Monthly Archives: April 2018

Amazon isn’t the only e-tailer offering cashierless brick-and-mortar stores. Alibaba’s new Futuremart store in Hangzhou, China, demonstrates its cutting-edge tech and possible scenarios for the future of shopping. Customers enter the store where facial recognition technology provides identification, while they can scan a QR code with their Taobao, Tmall or Alipay apps so they can shop. In another twist on facial recognition, the “Happy Go” happiness meter offers discounts for smiling. When you’re done shopping, they just walk out. Facial recognition and RFID technology at the exit confirm identification so Alipay can process the transaction.

At an event in Amsterdam last week, Walter Drenth, senior global director international brands at Heineken, explained that craft brands require a fundamentally different approach compared to scaled brand building. This means starting its communications with consumers who are already passionate about the brand, which spreads to “adopters”, and then to those it is looking to get to try the brand. Only then would it launch a wide-scale marketing campaign. In comparison, for more mainstream brands such as its namesake Heineken lager the strategy typically starts with a major campaign and then gets more personal.. “[Marketing for craft] is the reverse of what we normally do. Normally you start traditional with big campaigns creating awareness and then hopefully people try it but with craft you start very formal working with outlets and staying true to what the brand stands for — letting the beer speak for itself,” said Drench, speaking to Marketing Week.

There are quite a few articles that explore the ethical and moral issues arising from the advent of this type of technology. This article is not one of them. This article is about the incremental technological steps between where we are now and where this is clearly going. So if you want a yes or no answer to the question, “Is sex with a robot cheating?” you have to reword the question thusly: “Is sex with a surrogate, synthetic human with a convincing amount of AI capabilities cheating?” Asked that way, mostly everyone I’ve discussed this with would quickly say, “Yes.” Which raises the question, “When is this going to become an actual problem, as opposed to a hypothetical one?” The difficulty in answering “when” is complicated by the verb “to be.” In the series, we (the audience), they (the humans who visit Westworld) and the Hosts (the synthetic humans) do not know if the Hosts are sentient. If they are sentient, then we have created artificial life. That technology will come with its own set of remarkable problems. (We’ll explore artificial life in a different article.) That aside, if they are not sentient, then they are just mechanical devices. But this line of reasoning has gotten me into a bit of trouble. Incremental Steps to Human-on-Robot Relationships “Real” Westworld-style Hosts are the stuff of science fiction. (We’ll discuss what it might take to build one in a minute.) The point is, you don’t need anything like a Westworld-style Host to create a real world of ethical, moral and sexual issues. In 2013, Joaquin Phoenix starred in Her, a movie about a man who falls in love with a natural language processing (NLP) system named Samantha. According to the Consumer Technology Association, in 2013 NLP systems could understand approximately 3 out of 4 spoken words. Today it’s just shy of 4 out of 4. That is an amazing amount of technological ground to cover in only three years. Why do we care about NLP? Well, at the current pace of technological change, the science fiction female NLP system that Joaquin Phoenix fell in love with in the movie is just a few years from becoming science fact. We’re just waiting for AI to improve a bit – not all the way to pseudo-consciousness (however that may be defined), but just good enough to fool you. (Do some research about the Turing test if you’re truly interested in what I mean by “fool.”) Can you fall in love with a computer? Can you have phone sex with it? La-la-la-la, I can’t hear you … don’t answer; they are rhetorical questions. But I have to ask, is a relationship with a non-sentient NLP system cheating? When trying to qualify what “falling in love” means, most people pointed out, “If you need to fill an emotional void in your life, it doesn’t matter if you’re doing it with a human, a machine, a hobby or your work. If your partner cannot fulfill your emotional needs and you don’t disclose this reality to them, you’re cheating.” You may or may not agree with that consensus, but this is only armchair research. I’m sure there will be many professional ethicists and scientific researchers exploring the full range of human emotions involved.

As companies look to connect with consumers in more meaningful ways, brand purpose has rapidly moved up the agenda. But with an increasing number of businesses making it a focus of their marketing, consumers are understandably getting a little sceptical – particularly when there is not a clear line between the brand and its purpose. People are beginning to question whether it is really the responsibility of a biscuit brand to try to combat loneliness or a beer brand to make people think differently about feminism. New research shows 60% of businesses that launch brand purpose initiatives fail to actually measure their impact on society, which completely undermines what they are doing. In order to conduct the study, Dentsu Aegis looked at the the winners of Cannes Lions Grand Prix and Gold awards. Over the past four years, 29% of the awards have been given to ‘purposeful’ campaigns, and in 2017 alone this number jumped to nearly 50%. But the analysis shows not enough effort is being put into measuring the impact of these purpose-driven campaigns on society, with marketers preferring to evaluate their campaigns using marketing metrics alone. Campaigns promoting diversity and health have the fewest relevant metrics, it finds. It also says brands could be accused of “corporate greenwashing” if they fail to show evidence of improving society with their purpose work, either in the short or long term. So it’s time companies get their act together and start showing consumers – as well as their employees – that what they’re doing is more than just a hollow marketing push.

