Could a Robot Be Your Next Customer? Is Tik Tok Spying On Americans And Why Is Apple So Silent When It Comes To AI?
Welcome to trending hashtags for Friday, March 17thth,
I’m your host Jim Love, CIO of IT World Canada and TechNewsday in the US – here’s today’s top tech news.
One of the biggest customer growth areas, in fact a megatrend according to leading industry analyst Gartner Inc. is… machines.
This is correct. In a new book titled When Machines Become Customers, authors Don Schebenriff and Mark Rascino predict that machine customers will be involved in a wide range of business and even consumer purchases.
“The machine client era has already begun,” said Schebenrief. “There are more machines on the planet with the ability to act as shoppers than humans. Today, there are more than 9.7 billion installed IoT devices, including monitoring devices, surveillance cameras, connected cars, smart lighting, tablets, smartwatches, smart speakers, and connected printers., In each of these there is a continuous improvement in the ability to analyze information and make decisions. Every IoT Enabled Product A can become Customer. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2027, 50 percent of people in advanced economies will have an AI personal assistant doing work for them every day.
This new machine presents the customer one of the biggest new growth opportunities of the decade, And according to the authors, it will eventually be more important than ever with the advent of digital commerce.
The impact will be felt across the enterprise. Everyone from legal to CIO to marketing staff needs to rethink what a customer is and how to best understand their needs. Human resources and other sectors will have to rethink how machine customers will affect their organizations.
The authors also note that “what the machine customers of each stage have in common is that they will make decisions differently from humans”. Three ways, ”said Schiebenreiff. ,They are logical and will make decisions based on rules that may or may not be Don’t be transparent Second, they can also process large amount of information. Finally, machines focus on completing tasks efficiently and without emotion, and they cannot be swayed by ‘fun and eat’.
Get ready for a new line where – do you want to grab after work drinks – Want to meet me at the USB charging station?
We’ll post a link where you can Download a Sample ChapterOr you can get the book on Amazon Kindle.
And on a similar note, to those who think drone delivery is just a big idea, it’s already here and it’s on the rise.
An article in Axios states that “Zipline and Wing, two of the world’s leading drone delivery companiesare ramping up their operations in preparation for a wider US deployment beginning next year.
Drone delivery has been successfully deployed in Africa and is already available in some US cities, but it is limited and the Federal Aviation Administration needs to develop regulations for flying drones “outside the operator’s site”. .
Zipline co-founder and CEO Keller Rinaudo Clifton called it “the closest thing to teleportation ever created” and claimed it was a “truly magical autonomous logistics system” that “serves all people equally, no matter where they are”. Ho” will provide the service.
Aphabet, the Google parent that just unveiled its automated Wing delivery network, is hoping to deploy its drones “as efficiently as Uber dispatches drivers.”
Zipline’s system, which has made more than 500,000 autonomous deliveries, consists of a “mothership” that looks like an aircraft but uses rotors to fly. It can hover silently about 300 feet above its destination. It then releases a droid from its belly on a tether. The droid has sensors that allow it to make precise deliveries to “a stoop, a patio or even a picnic table”. The perfect system for congested areas.
Even Droids Are Loaded Down A Slopee while the drone is on its charging station. Or for remote pickup, they can set up stations from which droids can load automatically.
Drones using electric motors are capable of flying up to 38 kilometers or 24 miles between charging docks – while using a much smaller carbon footprint than any delivery vehicle.
Full service is expected to launch early next year, so when your package arrives on time and without traffic delays, you’ll be able to say, “These are the droids we’ve been looking for.”
Source: axios
TikTok spied on US journalists?
The FBI and Justice Department are investigating Tik Tok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance for using the app to spy on American journalists, including the reporter who broke the story today at Forbes.
According to the reporter’s sources, the US Attorney for the Easter District of Virginia has issued a subpoena to ByteDance, seeking information about efforts to access private data containing the location of US journalists.
Forbes first reported the surveillance of journalists in the US by ByteDance in October last year, when the company was trying to find internal leaks that exposed the company’s links with China.
At the time, a ByteDance spokesperson confirmed and decried it:
“We have strongly condemned the actions of the individuals have been found to be involved, and are no longer employed by ByteDance. Our internal investigation is still ongoing, and we will cooperate with any official investigation when we are assigned.”
TikTok declined any comment.
This is the first report from the federal government investigating ByteDance’s surveillance practices, according to a Forbes reporter.
