Turns out, the transition from a digital generic advertising experience to a personalised one has been smooth. Across the globe, leading e-commerce players facilitated the growth of personalised user experience, using the browsing and search history of the user to help them with relevant product ads. Today, for an average consumer online, a personalised experience is a routine. For the advanced consumers, who have spent over a decade surfing through the internet, anything outside the norm of a personalised experience is a disruption. From our emails to push notifications, personalised experience from any app engulfs our smartphone experience. …
By 2022, close to $5-trillion of commerce would have a digital presence in the form of online stores on Web and Smartphones. Clearly, this magnanimous presence of virtual properties warrants innovation on various fronts which include user-experience, product catalogues, operational intricacies, and payment gateways. While significant leaps have been taken for most of the frontiers, innovation pertaining to payment gateways and digital transactions is fast catching up.
When the US economy was struck by the 2008 recession, repercussions were felt across the world. From China to Chile, no nation, and no economy could remain immune to the financial virus that had penetrated the global economies. In angst, a group of techies came together to formulate a digital payment system called Bitcoins. Today, bitcoins are merely a tip of the iceberg when we talk about Blockchain technology, and given the rise of e-commerce, one wonders where the convergence point lies for these two virtual aspects. …
Apparently, the contemporary population still has a long way to go when it comes to incorporating the virtual world into the real one. One could have believed that the ‘Uber for X’ economic model would have been the saturation point for this decade, given how everything, from cabs to meals, was being availed virtually with a few taps on the Smartphone, but as it turns out, we are already on the starting threshold of something way different and virtually encompassing.
What is Virtual Reality Interface Design?
For the ones who had been living under a rock last year, a certain game by the name of PokemonGo took the gamers by storm, for it inculcated the eagerness to ‘Gotta catch em’ all’ with the real world. People were walking around the cities with their Smartphones, hooked to the game, capturing Pokemon on the go. The enterprise that had launched the game had a field day, with its share prices going through the roof. Even though the craze subsided in a few weeks, it gave the world its first major tryst with Virtual Reality and what it could achieve if the product engineering was done right. …
To sum up the difference in one line between Cyber Monday and Black Friday, the former is for this generation, the one that prefers phones to physical contact while the latter is from a generation that believed in the real world, outside the shackles of digitization. Eventually, they both boil down to heavy discounts, even leading to retailers losing money in return of customer numbers, and these days, data.
Winters are cloaking major parts of the world and spirit of Christmas can already be felt. To kick-off the celebrations, retailers will offer humongous discounts on both the days, separated by a mere weekend. …
With over 3-million unique mobile apps on the app store (of both Apple and Google combined), the world has no dearth of ideas. Since the inception of cab services in San Francisco in 2009, startups, freelancers, and enterprises have experimented with the idea of mobile apps in numerous domains. Apparently, today, if something cannot be found on a mobile app, it is either illegal or does not exist.
A competitive world so fierce can leave many and even intimidated, especially in the case of startups, given the cost of developing a basic app is in excess of $10,000. …
Here is a fact to put things in perspective; in 2012, Google was working on 100-projects in the domain of Artificial Intelligence. Today, the number of projects has increased by a percentage of 2700%. Between 2011 and 2014 alone, image recognition errors dipped to 5% from a staggering 42%. While voice searches and Chatbots are taking the centre-stage when it comes to the front-end of AI in web applications, there is quite a lot going on at the backend too.
Google, known for its erratic (as some SEO managers would like to call it) search algorithms, analytics, and ranking tools inculcated RankBrain within its ongoing project Hummingbird. The idea was to show up results not based on keywords alone, but also according to the intention with which those keywords have been inserted. As this led to better search results, PPC and SEO managers found themselves closer to potential clientele. …
When NASA first sent a man to the moon, all they had to work with was a computer with a memory in MB's. Today, even the dumbest Smartphones come with a memory thousand-times greater than the first computer sent to space. However, it is not the memory or the processors that make your phone capable (sure, they make it powerful, but power without capability amounts to nothing) but the ability to track your location and use it to facilitate a personalised user experience.
