This is IOT,Big-Data related blog and news for
Future Technology: Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, IoT and Big Data
Augmented reality, Cryptocurrency, Exocortex, Machine vision, Quantum computing, Speech recognition, Virtual Reality
Note: This is a blog for future upcomming most important technology like IOT(Internet of things),Big data and Robot technology
The term of Unicorns has been known only for several years, but is already one of the most used word in the tech world. So why is that? Apart from that, we will also take a look at the most well-known & the most valuable Tech Unicorns of 2017, and see the predictions for the year 2018.
Top 10 tech decacorns of 2017
Take a look at the main decacorns of 2017 according to Techcrunch:
1. Uber San Francisco, California Transportation Services Valuation: $62 billion
2. ANT FinancialXihu District, Hangzhou, China Financial services Valuation: $60 billion
3. Didi ChuxingBeijing, China Consumer Internet Valuation: $50 billion
4. XiaomiBeijing, China Hardware Valuation: $45 billion
5. Airbnb San Francisco Lodging Services Valuation: $31 billion
6. SpaceX Howthorne, California Aerospace and defence Valuation: $21 billion
7. Palantir Palo Alto, California Data Analytics Software Valuation: $20 billion
8. ToutiaoBeijing, China Consumer internet Valuation: $20 billion
9. Wework New York City, New York, United States Real Estate Valuation: $20 billion
10. Lufax Shanghai, China Financial services Valuation: $18 billion
..and many-many others from all over the world.
Top 10 tech unicorns of 2017
1. Stripe San Francisco, California, United States Financial services Valuation: $9 billion
2. Spotify Stockholm, Sweden Consumer internet, music Valuation: $8 billion
3. Zhong An Shanghai, China Financial services Valuation: $8 billion
4. Dji Shenzhen, China Financial services Valuation: $8 billion
5. Koubei Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China Search Engine Valuation: $8 billion
6. One97 Communications Shenzhen, China Financial services Valuation: $8 billion
7. Cainiao Logistics Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China Transportation Valuation: $7 billion
8. Lyft Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China Transportation Valuation: $7 billion
9. Jiedaibao Beijing, Beijing, China Financial services Valuation: $7 billion
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals or people that are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.
The latest inventions in IoT are :
1. The Google Glass
Coupled with Big Data, Google Glass can work as a mobile repository to store and retrieve a patient’s information. Thanks to the information overlayed by Google Glass on the real world, the doctor will be aware of all your allergies, your medical history and possible drug interactions while visiting his patient, therefore making the diagnosis easier. Imagine a pair of Google Glass strapped to a microscope and then think of the possibility of detection in mobile pathological labs.
2. Adobe Smart Bag
Essentially, the Smart Bag pairs with a retailers mobile app, and tracks what goes inside of the bag. When the customer is shopping and puts items into the bag, the item is also added to the shopping cart in the mobile app. When the customer is ready to check out, they take out the internal bag (the bag has 2 layers) and exits the store. The technology (beacons and RFID) triggers the app to complete the payment.
3. Agriculture and Aviation
IoT has brought about revolutionary changes in fields of medicine, agriculture and aviation, among others. Medicine has greatly benefited from IoT with the invention of ingestible pill sensors and prescription bottles with built-in reminder of dosage amount and time.IoT shows the maximum promise in the field of food production. Farmers can keep themselves updated with information about soil quality and weather conditions with IoT solutions such as GPS-enabled sensors in farming devices.
4. App-enabled robots and drones
App-enabled robots and drones, have a smart contract, 3D cameras, etc. Rent a drone by the minute, put a specific app and have it solve specific problems. Put a wedding picture app and find the lady in the white dress. Put a roof problem detector app and find leaks in high buildings.Uavia is a good example.
