something fundamentally different than the current way that we do machine learning and machine intelligence.”
Bezos added, “The longer you’ve been around, the more humble you get about tech.”
Facebbook is liberal because it’s employees are mostly liberal. It’s employees trend young and young people are the driving force behind socialist Bernie Sanders, for instance. The median age of Facebook’s workforce is only 29 years old. Facebook is based in arguably in the most liberal city in the United States, San Francisco, an official sanctuary city that refuses to honor federal requests to hold on to people found to be in the country illegally. There is no denying that Facebook employees are liberal.
“I hear fearful voices calling for building walls and distancing people they label as ‘others,’” Zuckerberg said, never referring to Trump by name. “I hear them calling for blocking free expression, for slowing immigration, for reducing trade, and in some cases, even for cutting access to the internet.”
Conservatives believe he is a liberal for plenty of reasons. He started and funds an organization called Fwd.us which openly bashes Trump and Cruz for their immigration positions:
Of course, Zuckerberg may also be just a pragmatist and a proponent of what is in the best interest of Facebook. Facebook needs the best tech people in the world and they are all not in the United States.
Some say that Zuckerberg is a globalist, which is something many conservatives resist, except for the conservatives that are executives in multi-national corporations. Globalist’s don’t care about fair trade, because arguing this could start a trade war which is not in their corporate interests. They want unhindered immigration and they don’t want much done on illegal immigration because that could end up putting more limits on legal immigration too. Zuckerberg, falls into this category not just because he’s a liberal, but because it is in his company’s best interest.
But Zuckerberg is liberal on hot-topic social issues too.
There was once a claim that Zuckerberg donated almost a billion dollars to Planned Parenthood, an organization that many Republican’s despise because of its pro-abortion agenda. What actually happened is that Zuckerberg donated $500 million in Facebook shares (Now possibly worth a billion!) to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, an organization that funds some liberal initiatives, but is not overtly political.
Mark Zuckerberg openly supports gay marriage, a liberal position that is supported by many younger conservatives as well. A Pew Research poll conducted in 2014 showed that 61% of young Republicans favor same-sex marriage. That’s likely much higher now considering that same sex marriage is now legal. In June, 2015 the Supreme Court ruled by a 5-to-4 vote that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage.
After the Paris attacks by Muslim extremists Zuckerberg felt it necessary to post that Facebook supports Muslims:
If you’re a Muslim in this community, as the leader of Facebook I want you to know that you are always welcome here and that we will fight to protect your rights and create a peaceful and safe environment for you.
Manyconservatives find this an unsettling, but common knee-jerk reaction of liberals, every time radical Muslims commit an act of terror. Conservatives suspect that many Muslims around the world sympathies with the so-called extremest and that leaders, political and corporate, shouldn’t assume that most Muslims are just like us, freedom loving and peaceful. For instance, according to a Pew survey, a third of U.S. Muslims support Al-Qaeda and that more than a third of U.S. Muslims think Islamic extremism is okay!
In my opinion, there is no evidence of a top-down initiative to silence conservative voices.
Based on our research and my personal experience with Facebook, I believe they are acting in good faith and share some very deep, fundamental principles with people who believe in the principles of liberty and freedom of speech.
“Facebook is intentionally suppressing our traffic and hiding our stories in people’s newsfeeds,” said Patty McMurray, co-founder of the group 100% Fed Up. “[The censorship] has everything to do with immigration,” McMurray said.
“Every time I threaten to take legal action [against Facebook’s censorship], I get the same response: ‘Glitch. Mistake. Sorry.’” said anti-amnesty filmmaker Dennis Michael Lynch. “It is total censorship, and there is no question it is an effort by those at Facebook who want to muffle the sounds of people like myself.”
Yet more broadly, the activists say that Facebook suppresses their groups in multiple ways: such as unsubscribing followers, hiding the groups’ content from their followers’ newsfeeds, deleting posts, and suspending the advocates’ ability to post on their own Facebook pages.
