- What happened when a professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant: To help with his class this spring, a Georgia Tech professor hired Jill Watson, a teaching assistant unlike any other in the world. Throughout the semester, she answered questions online for students, relieving the professor’s overworked teaching staff. But, in fact, Jill Watson was an artificial intelligence bot. Ashok Goel, a computer science professor, did not reveal Watson’s true identity to students until after they’d turned in their final exams. Students were amazed. “I feel like I am part of history because of Jill and this class!” wrote one in the class’s online forum. “Just when I wanted to nominate Jill Watson as an outstanding TA in the CIOS survey!” said another. Now Goel is forming a business to bring the chatbot to the wider world of education. While he doesn’t foresee the chatbot replacing teaching assistants or professors, he expects the chatbot’s question-answering abilities to be an invaluable asset for massive online open courses, where students often drop out and generally don’t receive the chance to engage with a human instructor. With more human-like interaction, Goel expects online learning could become more appealing to students and lead to better educational outcomes. At the start of this semester Goel provided his students with a list of nine teaching assistants, including Jill, the automated question and answering service Goel developed with the help of some of his students and IBM. Goel and his teaching assistants receive more than 10,000 questions a semester from students on the course’s online forum. Sometimes the same questions are asked again and again. Last spring he began to wonder if he could automate the burden of answering so many repetitive questions. As Goel looked for a technology that could help, he settled on IBM Watson, which he had used for several other projects. Watson, an artificial intelligence system, was designed to answer questions, so it seemed like a strong fit. To train the system to answer questions correctly, Goel fed it forum posts from the class’s previous semesters. This gave Jill an extensive background in common questions and how they should be answered. Goel tested the system privately for months, having his teaching assistants examine whether Jill’s answers were correct. Initially the system struggled with similar questions such as “Where can I find assignment two?” and “When is assignment two due?” Goel tweaked the software, adding more layers of decision-making to it. Eventually Jill reached the point where its answers were good enough. The system is only allowed to answer questions if it calculates that it is 97 percent or more confident in its answer. Goel found that was the threshold at which he could guarantee the system was accurate. There are many questions Jill can’t handle. Those questions were reserved for human teaching assistants. Goel plans to use Jill again in a class this fall, but will likely change its name so students have the challenge of guessing which teaching assistant isn’t human.
- Cowen: It Looks Even More Like Amazon Will Become America's Top Clothing Retailer in 2017: It's been a tough few weeks for retailers, and today is no different. But there is one exception: Amazon.com Inc. Whereas XRT, the SPDR S&P Retail ETF is down over 4 percent, Amazon shares are up over 2 percent. One driver of the retail selloff is Macy's, whose earnings report sent shares tumbling this morning after the retailer cut profit forecasts and missed analyst estimates on revenue. That's the opposite of what happened to Amazon last week when the web giantblew past analyst estimates. Given this recent action in the retail space, analysts at Cowen and Company are reiterating their call for Amazon to displace Macy's as the number one U.S. apparel retailer by next year. "[Our calculation] implies a gain in U.S. Apparel & Accessories market share from 5 percent to 14 percent," the team, led by John Blackledge write in their note, adding, "We have seen a continued shift away from more traditional retailers...In the first quarter of 2016, Amazon Apparel purchasers were up ~19 percent year-over-year, while Apparel purchasers fell ~1 percent year-over-year and ~5 percent year-over-year at Wal-Mart and Target, respectively." The team previously made this call in July of 2015, saying they were confident that Macy's would lose its top spot within two years. Looking at revenue from electronics and general merchandise at Amazon, the trend is obvious. Amazon has seen continued growth in its retail business with the expansion of its Prime offerings. Their stock prices have certainly reflected these trends. Amazon is up 65 percent over the past year, whiles Macy's is down more than 50 percent.
