Facebook Messenger an eCommerce Development Strategy

Following Facebook strategy it appears that it is about to announce new features particularly in its Facebook Messenger 

The development stage for an in-store mobile payment capability.

According to The Information, following a source code analysis of the iPhone Facebook Messenger app it can be seen and noted commands such as "pay in person" and "pay directly in Messenger when you pick up the item"  therefore it can be deduced that Facebook Messenger can have in-built the capability for in-store purchasing features. Nevertheless, Facebook was not yet responded to this new feature which is most likely in a development stage. 

Furthermore, it is already possible send money to a friend via Facebook Messenger, however the iOS app code implies that Facebook will most likely expand Facebook Messenger features and capabilities as a payment tool. This follows a similar pattern in the peer-to-peer payment feature was also predicted months ahead of official release with an analysis of the app's code, which Engadget reported.

This is despite what Mark Zuckerberg said, that Facebook was not planning to launch its own payment product. However,  Apple Pay was mentioned as a potential partner (transcript provided by Seeking Alpha is can be read below):

On payments, the basic strategy that we have is to make it especially in products like Messenger that where the business interaction maybe a bit more transactional, to take all the friction out of making the transactions that you need. So, we don’t view ourselves as a payments business, that’s not the type of company that we are. We’ll partner with everyone who does payment. We look at the stuff that Apple is doing with Apple Pay for example as a really neat innovation in the space that takes a lot of friction out of transactions as well. And our view is that the less friction, the better the user experience, the more people can easily interact with businesses that they care about. And ultimately for our business that will drive up the amount that businesses are willing to pay to advertise to send people into those interactions because they perform well. So it’s good for everyone but that’s how we think about that.

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Galactic Exchange Free Hadoop/Spark Cluster Creations in 5 minutes

A new company Galactic Exchange Offers Free Hadoop/Spark Cluster Creations in 5 minutes for Big Data.  

It is an impressive free service offering, as normally this process is not simple, and this new offer is a breakthrough and better still, open source. 

This new service offer / process is called ClusterGX is currently in Beta, presented at Strata + Hadoop World. However, the service works by having its beta users to own and have their own data already available with own applications, so that it runs on top of the cluster.

This new tool, is open source and superb being free to use for now.  The company is pays and provides the whole cloud infrastructure, this is a breakthrough as it is allowing users with a great vision by utilizing Hadoop and its implied big data wonders and capabilities.

The new company Galactic Exchange will eventually release an enterprise version of the product complete with better security, support and all the kinds of features businesses expect.

Rob Mustarde stated "The product is actually geared toward small to medium businesses, the ones that can’t afford to hire dedicated teams to spin up and manage Hadoop clusters",

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New Improved Machine Learning Platform by Google

New Machine Learning Platform by Google

It was announced by Google of a new machine learning platform which developers can use in their applications and solutions. 

It was presented at NEXT Google Cloud Platform user conference. It was stated by Google chairman Eric Schmidt "Google believes machine learning is “what’s next.”

The service is now available in limited preview and it was stated. “Major Google applications use Cloud Machine Learning, including Photos (image search), the Google app (voice search), Translate and Inbox (Smart Reply),” the company . “Our platform is now available as a cloud service to bring unmatched scale and speed to your business applications.”

Presently, Google’s Cloud Machine Learning platform consists of two parts: one that allows developers to build machine learning models from their own data, and another that offers developers a pre-trained model. To train or operate these machine learning models, developers can choose their data from tools such as Google Cloud Dataflow,Google BigQuery,Google Cloud Dataproc, Google Cloud Storage, and Google Cloud Datalab.

The pre-trained models include existing APIs like the Google Translate API and Cloud Vision API, but also new services like the Google Cloud Speech API. The Cloud Speech API powers Google’s own voice search and voice-enabled apps. It can do speech-to-text conversion for 80+ languages.