5. Smart appliances
A smart home needs smart gadgets and appliances. Entertainment, security and utilities are areas offering ample room for market development next year, but appliances and in-home gadgets offer even more. Bosch is one of the names which could kick-start a year filled with smart appliances. The company is the main sponsor of the smart-home section of January's CES show too. Nest Labs, Philips, Belkin, Electrolux and others will be attending Las Vegas' annual technology show in January, as products such as the Vessyl smart cup launch to market. With almost every area of our lives destined to become smarter this year, be prepared for appliances to get the technology treatment and be smarter as a result.
Home automation (also known as smart home devices) such as the control and
automation of lighting, ventilation, air conditioning (HVAC), robotic vacuums,
air purifiers, ovens or refrigerators that use Wi-Fi for remote monitoring.
Wearable technology which includes smart watches, fitness trackers, VR
headsets and more…
Environment: IoT application technologies that have sensors can be used to
monitor air and water quality, soil or atmospheric conditions, and even the movements
of wildlife. The IoT devices can also be used in applications such as tsunami early-warning
systems to enable authorities to offer more effective responses and aid.
Utilities doing real time grid assessment from devices sitting on the grid
Logistics firms designing real-time visibility into location and condition of assets
Infrastructure: The IoT can also be applied to monitor and control operations of urban
and rural infrastructure such as bridges and railway tracks. IoT can help to schedule repair
and maintenance activities in a well-organized manner.
Manufacturers predicting when equipment will need maintenance Insurers increasing revenue through asset monitoring Medical and Healthcare: IoT devices can facilitate remote health monitoring and
emergency notification systems such as blood pressure and heart rate monitors.
Retail: Retailers creating more personalized in-store shopping experiences Banks providing better offers and more engagement via tellers and ATMs
It is often said, people do not buy product or services, but they do buy relations, stories and magic. That’s where the storytellers and influencers come in. Whenever something new, disruptive gets launched, there is always a bit of skepticism which hovers around it. Influencers are the frontrunners who lead the people’s imagination and curate their curiosity and do what they do the best – influence them.
“To be an influencer, you have to love people before you can try to lead them.” – John C. Maxwell
Stacey Higginbotham: A former writer for GigaOm and Fortune, Stacey is the founder of The Internet of Things Podcast, manages a weekly IoT newsletter and writes for The Wirecutter and PC Mag.She is one of the most prominent writers to look for irrespective of beginner or expert in the domain.
Jenny Fielding:
Jenny leads both the FinTech and Internet of Things accelerators. She is a keen investor and has been one of the most sought-after speaker in IoT domain.
Daniel Herscovici: Daniel is a general manager and senior vice president of Xfinity Home, Comcast's highly successful Smart Home platform which provides subscribers with a simplified yet elegant user experience.
Kristine Faulkner:
She is at the helm at leading Cox's Smart Home efforts and contributes to the growth of the growth of that business unit. She is a leader to follow as curated solutions begin to drive mass-consumer adoption. She is also one of the leading speakers in the tech conferences.
Elizabeth Mathes: She leads the IoT division of Home Depot. She's helped creating one of the most fascinating consumer offerings for smart home products and is helping raise awareness in the consumer markets.
Scott Harkins:
Scott Harkins is Vice President of Partner Development within Honeywell's Connected Home & Building organizations. He is behind the success for Honeywell's home security channel and to make Honeywell as the security leader in IoT.
Sarah Cooper: She is one of the frontrunner to Amazon's remarkable growth and success in IoT as GM of IoT solutions at Amazon Web Services. She is also at the helm of Vice-chair of the IoT Community.
Beth Comstock:
Beth Comstock has garnered her reputation in the Tech industry. She is responsible for GE's efforts to accelerate new growth, and she will lead the IoT initiative of GE from the front.
Jim Hunter:
Jim is the Chief Scientist and Technology Evangelist of Greenwave Systems, where he has oversight of technology, architecture, and innovation of the Axon platform. Jim has been a successful entrepreneur.