Recyclage, réparation, réemploi, consigne… Edouard Philippe et la secrétaire d'Etat à la Transition écologique, Brune Poirson, veulent améliorer la gestion du cycle de vie des produits jusqu'à leur traitement à l'état de déchet. Développer l'économie circulaire. Tel est l'ambition de la feuille de route que le gouvernement présente ce lundi. Le Premier ministre et la secrétaire d'Etat à la Transition écologique, Brune Poirson, ont dévoilé leurs ambitions à l'occasion de la visite d'une usine SEB à Mayenne. Un choix assez naturel puisque le spécialiste du petit électroménager mise notamment sur des produits pouvant être réparés. « Aujourd'hui nous ne savons plus que casser », a regretté en préambule le Premier ministre en citant l'écrivain Paul Morand. Si « gouverner c'est choisir [...] consommer c'est aussi choisir » a encore indiqué le Premier ministre en appelant au passage à acheter français (qui est souvent plus robuste) et à con

When violent clashes between rogue soldiers of the Ivory Coast army and civilians in the western town of Vavoua killed six people in December 2011, the U.N.’s top representative in the nation was sharp in his condemnation. But the U.N.’s peacekeeping operations in Ivory Coast (the UNOCI) could have turned to an unusual tool for predicting — and perhaps even preventing — the tragedy: the town’s cellphone traffic in the days leading up to the clashes. Globally, phone networks are clogged with traffic immediately after religious riots, civil unrest or terrorist attacks as people either check up on loved ones or reassure them. But in western Ivory Coast, researchers have found something else: LOCAL MOBILE PHONE TRAFFIC INCREASES AN AVERAGE OF 10 PERCENT IN THE FOUR DAYS BEFORE SMALL-SCALE ACTS OF VIOLENCE, AND THE NUMBER OF ACTIVE CELLPHONE USERS GOES UP BY 6 PERCENT. What’s more, during that four-day window, cellphone traffic patterns are different from those in other periods when people speak more on the phone — before soccer matches and festivals. The findings suggest that, unlike with surprise terrorist attacks, local communities in Ivory Coast often have an inkling of rising tensions that may spill over into violence, or recognize that something unusual is afoot, according to the researchers. But the results also point to an unexpected predictive weapon that international peacekeeping missions can use in countries rife with this kind of rampant localized violence.

Omnichannel initiatives are seeing greater adoption in supermarkets, and more are fully integrated than last year. Keeping up with technology isn’t the most pressing concern among grocers (that would be labor issues or competitive threats), but it’s definitely on their minds. In fact, it was the third most cited concern in the annual Progressive Grocer survey, up from ninth place last year. Nearly three-fourths of respondents planned to increase their tech spending in 2018. Omnichannel initiatives are still a priority, and a majority (56.0%) said they are currently operating a fully integrated strategy connecting in-store and digital channels. Only 12.1% had no plans to execute omnichannel features. The leading omnichannel feature offered was mobile shopping apps (54.2%). The next most popular were delivery-related: click and collect (31.8%), third-party delivery services like Instacart (31.8%), and curbside pickup (30.8%). Notably, in-store mobile product scanning was implemented by roughly a quarter of grocers, while only 8.5% offered it last year.

Notre autre innovation importante c’est Djingo, un système d’intelligence artificielle accessible via divers supports. Il sera au cœur de l’assistant vocal qui sera lancé cet automne et que nous codéveloppons avec Deutsche telekom. On le réveillera par « OK Djingo » et on pourra lui demander de lancer la télé, envoyer un SMS, commander des courses, trouver un hôtel pas cher à Londres… Le système d’IA intégré sera nettement plus performant que ce qui existe, sur la reconnaissance de la parole, sur le délai de réaction… Il y aura deux modèles, un grand et un petit. Son prix sera bien inférieur à 300 €.

Huit mois après la création de leur coentreprise, Alibaba et Marriott ont annoncé la future mise en ligne d’un portail de réservation exclusif à la Chine, mine d’or pour les spécialistes du voyage. En s’appropriant ce marché, Alibaba et Marriott comptent concurrencer la nouvelle alliance Ctrip – AccorHotels. Il y a huit mois, la plateforme de voyage et d’e-commerce Alibaba formait une coentreprise (joint venture) avec Marriott. Une occasion pour le groupe hôtelier de rendre ses offres accessibles sur le marché chinois et une opportunité pour Alibaba d’élargir son offre. En signe de concrétisation de leurs ambitions, Marriott annonçait mardi dernier à Shanghai le futur lancement d’un portail de réservation accessible depuis Fliggy, la plateforme de voyage d’Alibaba. Ce service, uniquement réservé au marché chinois, couvrira dans un premier temps un éventail de 600 des propriétés de Marriott dans la zone Asie-Pacifique. Les voyageurs chinois devront patienter quelques temps avant d’avoir accès à la totalité des 6 500 hôtels et résidences gérés par le groupe hôtelier sur le globe.

WHEN SNAP WENT public last year, it sold 200 million shares; none of them carried any voting rights. When Spotify went public earlier this month, it raised no money. When members of the public bought shares in Uber in 2016, by buying into a Morgan Stanley vehicle named New Riders LP, they received no information about Uber’s income, expenses, or balance sheet, and had no assurances that the company was financially viable. These are just the latest examples of a long-standing trend: If you’re a successful technology company, the normal rules of Wall Street don’t apply to you. Indeed, Wall Street should count itself lucky if and when you deign to even acknowledge its existence. When Spotify listed its shares on the New York Stock Exchange, for instance, its CEO remained in Sweden, rather than flying over to perform the ritual bell-ringing. Instead, he wrote a blog post saying that the whole thing was a bit of a nothingburger, “just another day in our journey.”