- Google’s answer to Amazon's Echo is code-named ‘Chirp’ and is landing soon: A product team at Google is working on a hardware device that would integrate Google's search and voice assistant technology, akin to the Amazon Echo, Recode has learned. Google's device will resemble its OnHub wireless router, according to several sources. We don't know if it has a name yet, but internally the project goes by "Chirp." Google declined to comment. The Information previously reported that Google was plotting a competing version of Echo, a portable speaker with voice assistant tech. Sources said the device is unlikely to launch next week at Google's I/O developer conference, but plans are for it to land at some point this year. We should, however, get a peek at it and its potential next week — voice search and intelligent personal assistance will occupy center stage at the company's splash show, along with virtual reality. Google has long had voice assistant tech in its Android phones — beckoned by the words "Okay, Google" — that many in the industry see as leading the pack. (People inside Google think so, too.) But it has yet to bake that into the home, a key growing marketing for Google and its rivals. Its OnHub router, released last summer, does not have voice recognition capabilities. Amazon, on the other hand, has moved headlong into the home with Echo. One analyst estimated that Amazon has sold three million units. And Echo is collecting the type of data — what consumers search for, listen to and buy, and how they talk to machines — that Google loves. Amazon has long been considered a big threat to Google's core business as web and mobile app users go to the online retailer for product searches.
- Amazon Introduces 2 Alexa Voice-Controlled Devices: Amazon’s Alexa is gaining new powers, and a couple of new looks, too. Amazon, the Internet retailer, on Thursday announced two new siblings for the Echo, the voice-controlled household assistant that people address as “Alexa” and that became a surprise hit for the company last year. One new product, Amazon Tap, is a slimmer, shorter, portable version of the Echo. Rather than requiring an electrical wall connection, the Tap runs off a rechargeable battery. It connects with phones and the Internet through Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. The Tap acts as an ordinary wireless speaker for a phone, but it also provides Alexa on the go. People can ask about weather and traffic, ask for the news, tell it to play a song from a streaming service, or do any one of dozens of other tasks. The device, which will begin shipping at the end of the month, will sell for about $130. Amazon also announced the Echo Dot, essentially an Echo without that device’s powerful speaker. The Dot, which will sell for about $90, looks like a hockey puck, and is meant to provide Alexa’s voice functions for existing speaker systems. The Dot connects to those speakers either through a wire or over Bluetooth; after that, it functions as another Echo. Dot shipments also willbegin at the end of March. Sales will initially be limited to people who already own an Echo or one of Amazon’s Fire TV devices — a Dot buyer will have to ask Alexa to order one. The new devices suggest that Amazon has an expansive vision for the Echo, which looked like an experiment for the company when it was introduced in late 2014. The company has not provided sales data for the device, but it has said that sales exceeded its expectations and that customer reviews are rhapsodic. Amazon appears to have increased investment in the device — it keeps adding new features and capabilities to Alexa, and this year it ran Super Bowl ads about the gadget.
- EBay Banks on Bar Codes for a Comeback: Hoping to outgrow its image as a glorified garage sale and move up in Google searches, EBay is turning to technology developed 70 years ago: the bar code. The machine-readable symbol that keeps supermarket lines moving is helping EBay manage vast amounts of data associated with the 6 billion products—from smartphones to video games, handbags to tires—listed at the online marketplace each year. Merchants will be able to enter a full description of a sales item by using a smartphone camera to scan its Universal Product Code. EBay reads the scan and automatically lists the item’s specifications. Before, every detail, including brand, model, and dimensions, was entered manually. UPCs are a central part of what EBay calls its “structured data initiative,” started in June, to organize items into a catalog that shoppers can easily search using filters such as price, features, and condition. The switch started with auto parts and accessories, one of EBay’s fastest-growing categories. The UPC is also used to call up consumer reviews and product images, which create a degree of permanence on EBay that search engines will reward with better placement. EBay says the code provides a sufficient baseline of information because 80 percent of all products sold there are new. A key goal is to standardize the amount and type of information that merchants list. The initiative will eventually expand to most items on the site.So far, some merchants like the change. Quick Ship Electronics, which sells consumer devices on EBay, had some desktop computers and laptops languishing in its inventory. Once the company entered the UPCs on EBay’s catalog, the items sold within days, CEO Jordan Insley says.