Matt Eyring:
Matt is a one of the phenomenal speaker to follow in IoT. He has impressively helped Vivint shift as a leader in smart home security in the dealer channel. He has got his reputation for challenging the established status quo and trying to innovate.
Charlie Kindel:
Kindel is the man behind the The Amazon Echo and Alexa voice assistant which were the first massive consumer hits in the Smart Home. By focusing on voice as the user interface, Kindel and Amazon have redefined how consumers engage their everyday lives.
Andrew Thomas:
Andrew pegged the deal and led from the forefront the SkyBell's $600,000 Indiegogo campaign in 2013, and has helped scale SkyBell by landing significant deals with big companies in the space. Andrew is an active IoT speaker, social influencer, and advisor.
Greg Kahn:
Greg Kahn is known for his smart and analytical mindset, his continuing and everlasting enthusiasm and activity in the IoT community. In his role as president and CEO of the Internet of Things Consortium he has been leading the growth of IoT community from the front.
Nate Williams:
He was CMO of 4Home, and was CRO at August Home. Nate is an active speaker, investor and advisor in IoT, where he advises and takes active part in investments in Roost, Matterport and Datascience.
Sridhar Solur:
He is driving innovation and product strategy for the Xfinity Home business for Comcast. He is known for his fascinating and mesmerizing speech and tremendous knowledge in IoT.
Michael Wolf:
He is the founder and chief analyst of NextMarket Insights, and host of the Smart Home Show - a top podcast in IoT.
Rob Martens:
He is currently serving as Schlage's Futurist and Vice President of Strategy & Partnerships. Rob is known for curating interesting and relevant content on IoT and shares his vision on stages.
Marwan Fawaz:
Marwan is CEO of Nest Labs and has taken the responsibility to take the company back to its previous reputation as a top inventor and innovator of smart products and services.
Mark Spates:
Mark is the apple’s eye for IoT innovation. He is currently leading the product development part of Google. He is the founder of Iotlist.co and formerly the Head of Connected Home Platform at Logitech.
Brenna Berman:
Chicago has made its mark in the history again for this lady. As acting Chief Information Officer of Chicago, Brenna is leading the city from the front to make it the example of IoT smart city in the world.
Quick quiz: what do you visualize when you hear the word robot? Some machine in human form, behaving like a human? Or perhaps one of the massive, spiderlike machines that assemble complex products ranging from automobiles to computers?
In reality, modern robotics follows both paths. However, in spite of the progress with humanlike robots, most business applications of the technology focus on machine forms that are specific to the task at hand, whether it be a Mars Rover or a medical robot assisting a surgeon.
There are exceptions to this rule, however: companies who focus on making robots as humanlike as possible, with the eventual goal of behavior so realistic it can actually fool people into thinking the machine is fully human.
To achieve such levels of verisimilitude, such robots must have sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) built in. For example, take Sophia, the creation of Hanson Robotics that Saudi Arabia recently granted citizenship to, in a lavish publicity stunt.
Sophia has the ability to carry on limited conversations, requiring AI-driven natural language processing. ‘She’ can also recognize faces and respond to interactions emotionally, both via tone of voice as well as through a complex set of facial expressions – all technologies that depend upon AI.
In many ways, however, Sophia is less about AI and more about theatrics. ‘Her’ creators have combined AI, robotics, and elements of show business to prove that a fake person can be sufficiently realistic to be appealing rather than repulsive. Not In Our Digital House
What they have not accomplished – and in fact, aren’t attempting to accomplish – is to create AI that can simulate human behavior in a way that solves true business problems.
Sophia the Robot at Web Summit 2017STEPHEN MCCARTHY/WEB SUMMIT.
What Do We Really Want from Human-Like AI?
In spite of decades of Hollywood influence, the real money in robotics today is in the massive armlike devices from industry. No witty banter, no subtle smiles here – instead, these machines focus on the tasks at hand.