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Artificial Intelligent Facebook Personal Digital Assistant

Facebook Personal Digital Assistant on Messenger App via Artificial Intelligence 

The messenger app has moved another level in terms of capabilities for its users, following this new capability. As a result this new offering is a competing solution with the other IT giants such as Apple Siri, Google and Microsoft Cortana in the digital personal assistant arena.

The Facebook Messenger lead David Marcus stated:

We are beginning to test a new service called M. M is a personal digital assistant inside of Messenger that completes tasks and finds information on your behalf. It’s powered by artificial intelligence that’s trained and supervised by people.

The differentiating factor from other Artificial Intelligence services currently available as from the examples mentioned above is that the facebook service called M is able to complete tasks on a user behalf.  Furthermore, it can also purchase items, organize orders to be delivered to your friends locations, book restaurants, travel arrangements, appointments and much more.

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IBM Internet of Things Investment Announcements

Source: Techkriti

IBM strategy and Internet of Things are of key of importance to the company data expertise. It was announced a major investment by IBM which will focus its strategy onto the Internet of Things, and this initiative is IBM's major investment since the Big Blue. This new investment arrives along with a partnership from The Weather Company to assist on their data analysis applications around the world, and this is just the beginning, so that it can position itself as a development platform.

The Internet of Things can be summarized as connected computers, as an Internet of connected devices that can broadcast large amounts of data from the devices usage and its users or consumers operational patterns.

IBM is not the only technology company focusing on the Internet of Things, others exist such as Predix and Cisco is also developing investment.   

IBM is building a platform that can consolidate services so that they can be able to produce Internet of Things applications.

In this context it already has BlueMix which is IBM’s Platform as a Service solution.

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Surgery by Auto Robots Advanced Platform From Google and Johnson & Johnson (Ethicon)

Google and Johnson & Johnson (Ethicon) have announced and following news that they are partnering in order to develop an advanced robot surgery platform with a view to possibly decrease the risk of human error and increase autonomous patterns of procedures. 

It results in a partnership that will include capabilities, intellectual property and expertise from both companies, and will involve Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Ethicon, an expert maker of medical devices.

However at this stage the companies are not intending to fully replace human surgeons, nevertheless the potential and as a natural development this goal may be in their projects objectives.

At present, robot-assisted surgery does require a human surgeon that is in full control of instruments via a computer or a remote device.

In this context, it is not new that Google Glass has been previously used in robot-assisted surgery configurations, so Google already has an interest in this field not to mention the Artificial Intelligence R&D that it conducts. 

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Twitter Periscope Live Broadcasting Now Available New App

Twitter has published a proprietary live-streaming video app for iOS .

This news comes in a context where a few weeks ago it was announced a similar service Meerkat at the SXSW .

The new app called Periscope works by allowing its users to live-stream from their smartphones to viewed publicly on-line.

This new app is not a new idea, as there are already similar apps available, however in this case it appears to be trending topic as technology such as 4G allows for better capabilities and signal improvement responsiveness. In practice the way it works is that much in the same way as other apps that can live stream,  As soon as an event starts by a user by starting a broadcast it is followed by an optional alert that is published live on their twitter stream. 

As expected, the live broadcast has the interactive capability for users to comment and send “hearts”. Another option available is the possibility to "lock" a broadcast so that it becomes private or accessible to only certain approved users.

Currently the new app is only available on the Apple store.  In comparison the new app Periscope with Meerkat does have some key differences in terms of media content offering features to users, 

With Periscope users can save the video streams after the broadcast has finished, for later viewing for a period of 24 hours, on the other hand Meerkat is ephemeral and live video disappears once you finish broadcasting.

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Marketing New App Processes Natural Language, Machine Learning and Social Graphs

Following on the context on a recent development on third party content that could be hosted on Facebook , a new startup Keywee that processes content marketing is utilizing natural language processing, machine learning and social graphs so that it can filter patterns and recognize relevant stories for its users, which it claims to focus on content discovery and advertisement technology.

