Robots Enjoy Strongest First Quarter on Record in U.S. and Canada

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Robotic Industries Association:

North American robotics companies posted the strongest ever first-quarter results, according to the Robotic Industries Association (RIA), the industry’s trade group. Both robot orders and shipments achieved record levels.

An all-time high total of 9,773 robots valued at approximately $516 million were ordered from North American robotics companies during the first quarter of 2017. This represents growth of 32 percent in units over the same period in 2016, which held the previous record. Order revenue grew 28 percent over the first quarter of last year. Robot shipments also reached new heights, with 8,824 robots valued at $494 million shipped to North American customers in the opening quarter of the year. This represents growth of 24 percent in units and five percent in dollars over the same period in 2016.

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Data is Eating the World: A New Economy

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The Economist:

Data are to this century what oil was to the last one: a driver of growth and change. Flows of data have created new infrastructure, new businesses, new monopolies, new politics and—crucially—new economics. Digital information is unlike any previous resource; it is extracted, refined, valued, bought and sold in different ways. It changes the rules for markets and it demands new approaches from regulators. Many a battle will be fought over who should own, and benefit from, data…

The problem [with personal data] is the opposite to that with corporate data: people give personal data away too readily in return for “free” services. The terms of trade have become the norm almost by accident, says Glen Weyl, an economist at Microsoft Research. After the dotcom bubble burst in the early 2000s, firms badly needed a way to make money. Gathering data for targeted advertising was the quickest fix. Only recently have they realised that data could be turned into any number of AI services.

Whether this makes the trade of data for free services an unfair exchange largely depends on the source of the value of the these services: the data or the algorithms that crunch them? Data, argues Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, exhibit “decreasing returns to scale”, meaning that each additional piece of data is somewhat less valuable and at some point collecting more does not add anything. What matters more, he says, is the quality of the algorithms that crunch the data and the talent a firm has hired to develop them. Google’s success “is about recipes, not ingredients.”

That may have been true in the early days of online search but seems wrong in the brave new world of AI. Algorithms are increasingly self-teaching—the more and the fresher data they are fed, the better. And marginal returns from data may actually go up as applications multiply, says Mr Weyl.

See also:

Data is Eating the World: 163 Trillion Gigabytes Will Be Created in 2025

Data Is Eating the World: Enterprise Edition

Data Is Eating the World: Supply Chain Innovation

Data Is Eating the World: Self-Driving Cars

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Marketing Technology Landscape, 2017

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Scott Brinker:

  • There are now 5,381 solutions on the graphic, 39% more than last year
  • There are now 4,891 unique companies on the graphic, up 40% from last year
  • Only 4.7% of the solutions from 2016 were removed (and another 3.5% changed in some fundamental way — their name, their focus, or their ownership)
  • 6.9% are enterprises, with more than 1,000 employees or are public
  • 44.2% are private businesses, less than 1,000 employees or no funding data
  • 48.8% are investor-funded startups at any pre-exit stage

 

 

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Digital Tipping Points: Bits Replacing Atoms

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DigitalTippingPoint_Movies

 

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Timeline of AI and Robotics

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Source: PwC

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Data is Eating the World: The new face of globalization

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McKinsey:

The growth of trade compared with the growth of GDP in this decade has been half of that in the late 1990s and early 2000s, while global capital flows as a percentage of GDP have dropped precipitously since the 2008–09 financial crisis and have not returned to pre-crisis levels.

At the same time, there is evidence that other facets of globalization continue to advance, rapidly and at scale. Cross-border data flows are increasing at rates approaching 50 times those of last decade. Almost a billion social-networking users have at least one foreign connection, while 2.5 billion people have email accounts, and 200 billion emails are exchanged every day. About 250 million people are currently living outside of their home country, and more than 350 million people are cross-border e-commerce shoppers—expanding opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises to become “micro-multinationals.”

See also

Data Is Eating the World: Supply Chain Innovation

Data is Eating the World: 163 Trillion Gigabytes Will Be Created in 2025

Data Is Eating the World: Enterprise Edition

Data Is Eating the World: Self-Driving Cars

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Internet Tipping Point: Laptops and desktops overtake TVs as preferred devices for watching TV shows

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Accenture:

Signaling an accelerating shift in the digital video market consumer behavior, the percentage of consumers who prefer watching TV shows on television sets plummeted by 55 percent over the past year, from 52 percent to 23 percent, according to findings from the Accenture 2017 Digital Consumer Survey.

The global online survey of 26,000 consumers in 26 countries* reveals that consumers increasingly prefer to watch TV shows on devices such as laptop and desktop personal computers and smartphones. More than four in 10 consumers (42 percent) said they would rather view TV shows on a laptop or desktop, up from 32 percent in last year’s survey. Thirteen percent said they prefer watching TV shows on their smartphones, compared with 10 percent last year.

The decline in TV viewing over the past year tracks with a four-year trend. As recently as 2014, the survey revealed that nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of consumers preferred the TV set for viewing TV shows.

The most-recent findings, summarized in a new Accenture report titled Winning Experiences in the New Video World, show that only one in five consumers (19 percent) now prefer to watch sports games on their TVs, down from 38 percent in the prior-year survey.

eMarketer:

The digital video audience is growing, and this year the number of digital video viewers worldwide will climb to 2.15 billion.

Digital video viewership growth will remain steady, in part due to the increased availability of content created in local languages. The option to download videos will also spur some growth, as consumers seek alternatives to poor mobile connection streaming while on the go. The top video sources worldwide consist of OTT services like Hulu, Netflix and Vimeo and social media platforms Facebook and YouTube. Among the top players in China, where 569.0 million digital video viewers reside, are internet platform Sohu and video hosting site YouKu Tudou.

 

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Top 100 Websites in the U.S.

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Source: Vodien

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Types of Machine Learning Algorithms and When to Use Them

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Source: Hui Li

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10 Most Valuable Cryptocurrencies

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Business Insider:  According to CoinMarketCap.com, there are 796 cryptocurrencies currently trading around the world, with a combined market cap of $29,374,919,176.

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