When we talk about AI, however, we’re on shakier ground, as most of today’s applications of AI in business are not particularly humanlike. True, we have voice interactions like Siri, image recognition, and machine learning-driven predictions based upon crunching massive quantities of data – but if you think about it, these capabilities are only vaguely humanlike at best.
On the other hand, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – that is, true humanlike reasoning ability – is still well out of reach today. In the absence of AGI, then, what are the most advanced AI capabilities we can currently bring to bear to solve real business problems?
I recently spoke with Donald Thompson, Founder and CTO of AI-driven knowledge platform vendor Maana, to get his take on this question. “Maana supports decision making, reasoning, and answering questions,” Thompson explained. “We construct models that represent human expertise and combine them with data models in the context of optimizing a decision flow or equipment like an oil well.”
Where Sophia is able to mimic human expressions and conversations, Maana’s ability to mimic – or perhaps duplicate – human expertise provides the business value context that Sophia’s theatrics cannot.
The essence of Maana’s technology is what Thompson calls ‘digital knowledge.’ “Digital knowledge consists of models of the domain of business artifacts with the business goal in mind. These models digitize decision flows, and provide recommendations that help experts in the organization make better and faster decisions,” he explained.
The business artifacts in question could represent a wide variety of different types of information, from PDF documents to spreadsheets to emails to sensor data to information bottled up in various applications. From these artifacts, Maana is able to create data models, as well as computational models that mathematically model the human knowledge of a specific business process.
Given the rather philosophical questions about the nature of human knowledge, Maana puts a fine point on this conundrum. “We phrase every knowledge model as an answer to a business question,” Thompson said. “These are higher order questions, for example, ‘given the pump failure in a particular oil well, what are other oil wells with similar pumps?’”
The choice of oil wells in this example is no accident: Maana has found traction in the petroleum industry, listing companies such as Chevron CVX +0.66% Corporation, Royal Dutch Shell , and Saudi Aramco as customers as well as investors.
The reason that the oil business has taken to Maana’s AI-driven decision-making capability is due to the combination of the industry’s massive big data sets with its ability to distil its business goals into easily digested statements.
Thompson clarified the types of goals Maana’s technology targets. “The goals include minimization (for example, risks or costs) or maximization (for example, profits),” he said. “For example, given this list of constraints, what risks should we mitigate?”
In fact, Maana’s ability to interpret constraints gives the technology a leg up on modeling human expertise, as such expertise often boils down to dealing with constraints on a day-to-day basis.
For example, a person may know how to accomplish a goal, but also must know about all the various exceptions that might occur and how to deal with them. Such exceptions are a type of constraint.
Knowledge modeling in order to achieve certain goals can be thought of as decision support. “By decision support we mean that the technology can observe a particular domain, reason about the domain, justify and explain its reasoning, and then allow the user to hypothesize about different courses of action.”
The latter point is especially important: the technology does not generally make business decisions itself, but rather supports human decision making – in part by empowering people to simulate the results of different actions they may take.
Such decision support requires a mix of technical capabilities. “It’s a combination of natural language processing, constraint satisfaction, and simulation,” Thompson explained. “Maana adds constraint satisfaction and Bayesian probabilistic inference.”
The result is human-like reasoning, as different from simpler forms of AI like machine learning as the auto assembly robot is from Sophia. “Contrast Maana’s approach with machine learning, which is how to train machines to learn from data,” Thompson said. “Reasoning is the ability to answer a question.”
As with every vendor in the emerging AI marketplace, Maana’s technology will continue to improve over time. However, its ability to model human expertise to answer business questions in order to support mission-critical decisions gives the technology human-like characteristics that provide business value that other technologies cannot, the gimmicks and other theatrics of Sophia notwithstanding.
Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, Maana is an Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Stephen McCarthy/Web Summit.
Jason Bloomberg is president of industry analyst firm Intellyx.
