Year: 2017 (Page 1 of 4)

Scoring news stories is hard​

Frederic Filloux dives into some research and unique challenges the News Quality Scoring project faces. A worthy project to benefit producers and consumers, the NQS “is aimed at assessing the value-added deployed by a media for a given news coverage in terms of resources, expertise, thoroughness of the process, and ethical guarantees.” Read More

True AI is both logically possible and utterly implausible

Wonderful and witty example of a philosopher rescuing us from a current confusion.

… It is like a two-knife system that can sharpen itself. What’s the difference? The same as between you and the dishwasher when washing the dishes. What’s the consequence? That any apocalyptic vision of AI can be disregarded. We are and shall remain, for any foreseeable future, the problem, not our technology. So we should concentrate on the real challenges. By way of conclusion, let me list five of them… Read More

1 million software companies by 2027?

Consolidation does not necessarily mean shrinkage ― the CMS market is a perfect example of one just kind of software company. The idea is not as crazy as it may sound. Read More

Software 2.0

This is a bit technical but will help you understand the types of applications where you’ll need machine learning to be competitive, which “at the very least involve anything to do with images/video, sound/speech, and text” (managing unstructured data or CMS 2.0!) and what kinds of developer skills are required.

I sometimes see people refer to neural networks as just “another tool in your machine learning toolbox”. They have some pros and cons, they work here or there, and sometimes you can use them to win Kaggle competitions. Unfortunately, this interpretation completely misses the forest for the trees. Neural networks are not just another classifier, they represent the beginning of a fundamental shift in how we write software. They are Software 2.0. Read More

Also…

Thankfully still plugging along… HTML 5.2 is a W3C proposed recommendation via W3C

Since we are waxing philosophical this issue… On software development, language games, tech adoption and the death of the author via RedMonk

Yay! Millennials flocking to pay for trusted news sources via Politico

The prediction season starts…Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2018

The Gilbane Digital Content Conference

The Gilbane Digital Content Conference is focused on content and digital experience technologies and strategies for marketing, publishing, and the workplace.

Conference: November 28–29 ● Workshops: November 30
Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel

Frank Gilbane’s Gilbane Advisor curates content for content, computing, and digital experience professionals. More or less twice a month. See all issues

Martech & marketing orgs

Scott Brinker looks at two surveys on how modern marketing organizations are re-structuring to manage marketing technology. In short, they have and are. Read More

What Elon Musk taught me about growing a business

Dharmesh Shah was inspired by Elon Musk’s advice on growing and scaling a business, “Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors.” In this post, he explains what Musk meant in a way that doesn’t require any knowledge of linear algebra. This is a simple, practical, and powerful tool for anyone managing either a company or project. Read More

Emotional intelligence needs a rewrite

Software that can recognize emotions “emotion AI”, has a lot of potential and is already in use (learn more at this keynote at our upcoming conference). But recognizing emotions is not easy for humans, never mind software. Large amounts of data in specific contexts and application domains will continually help as data sets grow. Even so there is a lot to learn/unlearn in our understanding of how humans experience and process and exhibit emotional behavior. Read More

Google and the disintermediation of search

Jan Dawson argues, correctly I think, that the continued increase in Google’s traffic acquisition costs and effect on margins is something to watch, but of more concern…

… the threat of disintermediation could undermine the revenue base on which those margins are generated in the first place. What do I mean by disintermediation here? The fact that many of what would once have been Google searches are now pre-empted by other apps and services before the user ever reaches Google. Read More

The seven deadly sins of AI predictions

A lot of AI researchers and pundits imagine that the world is already digital, and that simply introducing new AI systems will immediately trickle down to operational changes in the field, in the supply chain, on the factory floor, in the design of products. Nothing could be further from the truth. Almost all innovations in robotics and AI take far,

far, longer to be really widely deployed than people in the field and outside the field imagine. Read More

Also…

Is AI riding a one-trick pony? No, but we are attaching too many expectations too soon. via Technology Review

Good advice… Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee via Y Combinator

This could be you… Even smart people are shockingly bad at analyzing sources online. via Nieman Lab

If you want to dig in to Facebook’s About Face re React. via RedMonk

The Gilbane Digital Content Conference

The Gilbane Digital Content Conference is focused on content and digital experience technologies and strategies for marketing, publishing, and the workplace.

Conference: November 28–29 ● Workshops: November 30
Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel

Frank Gilbane’s Gilbane Advisor curates content for content, computing, and digital experience professionals. More or less twice a month. See all issues

Will Microsoft’s new augmented reality patent kill the keyboard?

Well, there is a difference between the function of a keyboard, typing, which has legs for the foreseeable future, and its physical instantiation, which will eventually be eclipsed by something virtual. There are those who think voice will replace keyboards, and perhaps even typing, but it is way too early to confidently predict the relative adoption of voice versus typing. There are use cases, limitations, and reasonable preferences for each, as experiments with chatbots illustrate. Both typing and voice will likely last until well into the future of brain-to-computer interfaces. Read More

How the personal data extraction industry ends

Doc Searls with a positive outlook on personal data protection…

Our influence will be most corrective when all personal data extraction companies become what lawyers call second parties. That’s when they agree to our terms as first parties. These terms are in development today at Customer Commons, Kantara and elsewhere. They will prevail once they get deployed in our browsers and apps, and companies start agreeing (which they will in many cases because doing so gives them instant GDPR compliance, which is required by next May, with severe fines for noncompliance). Read More

Yep, that web project should be a PWA

Whether you’re a technologist, marketer, or both, it’s difficult to keep current on web tools and technologies. A well-researched and thought-out decision made a few months ago may no longer be optimal. Less technical colleagues or executives may be mis-informed by an out of date perception or current yet incorrect article. Aaron Gustafson provides an in-depth update on the state of progressive web apps. If you haven’t considered them in a while you may be surprised. Read More

and of course there is…

Framework Churn

This is perhaps a more hopeful article, and from an interested party. Nonetheless, it is a good explanation of the problem. Ionic’s Max Lynch argues the solution to Framework Churn is web components. Read More

Apple is going after the health care industry

While no surprise to anyone paying attention, most discussion to date has focused on technical details of devices like the Apple watch, the seemingly intractable challenges around managing health care data, or the quicksand of FDA approval. In this research brief CB Insights looks at the business and market leverage Apple has over the large players in the health care industry, including reach, customer experience relationship, and revenue model. Apple is progressing on all fronts. As CB Insights says, “Other players in health care should take notice.” Read More

Also…

Staying relevant… Java’s late flowering via RedMonk

Amazon’s approach to smart glasses sounds pretty smart, well, I would say “interesting” for now, via Axios

DYI Voice AI… Google’s Tensorflow team open-sources speech recognition dataset.  via Venturebeat

Safari in iOS 11 converts Google’s AMP links back to the original URLs, and Google approves. via 9to5mac.com

The Gilbane Digital Content Conference

The Gilbane Digital Content Conference is focused on content and digital experience technologies and strategies for marketing, publishing, and the workplace.

Conference: November 28–29
Workshops: November 30
Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel

Frank Gilbane’s Gilbane Advisor curates content for content, computing, and digital experience professionals. More or less twice a month. See all issues