Do you want AI to solve a marketing, business or operational challenge?

by Contributor

By Matt Jones, Tessella

Most articles about artificial intelligence start with big claims. ‘AI will change the world’; ‘Here are some exciting examples of AI’.

These are all legitimate starting points, but fewer words are spent understanding what contemporary AI really is, and who can benefit from it. An uninformed observer could be forgiven for thinking AI is a new technology that you can buy as part of a platform and simply plug into your business and become the next digital company of the future.

Most technology is quite complicated. And AI is ‘quite complicated’ multiplied. If a business wants to really take advantage of AI, they need to stop worrying about what the latest, cool AI gadget or platform will be and start thinking about what an AI toolset can do for the specific problems facing their enterprise. Continue reading →

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How artificial intelligence will find its way into brick-and-mortar retail

by Ben Dickson

It’s fair to say that artificial intelligence has helped online shopping take huge leaps and leave brick-and-mortar retail behind in terms of innovation and efficiency. There are no in-store equivalents for the personalized features that you find in e-commerce platforms.

The main hurdle to putting AI to use in retail is data, the new gold, and the reason companies such as Google and Facebook are offering you their services for free. Online shopping platforms provide a direct interface to the customer. This is useful to gather tons of information about every user, including the products they view, their search queries, items they add to or remove from their shopping carts, points where they abandon a purchase, and even the items they pause or hovered on. Continue reading →

Online reviews: a key element of marketing

by Contributor

By Megan Arevalo, Website Builder

There are many elements of online marketing, from social media to paid advertising, but one area that is often overlooked by business owners and marketers or simply left to develop by itself is online reviews.

Public feedback from customers on your own website or review sites is a powerful form of social proof. It tells potential customers that the business is active, has a certain degree of popularity, and if the reviews are mostly positive – that the business is what it says it is and does what it says it does.

In fact having no reviews at all can have more of a negative impact on attracting customers or clients than a few negatives among the positives. Continue reading →

Kuperman: home and IoT security will lead the way in the next generation of cybersecurity advances

by Ben Dickson

Unfortunately, it is fair to say that the vulnerabilities of Internet of Things (IoT) are preceding its innovations and utilities. From the hacking of the Ukraine power grid, to last year’s DDoS attack against the Dyn DNS provider, IoT devices are behind security incidents of all sizes.

The IoT industry is exposing how putting connectivity into anything and everything opens up a Pandora’s box of vulnerabilities, and give cybercriminals limitless ways to hurt their victims. One area of concern are smart homes, where a slew of not-so-secure devices are finding their way and exposing their owners to unprecedented threats.

In this month’s interview, Leon Kuperman, CTO of smart firewall manufacturer CUJO, discussed IoT security threats and new approaches to securing the homes of the future. Continue reading →

What is net neutrality?

by Ben Dickson

Should it make a difference for your Internet Service Provider whether you’re browsing your timeline on Facebook, reading your emails in Gmail, or reading the latest post on TechTalks? According to net neutrality, it shouldn’t.

Net neutrality is the principle that rules ISPs should treat all internet traffic equally and avoid playing favorites, throttling, blocking or providing paid prioritizations. What does that all mean? We’ll get there in a minute.

In the past years, as the internet has transformed from being a luxury to a vital commodity, net neutrality, which is also referred to as “open internet” and “internet freedom,” has become a thorny issue in the U.S. The debate has pitted several broadband and telecom giants such as AT&T and Comcast against huge content corporations such as Google and Facebook.

While the battle is currently being played out in the U.S., the outcome can set a precedent that will propagate to other countries and regions. Here’s what you need to know and why you should care. Continue reading →

The importance of ongoing tech education as a manager

by Contributor

By Southern Cross University

The rapid technological change that has occurred in the last decade has transformed every corner of our lives, from how we communicate with friends to the skills needed to navigate and prosper in the current labour market.

As Professor Ian Chubb, neuroscientist and former Chief Scientist of Australia, summed it up in 2013: “STEM is everywhere. Our nourishment, our safety, our homes and neighbours, our relationships with family and friends, our health, our jobs, our leisure are all profoundly shaped by technological innovation and the discoveries of science.”

The scale and pace of these changes poses challenges for those at all stages of the education and career ladder. For mid-career professionals moving into roles managing ambitious graduates with a higher technological literacy than their own, the challenges are perhaps greater than for any other cohort. In line with that, there is great opportunity for both tech education and management training. Continue reading →

How the semantic web revolution is starting from a blog post

by Contributor

By Andrea Volpini, WordLift

Search engines are evolving. They went from simple keyword matching to natural language processing. Those search engines got better at interpreting long tail queries. Yet they are still error-prone. Let’s put this into context: Google itself claimed that it started to use machine learning to cope with the 15 percent of searches done by users, on a daily basis, that have never been seen before. These are roughly 500 million new searches every day where Google doesn’t have a clue.

Semantic web is making those computational search engines taking a giant leap forward in three ways. Continue reading →