- HP Enterprise's revenue, profit beat estimates: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co, which houses former Hewlett-Packard Co's corporate hardware and services division, reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue and profit, helped by strength in its hardware business. Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (HPE) shares were up 6.4 percent at $14.47 in extended trading on Thursday. Revenue in HPE's enterprise group business, from which it derives more than half of its total revenue, rose about 1 percent to $7.1 billion in the first quarter ended Jan. 31, from a year earlier. The company's revenue fell to $12.72 billion from $13.05 billion.
- Apple supplier Broadcom to slash 1,900 jobs globally: Chipmaker Broadcom Ltd, the company created following the merger of Avago and Broadcom, said it would cut about 1,900 jobs globally across its businesses. Shares of Broadcom, which also supplies to Apple Inc, were up 8 percent at $148.20 in extended trading on Thursday. The company said it expects to take charges of about $650 million related to the job cuts through 2018. Avago completed its $37 billion deal for Broadcom last month. Revenue for the legacy Avago business fell 4 percent to $1.77 billion in the three months ended January 31.
- Snapchat Raises $175 Million From Fidelity at Flat $16 Billion Valuation: Snapchat has raised $175 million in new venture funding from Fidelity at the same $16 billion valuation it raised at back in May, according to a source familiar with the deal. That means Snapchat has now raised around $1.4 billion in total. The Wall Street Journalfirst reported the new funding. A flat valuation isn’t usually a great sign, but the raise comes at a time when lots of tech companies — including Jawbone and Foursquare — are raising down rounds, or taking money at a lower valuation than their last fundraising. In that vein, this investment doesn’t look bad.
- Facebook Messenger adds music, starting with Spotify song sharing: First came the Transportation hub with Uber, and now Facebook Messenger is launching “its very first music integration” with Spotify. Inside the Messenger “More” section in chat threads, all iOS and Android users will now find a Spotify option. Tap it and they’ll be shuttled into Spotify’s app where they can “Search for something to share.” Once they select a song, artist or playlist, they’ll be popped back to Messenger with the option to share the photo of the cover artwork. When a friend taps that photo, they’ll be bounced over to Spotify to listen.If Messenger can become a richer social layer connecting Spotify users, it could inspire deep conversations about music, boosting its engagement. That generates platform lock-in and potential monetization opportunities for Facebook. And for Spotify, Messenger will provide virality that could help it fend off Apple Music and convince more non-streamers of its value.
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- Marketers Will Drool Over Facebook’s New Signup Ads That Auto-Fill Your Email Or Number: Businesses desperately want your email address, but it’s annoying to enter it on mobile. Cue Facebook’s latest News Feed ads. A marketer can buy an ad asking for you to sign-up for a newsletter or request a sales call, and with two-taps you can auto-fill your email address, phone number, or other info you’ve registered with Facebook. Facebook is testing these “Lead Ads” with a small group of businesses around the world to gain feedback before considering rolling them out. Google has tested similar contact form ads for years, but they always required users to manually enter their info. To make Facebook’s ads privacy-friendly, Facebook won’t just hand your info over. You have to click the call-to-action button like “Subscribe,” and then “Submit” your info once you’ve reviewed what was auto-filled. Users can edit that info inside the ads, and businesses only get what’s voluntarily submitted. From there, advertisers can only use the data in accordance with a mini-privacy policy they embed in the ad, and can’t resell it to anyone else. Rather than ads that lead you offsite to fill out sign-up forms, it’s pulling that experience into the News Feed, so when you’re done, you keep right on social networking. Removing the click away and manual data entry could drastically boost conversion rates on these kinds of ads, making them easier to sell at higher prices.