Content marketing is offered by a variety of businesses, and most tend to use different approaches in serving their users with data content based recommendations and discovery. These providers include Outbrain, Taboola, Contently, Newscred, among many others. ”

With this tool, content is analysed based on stories and matching to user profiles which can provide better results in terms of marketing and understanding for content placement.

A trending subject at the moment is that of paid content, as advertising is focusing more on programmatic models whereas prices continue to drop on placement data pools, 

Keywee, innovation is on the ability to find audiences for content, whether audiences are on Facebook, Twitter, or any other social platform. 

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Instagram New App - Layout, Display And Share Collage Photos

The announcement news from Instagram that it now has a new application called Layout, 

The new app Layout, offers new features for Instagram users as they use their photos to build photo group collages. And subsequently be able to share to Instagram, Facebook, or any where else.

These type of applications already exist and they are quite popular, however Instagram now offers with this new app, features that are an improvement where compared to other apps such as Pic Stitch, Pic Collage, InstaCollage, PhotoGrid, and these are just a few examples. 

The way these apps offer features are all based on similar varieties of blank photo grids where users can customize with their own photos, optional text, stickers, frames and backgrounds.

With the new app Layout, users can build collages by changing the order of the steps involved in the typical process of other apps.

As a user selects its photos, Layout then presents previews of custom layouts that a user can scroll down to see its photos. Then a selection of up to nine photos can be made, and each time to tap to add another, photo grid options update automatically to reflect the new photos selected additions. At the end when a user is ready they can simply flick through the presented options in order to choose their grid.

On Layout there is also an option to select Faces, where a user from its camera roll can select and filter just photos with pictures that feature people.

Another new option on Layout, is the Photo Booth that a user can use to capture spontaneous moments. The way it works is that when a user taps this button, the app starts a countdown timer and then captures a series of photos that will appear instantly in a layout.

Layout app from Instagram,

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EdX Tech Entrepreneurial Courses and Earn $1000 from Amazon Web Services

Aspiring Technology Entrepreneurs Can Now Join Entrepreneurship Courses and Earns Credits from Amazon.

An interesting opportunity for any Entrepreneur that may be thinking of starting their business, by having an idea with the most appropriate skills can really help the path to success. 

In this context, there is an offer via a partnership between Amazon Web Services and the online education portal EdX . The offer comprises of $1,000 in credit for completing one of two courses. The courses are in Entrepreneurship 101 or 102 at EdX. In order to take advantage of the offer Entrepreneurs are required to pass the courses, which in turn will entitle them automatically with $1,000 in credit to spend on processor time and/or storage in Amazon’s cloud.

Furthermore, Entrepreneurs also receive extra bonuses which might be more relevant for those with software code development experience for administrating infrastructure, and instructor led training with web classes on using Amazon Web Services, also free support at Amazon premium tier, that includes Amazon specialists that can help design and architect an app or service for Amazon instances.

The EdX course offer is detailed here on this link Amazon Offer from EdX and also links directly to the classes. The couses start on January 9, 2015, so there is sufficient time to look through the course syllabus before committing.
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Inbox, A Next Generation Email Platform For Cross Messaging Syncing

A new technology startup partnership called Inbox has recently been announced by Dropbox and MIT, where its solution is attempting to become the next generation of email applications. 

The processing resembles to the also newly launched Gmail API,  However, Inbox design does offer a more modern way to build apps that access end users inboxes. Furthermore, Inbox users do not need to rely simply on Gmail, rather they can also use it email from with Yahoo, Microsoft Exchange among others.

Google first announced its new “Gmail API” at its Google I/O developer conference earlier this month, which offers developers who build email applications new tools to access messages, threads, labels and other parts of the Gmail inbox without requiring full inbox access. The idea is to reduce the reliance on older protocols, such as IMAP. Inbox focus on a specific feature sets including snoozing email messages or only sending emails on behalf of an end user.

The strategy of Inbox is not to offer a suite of developer tools, rather to offer and create a new email standard. The sync engine is available for free on GitHub. It currently works with Gmail and Yahoo mail, with plans to expand soon to all IMAP providers. Enterprise users on Microsoft Exchange can request access to the Inbox Developer program, which supports ActiveSync.

