What does 2017 have in store for the bot?
A lot can happen in 12 months. Last year, bots exploded into the mainstream, and adoption was rapid. For example, over $1.5 billion was invested in AI startups; Microsoft has over 35,000 bot developers on its platform; The Economist even asked if bots are the new apps.
As with any technology that grows so quickly in such a short amount of time, sometimes we need to take a step back. Last year, we saw bots enter the home through the likes of Amazon Echo’s Alexa and Google Assistant, and this paved the way for more bots to be introduced to our everyday lives. So what happens next?
Few UK retailers confident about their customer experience
Retailers are seriously lacking confidence when it comes to delivering a seamless, connected experience across channels. This is according to a new report by SAP and PwC. The report, based on a poll of 300 retailers and more than 2,000 consumers, says less than a fifth (17 percent) of retailers are confident in their capabilities.
More than six in ten agree siloed business units are hurting their efforts, and a third say they are having trouble implementing the "single view of the customer". Just eight percent have successfully done this, the report claims.
Amazon introduces new job training program in UK
Amazon has steadily been expanding the scope of its cloud storage business AWS beyond hosting websites and apps for businesses and today the company announced its latest venture aimed at increasing IT skills training in the UK.
During an event in London, the company announced its new training and job placement program, re:Start. Amazon's new service, that was built in partnership with the UK's Ministry of Defense, the Prince's Trust and QA consulting, is geared toward educating young adults and military veterans and their wives.
Chinese citizens can be tracked in real time
A group of researchers have revealed that the Chinese government is collecting data on its citizens to an extent where their movements can even be tracked in real-time using their mobile devices.
This discovery was made by The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs who specialize in studying the ways in which information technology affects both personal and human rights worldwide.
UK companies take too long to react to Internet disruptions
Internet disruptions, in their biggest part, are taking place outside a company’s network, a new report by Dyn claims. The report also says having poor visibility beyond "company walls" makes it harder for those companies to react on time.
More than half (57 percent) of all Internet disruptions UK companies faced in the last year happened outside company networks. These companies need double the time to react compared to companies in the US.
European businesses are not ready for ransomware attacks
Ransomware was the number one way hackers attacked businesses in 2016, a new report by Radware confirms. Entitled Global Application and Network Security Report 2016-2017, it says 49 percent of European businesses confirmed cyber-ransom as the biggest motivator last year.
That basically represents a 100 percent increase compared to a year before, when it stood at 25 percent.
IT spending will increase by 2.7 percent in 2017
Gartner has tweaked its IT spending predictions for 2017, and now says the three percent increase in spending is not exactly realistic. It's going to be less -- 2.7 percent to be exact, which is still a positive prognosis, keeping in mind we're talking about growth.
The reduced spending is mostly to blame on the "wait-and-see" approach many companies are taking, caused by political and economic uncertainty.
People, not technology, drive innovation
Anyone who has worked in the technology industry for a long time will develop a healthy cynicism towards industry buzzwords. They may also come to realize that the majority of technology "paradigms" are adaptations of concepts that have been done before. Digital disruption is not the automatic result of the arrival of new types of tech. Disruption, transformation, innovation -- call it what you will -- comes about as a result of human ingenuity, good fortune, and hard work -- in addition to technology.
Take Pokémon Go as an example. Plenty of analysis has been done on why it was so successful. Nothing about it was particularly radical; the smartphone, mapping, GPS, AR and, of course, the Pokémon themselves are not new. However the combination of these things tapped into a desire for nostalgia, collectables, and the need to complete and compete. Originally developed as an April Fool’s joke, it was, by all accounts, a highly successful mistake.
Why you should be thanking hackers
With titles like "cyber terrorist" floating around, hackers have been associated with all things criminal, malicious, and in some cases, just plain psychotic. A fair argument, considering how many cases of identity theft, loss of income, slander, and more have come from a data breach thanks to a keyboard and a few hours.
So why should you be thanking hackers?
4 reasons to move from Big Data to the Age of Insights
In the online world, where data aggregates, compounds and grows at a tremendous pace, your business probably has multiple tools for collecting data. But how many tools does it have for making sense of that data?
Are you able to merge or fuse sets of data together to fully understand your users? Do you have a single source of data in order to understand the complete user journey? Are you able to use the data to answer complex business questions? If you answered "yes" to the above questions, you’re a step ahead of many others. According to , online companies are continuously investing more in analytics. At the same time, however, their satisfaction continues to decline. How can online businesses become more confident about their analytics tools?
Yahoo's security is a huge mess
The latest reports on the data breach revelations at Yahoo, suggest that the company lost data for more than one billion users as far back as August 2013 and that the data is suspected to contain names, email addresses, hashed passwords, security questions and associated answers. In addition, Yahoo has stated that the attackers have accessed Yahoo proprietary code used to generate cookies for user access without credentials.
This major breach raises a number of questions, including: why did it take so long to identify and notify authorities about it? What are the implications for Yahoo users? What might this mean for Yahoo going forward? And what can other companies learn from these events?
Citrix acquires Unidesk for its layering technology
Citrix has announced that it has acquired Unidesk, a company that created layering. The technology allows for the separation of Windows applications from the operating system.
The value of the acquisition was not disclosed. What we do know, however, is that we can expect a much tighter cooperation between Microsoft and Citrix.
What won't be reported in 2017 -- Even though it's likely to happen
Last year, more than a few stories didn’t make headlines that I thought should have. Whether they weren’t sexy or sensational enough for mainstream news channels, I don’t know.
My inner Nostradamus is telling me that the trend will continue and, therefore, I’m predicting seven storylines that should be covered in 2017, but that most likely will never cross your daily news feeds.
Cyberattacks against IoT devices tripled in 2016
It only takes one successful cyber-attack to seriously hurt a company, so it’s shocking to see that UK businesses suffered, on average, almost 230,000 cyber-attacks in 2016.
This is according to Beaming. The ISP says a third of attacks was targeting company databases, but two thirds were, in fact, attacking connected devices, such as security cameras or building control systems. Such devices can be controlled remotely, through the internet.
One in three companies plans to embrace DevOps by 2019
Almost half of large organizations (47 percent) have a DevOps approach to at least some, if not all, of their projects. This is according to a new report by Redgate Software, entitled State of Database DevOps.
The company says it has polled 1,000 SQL Server professionals all over the globe, with more than half working at companies with 500 employees or more.
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