McMurray says she was suspended from posting on her Facebook group’s page for a whole month because another Facebook user published a post on her group’s page. The outside post was critical of unassimilated Muslim migrants who push for the implementation of Sharia law in Western countries.
Facebook is the world’s largest platform of communication and news with 1.65 billion users, and as such has a tremendous influence. It has the right to be biased against conservatives but if it was open about this it might turn-off millions in its user base. So it’s simply smart business not to be biased, but with tens of thousands of employees that trend liberal, conservatives have a right to be watchful that their voices are not being silenced. Most assuredly, Zuckerberg would not want Facebook to be thought of as “Fakebook” — a jab that Rush Limbaugh frequently uses.
Mark Zuckerberg at least in Beck’s longing eyes is not biased and wants Facebook to not be biased against conservatives. Because of its potential for significant influence let’s hope that’s true. It’s not just in Facebook’s interest, it’s in the interest of the world.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone first launched Jelly a couple years ago. It was something of a Q&A service billed as a “new way to search.” It didn’t really catch on, and work halted. Then, seemingly out of the blue, early this year, Stone announced that Jelly would return thanks to his “renewed enthusiasm” and “entirely new approach” to the product.
This time, users don’t need an account to search, and Jelly combines artificial intelligence with human decisions. On Thursday, Stone announced that the new Jelly is live after a period in closed beta.
“Jelly is the only search engine in the world with an attitude, an opinion, and the experience of people to back it all up,” he wrote in a post on Medium. “Only Jelly can say you asked the wrong question. Only Jelly can give you answers you wanted but didn’t think to ask. Only Jelly will deliver a thoughtful answer to your anonymous question. This is all because Jelly is humanity plus technology.”
Jelly uses a routing algorithm. Stone explains, “Each query and every answer is freighted with metadata. But all this science is in service of getting you the right responses from the right folks. People who can help because they’ve been there, they have the experience, they have the opinion, and most importantly, they have the answers you need — and you can follow up with them too.”
Jelly still carries the baggage of a very fundamental question that it did when it launched the first time. Do people want to search like this? More specifically, do they want to search for something and then wait a period of time before getting their answers? Optimistically, I’d say it depends on the type of question. Realistically, I’d say probably not. It would be one thing if search engines like Google were really bad at their job, but they’re not. They’re getting better all the time.
Before I started writing this article, I asked Jelly, “Why is Jelly supposed to be more useful now than it was when it launched the first time?”
Well, we knew it was bound to be a big day for Messenger news with Facebook’s developer conference F8 kicking off, and it has so far been just that. Within its first hour, Facebook made a slew of announcements about Messenger and otherwise.
In short, Messenger is about to become a lot more than most people are used to. It’s going to be a communication path for many more businesses and people are going to be interacting with artificial intelligence a whole lot more. Both of these scenarios will often be simultaneous.
At last year’s event, Facebook announced Messenger Platform, but now it’s getting a full beta launch, and with it, businesses and developers get tools to build their own chatbots to interact with people.
You can use bots and live-messaging tools to create custom experiences for customer service, e-commerce or whatever you come up with. These experiences can be integrated with Messenger plugins (buttons for your site, emails, etc.), or Messenger codes and links introduced last week.
Facebook is allowing for customer matching so what you’ve been sending through SMS can now be sent through Messenger. There’s a tool that lets you match optex in customer phone numbers to a messenger account.
Soon, there will be the ability to buy News Feed ads that will take people directly to your bot in Messenger. According to the company this will help with new users acquisition as well as retention.
The company showed off three bots from early partners including Spring, Poncho, and CNN.
Messenger lead David Marcus demonstrated buying a pair of shoes through Messenger with Spring. He specified what kind of shoe he wanted, his price range, and was presented with a carousel of results to choose from. This is a clear illustration of how this could be a game changer for ecommerce.