Developers are able download the Inbox engine, sync an account, and start building on top of the platform in a local development environment.

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Ambient Proximity New Hype On Location Social Media Sharing Services

From a social media user experience it is not always about where your connections are at a location exactly, but in relative terms how close a user is to another, and that is the relevant factor. 

Following recent years on providing a solution to always provide users exact coordinate check-ins in both Foursquare and Facebook platforms, the user experience is now trending away from this feature capability and focusing more on ambient proximity, which works by constantly and automatically sharing your approximate distance from your nearest connections contained in distance labelled groups. 

The process of ambient proximity permits a user to learn if one their connections is near enough to meet up, without necessarily having the stalking capability of knowing exact locations historically on maps. This new approach could be much more appealing to the wider social media daily users.

In this context, Foursquare’s new ambient proximity app Swarm was announced today to be released very soon. It creates a feed of a user connections into groups based on their present distance. Also launched recently was the Facebook Nearby Friends .

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Artificial Intelligence Businesses Catching Attention and Investment

So far this year artificial intelligence has caught the attention of Google with its DeepMind purchase in January, it now follows that a Venture Capital group is investing millions into Vicarious.

The investment was lead by Venture capital firm Formation 8 and the news were reported on the Wall Street Journal . 

This investment include partners such as Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and actor Ashton Kutcher. Re/code reports that Box CEO Aaron Levie, incoming Y Combinator president Sam Altman, Braintree founder Bryan Johnson, Khosla Ventures, Good Ventures Foundation, Felicis Ventures, Initialized Capital, Open Field Capital, Zarco Investment Group, Metaplanet Holdings and Founders Fund. It will be interesting to discuss this topic and innovation technology market at the Venture Capital World Summit 2014.

The background features of Vicarious is that it first announced as an initial showcase last year that it was capable with its own software to crack CAPTCHAs with at least 90 percent accuracy. Furthermore more recently Vicarious presented a solution system that can understand and process features on photographs including video processing very much emulating the interpretation and recognition capability of that of a human would.

Nevertheless, the technology if at all possible is still at least a decade away in building a fully functional autonomous virtual brain. However it does not mean that world class influential companies like Facebook and Google are not joining the game of intelligence potential.

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Gmail Email Traffic Connections Now Encrypted To Protect Its Users

It was announced today by Google that is protecting its Gmail users by providing enhanced encryption.

Gmail will “always use an encrypted HTTPS connection” 

When a user connects to read its email, and subsequently transmits a new communication, it will now be always encrypted.

 This security layer also ensures that even when traffic at a point of delivery and processing stages as it travels between Google servers and data communication highways will have better security from any possible third party attempts to read confidential data.

As a positive consequence is that general users even whilst at different locations checking their emails, will be better protected regardless of their type of connected network such as a public location. 

Thus leaving users without the need to worry about security settings or third party illegal attempts to intercept communications using technology such as public wifi.

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Facebook R&D Advances in Pattern Recognition for Computer Vision

Facebook latest R&D developments in computer vision and pattern recognition have produced impressive results with DeepFace. 

The produced facebook technology is now capable to recognize people's faces almost as accurate as an average human (with 97.5 percent accuracy). The recognition results shown provides great results although within short variety of scenes.

The Facebook researchers were capable of building 3D models from simply using faces from photos, it then follows that the 3D models can be used and rotated to improve accuracy and thus provide matching/recognition of similar features faces captured at different angles. 

The Facebook DeepFace algorithm as expected requires to be trained on an extensive pool of faces in order to achieve best and optimum accurate results but that is a common practice for any smart system. At present its capability consists of identifying up to 4,000 identities based on a database of over 4 million individual images.

The Facebook research team will present its findings at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Columbus, Ohio in June. 

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Google Android Wear Development Now Available in LG Smartwatches

Google announced a new technology named Android Wear

Google OEM technology partners provide wearable hardware so that the technology is streamlined to many users. 