Jason Bloomberg is a leading IT industry analyst, Forbes contributor, keynote speaker, and globally recognized expert on multiple disruptive trends in enterprise technology and digital transformation. He is founder and president of Agile Digital Transformation analy...
“Blockchainisation” is underway and here are 5 areas that will most like
be deeply affected by the technology.
We’re sure you’ve heard a lot about Blockchain and Bitcoin (check out this insane infographic for some cool, easy-to-digest facts).
But what makes Blockchain so special?
Here’s a quick overview:
1. Blockchain is Decentralized:
Blockchain runs on a global network of users’ computers. Each member contributes processing power to the whole, and the network doesn’t function properly without a constant influx of new miners.
2. It’s Public:
On Blockchain, everyone can see everything all the time–it’s 100% transparent.
3. It’s Encrypted:
Blockchain uses robust encryption to maintain virtual security. Aside from a strong external defense, there is no central database to hack in the first place.
5 ways the world will change thanks to #Blockchain technology
Throughout the day and every couple of minutes, Blockchain transactions, which are initiated by complex math problems that computers work together to solve, are checked, erased and stored in a block that is linked to the previous block, creating a chain, hence the name “Blockchain”.
This structure prevents any one user from modifying historical data.
If someone, for example, wants to modify data (say, to steal a Bitcoin), they’ll have to rewrite, in real-time, the entire Blockchain record–which is virtually impossible.
This is one of the things that makes Blockchain one of the most promising networking and currency technologies. If you consider how it can be combined with the latest advances in AI and the IoT, we are poised to change the world.
5 Ways Blockchain Will Change the World:
1. Taxes
Taxes are collected and then delivered to local governments or the state following a complex audit system that costs a lot of money and time to carry out.
Governments can use Blockchain technology to implement, track and receive taxes in real time. Blockchain may help streamline and even eliminate taxes as we know them–but that’s certainly further off.
In the meantime, start-ups are developing innovative solutions toward this direction.
For instance, Chainalysis, a company specialized in analyzing the Bitcoin Blockchain, is helping some clients, including the IRS and Europol, to identify Bitcoin tax cheaters.
2. Digital ID
United Nations stats show that globally over one 1 billion people cannot provide documented proof of their existence, which raises many social, cultural and political challenges.
ID2020is a global public-private initiative that seeks to remedy this situation. Microsoft and Accenture, at the last ID2020 summit held last June in New York, presented a prototype digital identification system based on Blockchain protocols.
Estonia issues e-residency cards for its residents, based on Blockchain technology. India also aims to use the technology to enhance the Aadhar registry.
3. Digital Advertising
Blockchain can solve many issues now inherent to digital advertising, such as those that come along with fraud and transparency.
The market of peer-to-peer advertising via Blockchain is taking shape.
Created by MetaX and DMA, adChainis an open protocol built on the Ethereum Blockchain.
adChain ensures that ad spending reaches where it needs to without going through a complicated ad supply chain, without fake views, and it favors efficiency, trust, and transparency between advertisers, publishers, and customers.
4. Transparency and Accountability
With tamperproof records, Blockchain protocols can handle more than virtual currency transactions.
Among the areas where Blockchain tech can be applied, there is the storage and exchange of documents, certificates or the setting up of contracts.
Decentralization, autonomy, security, and transparency of accounts are what Blockchain technology can offer to companies.
Blockchain offers a secure e-voting tool whose results are transparent and none can modify them afterward.
5. Smart Digital Assets
Investors could leverage Blockchain as a smart system to track their digital assets. Using the open ledger, they can prove ownership of the asset and track its movement.
In case of physical assets, a digital identity of the item can be recorded in real-time. This should help with physical transactions and shipping from getting items through foreign government customs to shipping items remotely.
For example, Portion is a startup that allows you to easily rent out unused goods, using fraud-resistant “smart-tags” to represent a physical item as a virtual asset and thereby authenticates ownership.
