Digital Feed - A2D Consulting

NATO Looks To Disruptive Technology To Keep Competitive Edge

11/14/2018

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Source: NTB Scanpix/Gorm Kallestad via REUTERS

NATO is looking at working with startups to boost innovation and maintain its competitive edge as its adversaries have begun to close NATO's advantage due to easily accessible emerging technologies. NATO is currently working on innovative projects such as delivering 3-D printed weapon parts by drone and NATO's Head of Transformation Command, General Andre Lanata, has explained that NATO is focusing on other areas such as connectivity, big data, quantum computing, artificial intelligence and logistics.

General Andre Lanata's comments came during a conference in Berlin this week where he also urged traditional arms manufacturers and startups to work with NATO. His command also hosted an "innovation challenge" for the third time which brought 10 small firms and startups together to pitch ideas for defeating drones in the air and on the ground.

Click here to read the full article.

Alibaba's Singles' Day Breaks Online Shopping Records

11/12/2018

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Source: Alibaba

Alibaba's Global Shopping Festival, also known as Singles' Day, sold $30.8 billion in goods over 24 hours across 230 countries. This year's online shopping record beat last year's record during the Global Shopping Festival of $25.3 billion by 27%, and easily topped the $5 billion in online sales that occurred in the United States during Black Friday. Artificial intelligence helped the 200,000 offline smart stores and 180,000 brands over the 24 hour period with sales forecasting, inventory management, pricing strategy, and product assortment. Alibaba CEO, Daniel Zhang, stated at the conclusion of the Festival that Alibaba will try to take the entire consumer retail market online.

Statistics:

20 seconds- within the first 20 seconds of the sale, gross merchandising volume broke $155 million.
1 min 30 seconds - within the first minute and thirty seconds, gross merchandising volume broke $1billion.
1 hour 1 minute- gross merchandise volume exceeded $10 billion within 1 hour and 48 seconds

For context, Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday generated last year a combined total of $14.49 billion.

The top five countries that sold to China during the Global Shopping Festival were Japan, the United States, Korea, Australia, and Germany.

Click here to read the full article and here to read about the technology portfolio enabling it all.

Why People Visit YouTube

11/8/2018

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According to research from the Pew Research Center, 51% of adult YouTube users use the video service to help them learn how to do new things, while 19% use the platform to help them decide whether to buy a product. Other key findings show that 81% of parents let their children (ages 11 or below) watch content on YouTube, while 34% allow their children to watch YouTube videos regularly. The study also conducted research into YouTube's video recommendation system and found that it recommends progressively longer and more popular videos to users.

The survey also highlights that although many users rely on the platform to help them understand events (19% of adult users reported the site was very important in helping them understand events happening in the world), around two-thirds of YouTube users reported that they find obviously untrue or false videos at least sometimes.

YouTube is currently the second most used search engine in the world after Google, and over 1.9 billion users log onto the platform every month.

Click here to read more about Pew Research Center's Survey.

Web Summit Begins Today

11/5/2018

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Source: Web Summit

The Web Summit kicks off tonight with the Opening Night Festival, which will begin with a speech from the inventor of the world wide web (www), Tim Berners-Lee. This year's summit is expected to welcome more than 70,000 participants from 170 countries to its combination of 25 different conferences. The technology summit will run from 5 to 8 of November and is expected to have a positive impact of 300 million to the Portuguese economy.

The Web Summit began in 2010 in Ireland, combining a focus on technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship. In 2016, the summit moved to Lisbon, Portugal where it will remain until 2028. Last year, the summit brought close to 60,000 participants together including 1,400 investors, 2,500 journalists and 1,200 speakers. In preparation for the increase in participants this year, both the location space and wifi capabilities have been increased.

Click here to read the full article and here for the Web Summit's website.

Uber Launches Monthly Subscription Service

10/31/2018

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Source: The Verge

Yesterday, Uber launched Ride Pass, a monthly subscription service that will be available in five cities across the United States: Austin, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando. The price of the subscription will be $14.99 a month in all cities except Los Angeles, where it will cost $24.99 a month. Buying into Ride Pass will allow Uber riders to lock in flat rates on all UberPool and UberX trips they take over that month, without being subjected to price increases from surge pricing, traffic or other external factors. Uber joins Lyft, another American ride hailing company who also released its subscription service this month, as ride hailing companies look to create incentives to prevent users from jumping to other apps searching for shorter wait times or cheaper fares.

For riders, Uber is trying to make this decision as easy and simple as possible with features such as auto-renewal and savings tracking, where riders who subscribe to Ride Pass will be able to see their savings (from locked in fares) in real time through the app. For drivers, Uber will cover the difference between the cost of the driver's time and distance driven and the locked in fares Ride Pass users receive ensuring that the savings riders receive have no effect on driver earnings.

Lyft's subscription service, called All-Access Plan, was rolled out nationally in the middle of October with a price of $299 per month. All-Access Plan provides subscribers with 30 rides with a cost of up to $15. If the ride happens to cost more than $15, the subscriber pays the difference. Lyft's announcement of the subscription service indicated that the service was intended to help its users get rid of their personal cars and rely solely on Lyft for the majority of their daily travel.

Lyft and Uber are both expected to go public in 2019.

Click here to read the full article.

Breakthrough Technologies Of This Year

10/29/2018

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MIT Technology Review has released its yearly list of 10 breakthrough technologies that will have a profound effect on our lives. This year's list includes: 3-D Metal Printing, Artificial Embryos, Sensing City, AI for Everybody, Dueling Neural Networks, Real Time Translation Earbuds, Zero-Carbon Natural Gas, Perfect Online Privacy, Genetic Fortune-Telling and Materials' Quantum Leap.