In a related story today, Axios reports that the Biden administration has tiktok warned That ByteDance could be banned from the US if it doesn’t sell its stake in the US version of the app. The Trump administration had given permission for TikTok to operate provided it stored its data with a US company and forwarded to Oracle. But apparently, perhaps because of the investigation mentioned in Forbes, this is no longer enough.
TikTok is one of the most popular apps in the world. It has over 100 million US users. Any sanctions would have a huge impact and would lead to a significant escalation in already strained relations between the US and China.
Mozilla has a new feature for Firefox that it hopes will put an end to spamming and online tracking.
Firefox Relay, launched in beta in August of 2020 as an extension, will let users hide email addresses when they sign up for accounts on websites. This meant that no one could get your real email address – only a disposable alias.
With the new integration, there is no need to visit a separate management dashboard to generate a nickname. Firefox Relay will prompt to use an existing alias or create a new one. while you are on the webpage.
Messages with aliases are automatically forwarded to the user’s existing email, so that users can take advantage of all the website’s services while protecting their privacy and identity. Nicknames can be removed if they are abused or spammed.
Mozilla claims that Firefox Relay has prevented more than two million unwanted messages from arriving in user email accounts.
Other benefits include automatic removal of trackers from emails.
Users must sign up for the service, which has a free and paid version. The seamless integration is only applicable to certain websites and the service will be gradually rolled out to users, But Mozilla hopes to have all users and websites covered by the end of the year.
Source: techradar
Here is some news that is not really news, but a question. Do you wonder what happened to Apple in the midst of the AI extravaganza?
Last month, Apple held an internal event focused on AI and large language models. And in a New York Times story recently that people working on Siri are constantly testing language generating concepts” Apple otherwise remained silent as others like Microsoft, Google have launched new AI offerings.
Any Siri user will realize that it is not as smart as Amazon’s Alexa. They have trouble with many questions and have a real problem with pronunciation or any participial order or sentence.
In an interview with The New York Times, former Apple engineer John Burke, one of the people who worked on Siri, has reportedly said that development of Apple’s assistant has been slow due to “clunky code”. This, according to the same report, made it difficult to pursue “even basic feature updates”.
One of the major problems is that Siri relies on a huge database of words and, unlike generative AI models, This database needs to be recreated and reloaded when there is a changes are made. Obviously, this could take weeks.
It’s a clunky solution for a company that sees itself as the leading edge of user-oriented design. In fairness, Apple has been using AI features for some time to process and edit photos, including removing and adding backgrounds and even objects for biometric security. and even added karaoke to Apple Music,
But there’s no doubt that the company is catching up in the world of big language models. Are they working on their model? Or they will try to adopt some existing models. Whatever they do, you can bet it’s going to be interesting. Apple isn’t always first to a market, but they usually make an impact when they do.
Source: techcrunch
And finally, the product that just won’t die — will it finally die?
We all remember the Google Glass fiasco of 2012. Launched with much fanfare, these glasses were sure to keep us hooked. The smartphone was, according to Google – doomed!
But somehow never took the glasses. That crappy Clark Kent look was just too nerdy for nerds. After a short time on the market, they tarnished and disappeared.
But like that villain in a horror movie, and with all the hubbub about the metaverse and augmented reality, Google has brought them back, after buying a Canadian company. Second time lucky?
apparently not. It appears that Google has given up for the second time and according to a support page on March 15thSupport for the new Glass Enterprise Edition will end on September 15thth2023. System images will remain online until April 1, 2024, and on that auspicious day, users may be, as The Register reported, “in the dark.”
No one at Google is saying what killed the second arrival of Google Glass, but given the recent layoffs and staffing reductions, it’s quite possible that they weren’t profitable enough or that a CEO saw it as an unnecessary Said “Science Project”.
But Google Glass isn’t the only failure in this area. Microsoft’s “HoloLens” found some limited use but failed with its biggest customer, the US Department of Defense. While they planned to roll out thousands of these devices out there There were problems. The delay and perhaps the fact that they allegedly failed user acceptance testing, making soldiers physically ill while using them, led Congress to cancel the program.
Another one bites the dust And we are left with a dilemma. I can’t use Oculus, because Zuckerberg is apparently a supervillain – so what am I going to do now to hide my secret identity?
That’s the top tech news for today
Can link to these stories The article was posted at itworldcanada.com/podcasts. You can also find more great stories and more in-depth coverage at itworldcanada.com or Technewsday.com in the US.
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I’m your host Jim Love – have a wonderful Friday!