“I can guarantee you you’re going to spend way more than you want with this,” Marcus said. “It’s really addictive.”
He demonstrated Poncho the weather cat, a bot that has a “dry and witty” sense of humor that it uses to give you weather info in a fun way. He says it feels like a real conversation.
They’re experimenting with ways businesses can reconnect with people, but are giving users the ability to block businesses as well.
The company launched a new Send/Receive API that’s available today to help you build bots. For more complex bots, they’re opening up a tool called Bot Engine based on what it has learned from “M” to enable you to build high-end self-learning bots.
Some companies are already announcing their new offerings resulting from all of this. SparkCentral announced a customer care agent, for example. Salesforce announced the Salesforce for Messenger Platform.
“Together, the companies are empowering companies to engage their customers through dynamic experiences around products, brands and moments—all connected to their business,” the company said. “Powered by Salesforce Lightning, the proven platform for more than 150,000 companies and millions of users, Salesforce for Messenger will deliver personalized engagement at scale with CRM data.”
You can get started building your bot with the documentation and resources available here. There will of course be sessions on all of this at the conference, and Facebook is making some sessions available online at the F8 site.
Facebook also discusses the news more in a blog post here.
Artificial intelligence startup MetaMind launched in late 2014 with $8 million in funding from Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff and Khosla Ventures. Now, Salesforce has has acquired it.
Salesforce will integrate MetaMind’s technology into its services.
“With MetaMind and Salesforce coming together, we’ll be able to offer customers real AI solutions with breakthrough capabilities that further automate and personalize customer support, marketing automation, and many other business processes,” says MetaMind co-founder and CEO Richard Socher. “We’ll extend Salesforce’s data science capabilities by embedding deep learning within the Salesforce platform.”
“Over the past year and a half, we’ve been on a mission to empower business users with state of the art deep learning technology to simplify, improve and automate decision making,” he says. “And now, we’ll be able to continue our journey at Salesforce on a much larger scale, with the resources and ecosystem of one of the world’s most innovative and influential enterprise software companies.”
While under Salesforce, MetaMind intends to continue its AI research. According to Socher, they’ll be publishing “groundbreaking discoveries” that advance the technology. They’re also hiring.
MetaMind’s products will be discontinued on May 4 for unpaid web users with June 4 being the end date for recurring monthly users. The company says all user data will be deleted “promptly” after closing.
Google revealed RankBrain to be its third most important ranking factor last year, but there appears to be a good deal of confusion within the company about just how it works.
What are your thoughts about RankBrain? Do you see it as a good thing for Google? Share your thoughts.
RankBrain was revealed in October pretty much out of nowhere. It didn’t come in an official announcement, but from an interview Bloomberg Business ran with Greg Corrado, a senior research scientist at Google. He said that Google had introduced the algorithm on a wide scale earlier in the year and that it quickly became the third most important signal out of hundreds in Google’s ranking algorithm.
RankBrain uses artificial intelligence to put written language into mathematical entities (vectors) that computers can understand. If it sees a word or phrase that it doesn’t know, the machine guesses what words or phrases might have similar meanings. It helps specifically with never-before-seen search queries. Apparently it’s better at humans (even Googlers) at guessing which results Google would rank number one for various queries. It’s the first ranking signal that actually learns on its own. Google has indicated in the past that turning RankBrain off would be as damaging to search results as turning off half of Wikipedia pages.
Barry Schwartz reported on a session at SMX West earlier this month in which Google’s Paul Haahr, who is described as “a top engineer involved in core ranking,” admitted that Google itself doesn’t fully understand RankBrain.
Now, Schwartz is pointing to a Twitter conversation with Google’s Gary Illyes and Moz’s Rand Fishkin in which it’s suggested that RankBrain can’t use a new factor that wasn’t previously in an algorithm, but it might adjust the weights of existing signals. Still, Illyes notes that while he’s on the search quality team, he doesn’t know everything about RankBrain.