- Alibaba affiliate launches Internet bank for small enterprises: Alibaba's financial affiliate launched on Thursday Internet bank MYbank, targeting the small- and medium-sized Chinese enterprises that have struggled to obtain credit from major financial institutions. MYbank, which is 30-percent owned by Alibaba-linked Ant Financial Services Group, has 4 billion yuan ($644 million) of registered capital and will offer loans of up to 5 million yuan. It will only be able to take in deposits when regulators approve a facial recognition technology that allow its customers to remotely open bank accounts, an Ant Financial spokeswoman told Reuters. MYbank follows in the footsteps of Alibaba arch-rival Tencent Holdings Ltd, which began trial operations of its WeBank, China's first online bank, in January. Credit conditions have remained tight for SMEs, despite a series of policy easing, as banks avoid the companies worst hit by an economic slowdown. State-owned banks have also avoided customers such as farmers and smaller businesses because of the difficulties in assessing their credit worthiness and they have little to offer as collateral.
- Clashes Erupt Across France as Taxi Drivers Protest Uber: Irate taxi drivers blocked roads, burned tires and attacked drivers who they thought were working for Uber, the ride-hailing company, during a day of protests Thursday that disrupted Paris and slowed traffic to a crawl. Fights broke out on streets, a couple of cars were burned and travelers were frustrated all over Paris and in major cities elsewhere in France, where the labor battle snarled several cities’ streets. “Economic terrorism” is the favored term of Parisian taxi drivers for Uber’s lower prices, flexible hours and the way it is operating outside French law. In France the UberPop service is illegal. It allows anyone who wants to become a driver to sign up without a professional chauffeur license and to pick up fares through the Uber smartphone app. Other Uber services are permitted under strict conditions, and the company is contesting the constitutionality of parts of the law limiting UberPop. The company has instructed its drivers to keep working. The French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, who met Thursday evening with the taxi unions, deplored the violence, but saved his most angry words for Uber. He said the company behaved with “arrogance” in its flouting of French law and declared that “the government will never accept the law of the jungle,” referring to Uber’s stark form of competition.
- Amazon wants the Echo to be your personal robot butler: Amazon's fuller ambitions for the Echo and its Alexa cloud-based voice software have become a little clearer. The company announced Thursday that it is opening up the system to developers, so that anyone can design their own programs to work with the sleek cylindrical in-home assistant. The company announced that its new developer's kit will make it easy for programmers to work with the device, even without previous knowledge of how to work with voice-recognition systems. That means amateur and professional developers alike can make programs for themselves. That means they could make custom commands for smart appliances such as thermostats and sprinklers, or custom programs that work with Web sites so you can get news updates fed to your Echo. It also means Amazon's set up the Echo to potentially be the central point from which you run your whole life. The Echo itself can't vacuum your home, but it could theoretically tell your vacuum when to start going. It may not do your dishes, but it can prompt your dishwasher to fire up as well. So while it won't be your robot maid, it could theoretically be your robot butler. Earlier this week, Amazon began selling the Echo widely -- it had previously been an invite-only device. Those moves set Amazon up a little more solidly as a competitor to Apple and Google, which have also laid out ambitions to create hubs for the smart homes of the future. Earlier this week, Apple released a new set of home-related prompts that will work with its Siri voice assistant for individual smart devices -- "turn on the coffee maker" -- as well as for groups of smart devices. So you can tell Siri to "turn off the upstairs lights," for example, if you want to save a little energy while your family is gathered in the living room.
- IBM Pushes Networking and Research to Catch Rivals in the Cloud - Mulls India Data Center: IBM will expand the networking services available through its SoftLayer cloud technology, trying to catch up with deep-pocketed rivals. IBM researchers and engineers are now making regular trips to SoftLayer’s headquarters in Dallas to discuss product plans and get educated about cloud operation, said Marc Jones, SoftLayer’s chief technology officer. Increasing cloud revenue is critical for IBM. It has tried to boost sales for operations like cloud computing and data analytics but that hasn’t been enough to make up for declines in longstanding operations -- such as services and hardware -- and revenue lost from divestitures. The initiative comes almost two years after the Armonk, New York-based company acquired SoftLayer for $2 billion to help IBM compete against Google, Microsoft and Amazon. SoftLayer also plans to open a data center in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and is looking at a location in India.