Today, we have a come a long way since the first Apollo Mission. The World Wide Web has made away for several advances in the realm of web and mobile app development. A simple voice search in a device no bigger than our wallets helps us with a tonnage of information, and that too in less than a fraction of a second, and yet, we have only managed to scratch the surface of Artificial Intelligence. …
For any app, an average user does not shell out more than 5-seconds of their critical time. Therefore, all an enterprise has from a user is 5-seconds, sometimes even less, to create an impression that brings them back to their app. Clearly, many fail. When it comes to design in web and mobile app development, it is not about the idea alone, for there are many apps that offer similar services. …
Uber, the world’s most significant ride-hailing service, has been valued at $120bn by the banks on Wall Street. In the proposals received from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, two of the biggest investment banks on Wall Street, Uber found its valuation to be 66% greater than its last projected value of $66 bn.
Uber, which began as an on-demand cab service in the late 2010's is famous for ushering an age of on-demand business models. From utility services to entertainment, the Uber-model was replicated across the world by businesses from different domains and on a scale that varied from international to local. Driven by investor belief and confidence, Uber plans to go public next year with its initial public offering (IPO). …
Innovation in the realm of the user, utility, and retail technology, in the last ten years, has been driven by the Smartphone. From the conventional days of elaborate, and often excruciating, software programmes, the world has now moved to app-based solutions.
From social networking to sites to utility services like cab hailing, grocery ordering, and even arranging for a salon appointment, app-based solutions are now bridging the gap between technology and businesses. However, this comes at a cost.
Clearly, looking back, the innovation comes across as unthinkable without the users investing their data. The likes of Facebook, Uber, Google, and many apps serving a local county or district request for a users’ data which includes their location, their contacts, and their media.
This is where data literacy comes into play. The request for users’ data is hidden in an elaborate agreement. Users’, without much thought, accept this agreement, as the case has always been. With a single tap on the Smartphone by the user, enterprises and companies gain access to the most intimate user data. For tech enthusiasts, this access is the user paying for the service offered via their data, and thus fair.
For instance, Facebook saw a significant part of its paper wealth wiped out after the case of Cambridge Analytica came in the open. However, to what extent was this third-party at fault?
Garnering user information under the garb of personality quizzes, the likes of which were ‘who is your twin’, ‘who is going to murder you’, and so on, the company created a series of quizzes that appealed to a number of the users for their humour.
The questions required users to put forward their basic information, grant access to their Facebook contacts and messages for the results to be seen, and thus, Cambridge Analytica managed to gain data from millions of users across the globe. The company was not violating user privacy, but banking on their gullibility.
This is where the challenge of data literacy comes into play. Lawmakers across the world, including the European Union recently, are quick to blame the enterprises for any issue pertaining to data privacy or violation. While the likes of Facebook and Google have the major role to play when it comes to safeguarding user interests, they cannot facilitate data literacy for that shall constrain the very fuel that sustains their companies; data.
Thus, the onus lies with the users, organisations, and even nations to educate their subjects when it comes to data literacy. In many cases, countries can find a way to work with the likes of Facebook and Uber to design better data privacy standards and policies.
Users must realise the gravity of the data they share on Facebook. For instance, for a user willing to share their location with Uber every day must realise the benefits or consequences that come along. While the benefits may include faster access to a cab, the consequences shall also include the license of Uber to hike the pricing for the same service, citing a pattern of dependability at the user end.
Data Literacy, in the coming years, shall be a necessity. Nations like India, which shall get a billion users online in the next decade, shall have to explore options to combat the issue of data literacy. In the United States and EU too, with increasing innovation in the realm of Smartphone tech with inculcation of apps based on augmented reality, the challenge for lawmakers will be to get users to understand the importance of data literacy.
For the users, at the end of the day, data is a price they pay for availing services, connecting to fellow users online, and so on. …
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