The first Google partner for this technology is the LG G Watch, a smart-watch that is due to launch in the US in the next 3 months. The technology incorporates key interesting design features such as Android UI extension, always-on voice commands that respond to the now-familiar “Ok Google.”

Furthermore users of the technology will be able to see notifications alongside contextual information. Google further application development include sectors such as health and fitness, apps that provide goals, reminders and progress tracking for fitness routines, as well as real-time feedback.

It has been noted that LG is a key launch partner for Android Wear. Other Google launch partners include Motorola, with a summer launch for its Moto 360.

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Backup Your Facebook Tagged Photos and Videos to the Cloud

Facebook users can now backup their photos and videos that they were tagged by their friends via the new feature from the service IDrive.

The way the new feature works is that as the on-line backup service traditionally has it users connecting their local PC drives it is now also possible to connect to facebook and enabling it users to back up photos and videos to its servers on the cloud as a service.

Furthermore, it is not just simply backing photos and videos it now also offers the capability to back up photos and videos where a user has been tagged by its friends. This tagging feature means that in many cases if a user friend that owns the photo or video decides in the future to untag or delete the photo or video, or even further if the friend no longer is a friend, the original photo or video is still included in a user IDrive backup.

The data from Facebook once backed up, it can be accessed from any web browser or via the iOS app.

There are other backup similar services such as OwnBackup and Backupify.

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Latest Windows Phone 8 Update 3 New Features

The Latest Update for Windows Phone 8

Now supporting larger displays with more room for the great Live Tiles.

The latest Update 3 is supporting new features such as large displays via HD and the experience via the Start Screen will also improve with the stored apps thus improve the user experience and quality feel. 

This new update certainly confirms the previous news on the new phone to support the technology namely the Nokia Lumia 1520.  Despite of all the qualities of the existing Nokia Lumia 925 including the exceptional camera on the Nokia Lumia 1020, nevertheless the new Nokia Lumia 1520 is to set a new a standard in terms of consumer experience and quality which is to deliver an amazing 1080×1920 display, 2GB RAM, 32GB of storage space and finally a a microSD slot.

It seems possible that a 20-megapixel camera is on the pipeline too.

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BT Partners TechHub for Users New Applications on Superfast Broadband

The UK technology giant that is BT partners TechHub.

New business start-ups can create new applications and services utilising Super-Fast Broadband.

Based on the BT Infinity Lab programme, this partnership is to be present London Tech City. It will now be facilitated, supported and encouraged business to create new applications and services that can be marketed alongside existing products from BT that are offered to its large market based on UK households. 

The way it will work, is that the winners Entrepreneurs/Business Start-ups receive six month support relating to Research & Innovation, engineering, legal and marketing. Furthermore, BT is to support further development and/or trial of the winning solutions. Also Business Start-ups accepted into the programme receive membership of TechHub.

In practice BT does not make a cash investment, or takes equity or intending to acquire IPR from the winning entrants, it appears that is simply interested in co-innovating with new solutions from Start-ups and its selected groups of their existing customers.

A BT Infinity Lab competition briefing is on the 22nd October 2013.

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Newest Microsoft Windows Phone 8 Apps from YODspica Ltd

Today we saw the launch of two interesting free apps.

For users of Microsoft Windows phone 8 operating system by YODspica Ltd.

The two new apps include the Cardiff Open Coffee Network which is a monthly free business network meeting with its official website on 1Cardiff.com and the other free app is that of YODspica Ltd itself which can be viewed and downloaded on Our Company.

So if you have a windows phone what is stopping you from downloading these great apps today, the download links are above with the screenshots seen on this post. 

The windows phone apps, are well designed and developed, the first app provides detailed information about members which they are to be updated regularly, a news page with the latest event news, a ticket page for anyone wish to book into events, with other detailed information throughout the navigation options. 

The Our company windows phone app, provides detailed information on all services currently offered by YODspica Ltd, as well as a latest news feature for readers.

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