- Uber growing 40% month-over-month in India: Uber’s Asia Head: Uber may have had its share of challenges in the Indian market, but the ride sharing app has been growing at over 40 per cent month-over-month here. In fact, Bangalore and Kolkata are some of the fastest growing cities for Uber globally, Eric Alexander, Head of Business, Asia, Uber told Techcircle. The team at Uber India has their work cut out. The regulatory overhang over Uber, which started after a passengers’ sexual assault by an Uber driver in December, continues to play out. It has been facing ban calls in Delhi and other places. Earlier, it came under the RBI scanner over its payment system which automatically debited a user’s credit card after a ride.
- Amazon Puts a Store on Wheels, Continues to Flirt With Physical Retail: Amazon continues to explore new ways to bridge the gap between online and offline retail, even if the most recent example seems stunt-ish. The company today is introducing the Amazon Treasure Truck in Seattle, which will carry a limited quantity of one product each day that shoppers can order on Amazon’s app and then collect from the truck at a designated pickup location. The company said the truck will feature hard-to-find, heavily discounted or limited edition products and food, ranging from paddle boards to beach bikes to steak — yes, steak. The Treasure Truck introduction comes as Amazon flirts with physical retail: Amazon product vending machines have popped up in some airports, and a recent patent application lays out a vision for a new kind of technologically advanced retail store.
Stripe doubled its valuation to $3.5B; payment start-up that partners with Apple Pay, Alipay, Facebook, Twitter: Stripe, an e-commerce start-up based in San Francisco, announced on Tuesday that it had raised a new $70 million round in venture capital. The round, which includes Sequoia Capital and Thrive Capital, values Stripe at $3.5 billion, twice the amount the company was valued at less than one year ago. The company, which was founded by brothers, John and Patrick Collison, in 2009, offers payment processing services for small and medium-size businesses that want to sell items online. It competes with the likes of companies like PayPal, which has long dominated the online payments industry. The company has also secured partnerships with Facebook and Twitter — which allow for users to buy things directly inside of these social platforms — and recently announced a deal with Alipay, one of the largest e-commerce platforms in China. Stripe plans to use its new capital to continue to add to its existing staff of 180 employees, and push harder into international markets. It also plans to bolster the set of tools it offers to developers who use Stripe to process payments for their businesses. More here and here.
IBM signs $1.25B cloud deal with WPP, and differentiates with hybrid focus: IBM seeks to differentiate its offering by focusing on hybrid clouds, which mix together the private, on-premise computer systems for which it has long been known with newer public-facing Internet, mobile and analytics systems, allowing clients to move existing systems to the cloud at their own pace. This hybrid approach means companies can wait for years before they consider moving their most sensitive core financial systems to the cloud computers. It also gives them the option of never having to move. Secondly, European clients demand that their data remain stored locally in European data center, a requirement IBM has met by building seven public cloud data centers across Europe in London, Amsterdam, Paris and one in Germany, with another to follow there shortly.
Tumblr adds action buttons - simpler than Twitter buy button, but no payment integration: Tumblr, which has apparently overtaken Instagram as the fastest-growing social media property — has today announced a test of a new feature that will give it more interactivity, and more of a social commerce spin. Users that post links from a selection of sites — Etsy, Artsy, Kickstarter and Do Something — will now automatically see action buttons appear in the top right corner of the posts for people to “buy”, “browse”, “pledge”, or “do something”. For now, the actions are limited to these four sites. Down the road, if Tumblr decides to integrate the buttons into links from a wider range of properties — taking in e-commerce behemoths like Amazon and eBay, for example — it could feasibly become much more of a competitor against the likes of Pinterest, Facebook and others, positioning Tumblr not just as a place to consume content but to transact, too. the buttons on Tumblr are somewhat reminiscent of the buttons that Twitter has been adding to Tweets,but Tumblr’s buttons are much more simple for anyone (not just businesses or power users) to create — they come up literally when you a copy/paste of a link. And while Twitter has integrated with payments companies to underpin its own buy button, Tumblr’s implementation is, well, a bit more rough and tumble. It’s unclear, for example, if Tumblr is getting an affiliate cut on any traffic that it sends to these sites as a result of the button. If anything, it feels more like Tumblr has added these buttons to test the waters, looking at how such a feature might potentially get monetised in the future, perhaps as an ad unit for businesses using the button. The offering is desktop only — not mobile.