Lemme try one last time: Rankbrain lets us understand queries better. No affect on crawling nor indexing or replace anything in ranking
Last week, Stone Temple Consulting released some research on RankBrain’s effectiveness at improving Google search results. The data was gathered by comparing 500,000 search queries from both before and after RankBrain was implemented.
They found that Google improved results on 54.6% of queries that it previously misunderstood. Examples of words and phrases RankBrain handles better, according to the firm, include: what is, who is, where is, without, not, and convert.
Stone Temple’s Eric Enge suggested that Google may use RankBrain to impact selection of featured snippet results, trigger the delivery of a map where there wasn’t one shown before, and/or determine if the main impact of a given query would be an improved search results snippet.
“Predictably, one of the most common questions I get asked is how RankBrain will impact SEO,” he said. “Truth be told, at the moment, there is not much impact at all. RankBrain will simply do a better job of matching user queries with your web pages, so you’d arguably be less dependent on having all the words from the user query on your page.”
“In addition, you still need to do keyword research so that you can understand how to target a page to a major topic area (and what that major topic area is),” he added. “Understanding the preferred language of most users will always make sense, whether or not search engines exist. If you haven’t already (hopefully you have!), you can increase your emphasis on using truly natural language on your web pages.”
According to Enge, the real impacts of RankBrain are an increase in overall search quality and in Google’s confidence that they can use machine-leaning within the core search algorithm.
Be sure to check out Stone Temple’s study if you haven’t already. It includes a nice infographic outlining the highlights.
Do you think RankBrain is a positive thing for search results? Discuss.
Google has been using one of its most important ranking signals for going on a year, and apparently it has so far helped improve search results on over half of queries.
Have you noticed a marked improvement in Google search results over the past year? Let us know in the comments.
Stone Temple Consulting, which has been publishing some of the most interesting research on Google search in recent memory, has some new findings out after a study on Google’s machine learning algorithm RankBrain. The data was gathered by comparing 500,000 search queries from both before and after RankBrain was implemented.
According to the firm, and as far as we know, this is the only study of its kind on RankBrain.
The study found that Google improved results on 54.6% of queries that it previously misunderstood. Examples of words and phrases RankBrain handles better, according to the firm, include: what is, who is, where is, without, not, and convert.
RankBrain was revealed in October pretty much out of nowhere. It didn’t come in an official announcement, but from an interview Bloomberg Business ran with Greg Corrado, a senior research scientist at Google. He said that Google had introduced the algorithm on a wide scale earlier in the year and that it quickly became the third most important signal out of hundreds in Google’s ranking algorithm. Before we look more closely at Stone Temple’s findings, here’s a quick recqp of what we learned about RankBrain from that initial interview.
1. RankBrain is the third most important ranking signal in Google Search.
2. RankBrain was deployed several months before October.
3. RankBrain uses artificial intelligence to put written language into mathematical entities (vectors) that computers can understand.
4. If RankBrain sees a word/phrase it doesn’t know, the machine guesses what words/phrases might have similar meanings.
5. RankBrain specifically helps with never-before-seen search queries.
6. RankBrain is better than humans (even Googlers) at guessing which results Google would rank number one for various queries.
7. RankBrain is the first Google search ranking signal that actually learns on its own.
8. Turning RankBrain off is as damaging to users as turning off half of Wikipedia pages.
9. RankBrain is so effective, Google engineers were surprised at how well it worked.
10. Machine learning is a major focus of Google right now, which probably means we’ll see RankBrain itself and other endeavors in this area improve greatly in the future.
Stone Temple’s Eric Enge suggests that Google may use RankBrain to impact selection of featured snippet results, trigger the delivery of a map where there wasn’t one shown before, and/or determine if the main impact of a given query would be an improved search results snippet.
