Digital Personalisation: The Holy Grail of AI

At present if you do an online search for, say, car hire firms, you will suddenly find ads appearing for car hire firms on your computer. This is one way businesses target products and services to you.

For the future the major tech firms around the world are developing Artificial Intelligence, AI, that can take digital personalisation even further. With access to your emails, location, messages and phone conversations etc., (leaving aside issues of privacy) they can push ideas, products and services when and where you will want them. (Such AI technology could be used by insurers to assess an individual's risk better). Becoming in effect digital pushers. This is the holy grail for AI. 

DigitalAsian

Selling Your Soul Online: Online Portals

Online marketplaces are not just battling for customers but for sellers to go online. Merchants should read the small print.

Economic times reports that ahead of the big-bang sale across ecommerce platforms in the coming weeks, marketplaces are courting sellers through multiple schemes and incentives to reach their targets for on-boarding sellers by the year-end, and prepare them for possible hiccups while processing such large volumes of orders. 

Online marketplaces are also trying to ensure that this Diwali is a happy one for merchants by giving up on commissions and reducing the pay cycle for sellers. "We have been receiving calls from different non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) which have tied up with marketplaces extending loans to us at market rates. Snapdeal has also reduced its payment cycle from over a 10-day period to over a 6-day period to ensure that we can rotate the money for procurement," said Sumanth Lingala, an electronics reseller who works with multiple marketplaces. Online marketplace ShopClues is not charging any commissions for new sellers on the portal. 

SJP @DigitalAsian

Face-Off: Code of Conduct for Facial Recognition Technology

BBC News reports that "Privacy campaigners have walked out of talks aimed at creating a code of conduct for companies keen to use facial-recognition technology. In an open letter, the groups said they had quit because of "fundamental" differences over use of the technology. And there had been little prospect that the talks would have produced "adequate protections" for citizens. People deserved better protection than the talks had been likely to have produced, they said. The discussions, brokered by the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the body that oversees technology policy issues, began in February 2014. Nine separate privacy groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Center for Democracy and Technology, were invited. But the groups' letter said the companies involved had refused to accept they needed prior permission from people being identified by the technology."

SJP @DigitalAsian

Cloud DNA

Times of India reports that Amazon is in a race against Google to store data on human DNA, seeking both bragging rights in helping scientists make new medical discoveries and market share in a business that may be worth $1 billion a year by 2018.

Academic institutions and healthcare companies are picking sides between their cloud computing offerings - Google Genomics or Amazon Web Services - spurring the two to one-up each other as they win high-profile genomics business, according to interviews with researchers, industry consultants and analysts.

That growth is being propelled by, among other forces, the push for personalized medicine, which aims to base treatments on a patient's DNA profile. Making that a reality will require enormous quantities of data to reveal how particular genetic profiles respond to different treatments.

Already, universities and drug manufacturers are embarking on projects to sequence the genomes of hundreds of thousands of people. The human genome is the full complement of DNA, or genetic material, a copy of which is found in nearly every cell of the body.

SJP @DigitalAsian