Smart home-audio market continues to heat up - Sonos raises $130M: After Amazon's launch of Echo, and Apple's purchase of Beats, Sonos, in the smart home audio business since 2002, just raised $130 million, according to an SEC filing. The funding adds to Sonos’ previous $325 million, bringing it to around $455 million. That makes it a very, very well capitalized startup. It’s so big that probably no one but Google or Apple could afford to acquire it. Considering Apple’s personal audio buyout of Beats’ headphones business, and Google’s invasion of the smart home, either could be a smart alternative to an IPO for Sonos. Sonos has been steadily improving its core product — home stereo systems where each room can be separately controlled to wirelessly play music from online and local sources. It ditched its proprietary controller to let you use iOS and Android devices as remotes, and eliminated the need for its “Bridge” gadget you had to plug into your wireless router. Alongside Spotify, Pandora, iTunes, Deezer, Sirius XM, and your own music library, Sonos recently added support for SoundCloud and Google Music. What’s left is to become a household name. Sonos has already begun buying expensive commercials on primetime music TV shows like The X Factor. It’s also running huge outdoor ad campaigns on the sides of buildings in Europe
Amazon quietly launched Echo, a voice-controlled smartspeaker with integrated voice-ordering from Amazon: Initial reactions are mixed at best: Echo is priced at $199, Amazon said on its website today. Members of Amazon’s Prime fast-shipping program can purchase the gadget for $99 for a limited period. With Echo, Amazon can plant a voice-activated device in homes that lets users easily order things from the Web retailer by adding it to their shopping lists via voice command and later confirming the purchase through a companion app. Yet it’s unclear if consumers will see enough benefits and convenience to embrace another piece of hardware. “It seems like an odd and not-very-useful product,” said Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The consumer doesn’t need yet another device in their home that replicates what they already have on their phone.” Amazon introduced Echo with little fanfare, simply putting up a Web page about the device.
Despite splashy new investments and Alibaba, SoftBank is hurting from its Sprint investment: A 15 percent drop in SoftBank’s shares this year suggests investors have concerns about its shorter-term prospects. The company this week reduced its annual operating profit outlook by 10 percent, citing mounting losses at Sprint. Its 80 percent ownership of Sprint is worth about $15.5 billion, less than the $22 billion SoftBank paid last year. Sprint’s shares have slumped 54 percent in New York this year. After the company reported its 11th straight quarter of subscriber losses this week, the stock fell 21 percent in the last two days alone. In addition to Sprint, and the the 32% stake in Alibaba, SoftBank owns 36% of Yahoo Japan Corp. (4689) and 40% of GungHo. Those stakes are worth $8.6 billion and $1.8 billion, respectively, according to its website.
Location-based audience targeting is used by 18% of US mobile retailers (set to double in a year); Geo-location could turn help offline retailers fight back against online: In category after category, Amazon has steadily eroded the market share of traditional bricks-and-mortar retail chains, which seem to be in a state of irreversible decline. Much of the online giant’s competitive advantage is based on its access to and mastery of rich customer data. Traditional retailers know relatively little about their customers, unless they have a loyalty card and actually buy something – and even this knowledge comes late, after a purchase is made. They have no way to cross sell, recommend new products, or target advertising. Unlike Amazon, they can’t tell if a potential customer visits the store or passes by it without buying anything. But all that is about to change because traditional retail is starting to wake up to the potential of geolocation, which is giving the new wave of data analytics companies ways to help bricks-and-mortar retailers make up for the data deficit. A separate analysis finds that 18 percent of US mobile marketers plan to use iBeacon technology to target consumers this year. "We expect that to double next year," she said.