10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2018:

3-D Metal Printing - while 3-D Printing has been around for years, it is now becoming more and more accessible. Because of its ability to create complex parts that are stronger and lighter than more traditional manufacturing methods, wide spread adoption of the technology promises to change how manufacturers produce parts, even at mass-production levels.
Artificial Embryos - As advances in stem-cell research continue to unfold and show promise, the next step for some researchers is the creation of an artificial embryo. Scientists could use these artificially created embryos to study and investigate the earliest events of development.
Sensing City - Numerous smart city developments are underway including Toronto's Quayside project that brings together the Canadian government and Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs. The project's ambitions include using sensors to gather data and assist in technology, design, and policy decision making.
AI for Everybody - Amazon, Microsoft and Google are bringing machine learning tools based in the cloud within reach of a much broader audience. As AI transitions out of the technology industry it primary exists in now and into other industries, the transformation it will bring with it promises to result in huge economic boosts.
Dueling Neural Networks - Artificial intelligence has become very good at identifying things, such as people and objects, but providing them with the imagination to create new images has been much harder to solve. GAN, generative adversarial network, takes two neural networks trained on the same data set and pits them against each other to enable one to create images that are realistic enough that the second can no longer distinguish if the new image is a fake (generated by the other neural network) or real (similar enough to the data set it was trained on). Advances in this area of AI will give AI a deeper, independent understanding of the world.
Babel-Fish Earbuds - Google's Pixel buds can work with the Google Translate app and Google Pixel smartphones to allow communication between languages in close to real time.
Zero-Carbon Natural Gas - a company in Houston is testing a technology that generates power from natural gas while also capturing all the carbon dioxide that the process releases resulting in cheap (as cheap as current natural gas plants), carbon-free energy.
Perfect Online Privacy - Zero-knowledge proof is a tool that uses cryptographic protocols to allow users to prove personal details, such as being older than 18 years old, without having to reveal their actual birthday. The tool has a lot of promise within the financial industry, where it could allow users to transact anonymously.
Genetic Fortune-Telling - New DNA tests, known as polygenic risk scores, may be able to provide a prediction of the likelihood that a baby will have cancer or suffer a heart attack.
Materials' Quantum Leap - The power of quantum computing may give scientists enough computing power to more precisely design molecules. This ability could lead to innovations such as more efficient batteries or solar cells, and more effective drugs.

Click here to read the full article.

New Google Shortcuts

10/26/2018

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Source: Google

Google has now made it incredibly easy and quick to create documents using its G suite - users can now use the domain .new to make a new Google Doc, Slide, Sheet, Site, or Form. If you need a new document, you can just type the type of the document followed by .new into your browser. Here are a couple of the options for each G Suit app: "doc.new," "slide.new," "form.new," "site.new," "sheet.new."

Here is a list of all the shortcuts for each G Suite document:
Form-

form.new
forms.new

Site-

site.new
sites.new
website.new

Document-

doc.new
docs.new
document.new

Sheet-

sheet.new
sheets.new
spreadsheet.new

Slides-

slide.new
slides.new
deck.new
presentation.new

Click here to read the full article.

Apple Plans To Launch Global TV Subscription Service

10/25/2018

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Apple will launch a TV subscription service at the beginning of next year according to a report from The Information, a technology news website. The new TV subscription service will be available in over 100 countries worldwide and will offer access to both original content and network subscriptions such as Showtime and HBO. Apple has been investing heavily in original content over the past year, and its new TV subscription service will put it in direct competition with services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Current market leaders are HBO and Netflix, who have 140 million and 125 million subscribers respectively.

Other rumors also indicate that Apple's new TV subscription service may be offered free of charge to Apple device owners.

Click here to read the full article.

Uber Works

10/19/2018

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Source: The Verge/ Alex Castro

After initial testing in Los Angeles, Uber will begin testing an on demand staffing service called Uber Works in Chicago. The service will provide business partners with the ability to recruit short-term workers such as security guards, waiters and other temporary staff for according to the Financial Times. The new business unit, although still in trial mode, is one of many service expansions Uber is exploring outside of ride-hailing including food delivery, electric scooters, and freight hauling as prepares for its IPO next year.

Uber has diversified into several new service offerings in the last couple of years. Uber Eats, one of its new business units, was launched in 2014 and is already being valued at $20 billion by itself. Uber CEO, Dana Khosrowshashi, stated in May that Uber Eats is located in 250 cities around the world and brings in $6 billion per year in total bookings.

Uber is expected to IPO in the second half of 2019.

Click here to read the full article.

Volkswagen Targeting Online Sales By 2020

10/17/2018

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Volkswagen, in partnership with dealerships, will build a new sales platform by 2020 that "will handle the entire purchasing process through to contract conclusion, including financing, payment and even used car trade-ins." The new platform will allow Volkswagen to sell directly to customers online for the first time and will also enable over-the-air software updates for their electric "ID" family of vehicles. Volkswagen expects to launch mass production of new electric cars built using its new MEB platform by 2022 and has stated that it believes the "online business will make a key contribution to the development of the new sales model."

The new sales platform will work together with Volkswagen's current dealership network according to Volkswagen. In November, European dealerships are expected to sign a contract that will allow Volkswagen to launch these new services.

Rivals, like Tesla, are already offering over-the-air updates and direct online sales.

Click here to read the full article.