“Predictably, one of the most common questions I get asked is how RankBrain will impact SEO,” says Enge. “Truth be told, at the moment, there is not much impact at all. RankBrain will simply do a better job of matching user queries with your web pages, so you’d arguably be less dependent on having all the words from the user query on your page.”
“In addition, you still need to do keyword research so that you can understand how to target a page to a major topic area (and what that major topic area is),” he adds. “Understanding the preferred language of most users will always make sense, whether or not search engines exist. If you haven’t already (hopefully you have!), you can increase your emphasis on using truly natural language on your web pages.”
According to Enge, the real impacts of RankBrain are an increase in overall search quality and in Google’s confidence that they can use machine-leaning within the core search algorithm.
Stone Temple put together this infographic highlighting its findings:
On a related note, word out of SMX is that apparently Google doesn’t completely understand RankBrain and what it’s doing. Hmmm. Let’s hope the company has a better handle on what its nightmare-inducing robots are doing:
Do you believe RankBrain is making Google a better search engine and helping users find what they’re looking for? Discuss.
In September, Google announced a bunch of new templates for Docs, Slides, and Sheets. In December, these became available on Android and iOS.
Building on these offerings, the company just announced even more templates, and some of them are specifically geared toward businesses. The new templates are designed by experts in their fields. This includes Intuit, GV, and Made to Stick authors Chip and Dan Heath.
Intuit’s QuickBooks contributed a new annual business budget template in Sheets to make it easier to manage budgets.
“GV provides venture capital funding to bold new companies,” says product manager Brian LeVee. “In the fields of life science, healthcare, artificial intelligence, robotics, transportation, cyber security and agriculture, GV’s companies aim to improve lives and change industries.The new GV pitch template in Slides helps entrepreneurs share their vision, based on proven presentation tactics.”
“And, in the bestselling book, Made to Stick, brothers Chip and Dan Heath revealed that ‘sticky’ messages of all kinds draw their power from the same main traits,” LeVee adds. “In their big idea template in Slides, they use these principles to help you build and deliver your most memorable presentation yet.”
On the educational side of things, there’s a new Reading Rainbow-designed lesson plan and book report template in Docs and a Google Science Fair-designed Slides template for science projects.
Google discusses each of the new templates in a blog post here.
Come meet with other developers and innovators who are excited about connecting the world! We're hosting F8, our global developer conference on April 12 + 13, in San Francisco, California.
Here’s what you can expect from the event, according to a post on the Facebook Developers blog:
– Keynote: Hear from Mark about how Facebook is helping developers build, grow and monetize success, and where we’re headed in the future.
– 40+ Sessions: Attend talks from Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, Oculus, Instagram, advertising, engineering and more — there’s content for everyone across Facebook’s family of apps and services.
– Interactive Demos: Experience our immersive products for yourself with hands-on demos featuring Oculus Rift and Touch, 360 video and more.
– Innovation Lab: Learn how we plan to improve connectivity, enhance infrastructure and scale artificial intelligence and virtual reality around the world.
– Meet the Facebook Team: Connect with our engineers and product experts for 1:1 personalized support to learn how you can grow and optimize your app business.
– After Party: Join us for a fun after party at the end of the first conference day, and enjoy music, food and drinks while getting to know other developers.
You can apply for the event here. Space is limited, but they will be streaming the whole thing online as usual.
perscale datacenter providers have struggled to balance the growing need for specialized hardware (efficiency) with the economic benefits of homogeneity (manageability). In this paper we propose a new cloud architecture that uses reconfigurable logic to accelerate both network plane functions and applications. This Configurable Cloud architecture places a layer of reconfigurable logic (FPGAs) between the network switches and the servers, enabling network flows to be programmably transformed at line rate, enabling acceleration of local applications running on the server, and enabling the FPGAs to communicate directly, at datacenter scale, to harvest remote FPGAs unused by their local servers.
network acceleration (encryption of data in transit at high-speeds). This architecture is much more scalable than 
