Issue #56 A sun-chasing robot, the end of the Digital Era, and e-commerce optimization - Sat, Jul 14 2018

Amazon.com

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Clo Willaerts This made my day! My 3rd book is now available for pre-order from Amazon.

In January, Amazon opened Amazon Go, a high-tech, cashierless convenience store in Seattle. There are no checkout lines and few employees. The only requirement to shop is downloading an app. Customers just walk in, load up their bags, and go.

Clo Willaerts Doomsday headlines such as “You Will Lose Your Job to a Robot” reflect fears that artificial intelligence and robots will replace human labor on a mass scale and computers will become so intelligent that people will simply be unable to compete.

At some point in the not too distant future the Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders will have to be completely rewritten to account for all the ways social media has driven us insane. And when it is, there will be subsections dedicated to the…

Clo Willaerts 'I’m just trying to get eyes on me. It’s a big attention game online... the end goal for me is just be on as many screens as I can.'

Smart Insights – Mark Hall – Jul 12, 4:00 AM

If you're running around like crazy - doing redesigns, running split tests, and adding new technologies - but don't know the best practices needed to define the ‘most likely to succeed' designs and tests - you're definitely not practicing…

Clo Willaerts A handy overview of what to optimize on your e-commerce site.

Engadget – Jul 12

Now that dating giant Match owns Hinge, what's its first move? It's using a dash of AI to help you find a partner sooner. Hinge is trotting out a Most Compatible feature that uses machine learning and the Gale-Shapley algorithm (aka the 'stable…

Clo Willaerts Hinge is trotting out a Most Compatible feature that uses machine learning and a 'stable marriage' algorithm to send daily recommendations for people who it thinks would be just as interested in you as you are with them.

We become accustomed to technology so quickly, it's easy to forget that Amazon's Alexa was a pioneer just six years ago. The idea was to introduce into people's homes and offices a personal assistant so knowledgeable, so available, and requiring…

Clo Willaerts It seems like Alexa would be the ideal assistant to handle questions about perhaps the most important, and most personal, subject matter: our health. But on this front, she’s got a lot of learning to do.

NEW ORLEANS – There were termites in the garage and a $2,100 bill to get rid of them. The mechanic had called to say he didn't know when the car would be fixed. So after a summer day full of aggravations, 73-year-old Ann Ware wasn't…

Clo Willaerts Ochsner, a Louisiana-based nonprofit health-care provider, is banking on its belief that easy-to-use technology can help people control their chronic illnesses without costly hospital stays or emergency room visits.

Back in school I remember learning that plants are “heliotropic,” meaning they grow towards the light. I always found this oddly touching; as if those green tendrils stretching out to the sun proved the plant itself was yearning to…

Clo Willaerts This plant-robot hybrid looks like a leafy crab or a robot Bulbasaur. It moves toward the sunshine when needed, and it retreats to shade when it’s had enough.

In a famous scene in the 1967 movie The Graduate, a family friend takes aside Dustin Hoffman's character, Benjamin Braddock, and whispers in a conspiratorial tone, “Plastics… There's a great future in plastics.” It's seems…

Clo Willaerts We need to start preparing for a new era of innovation in which different technologies, such as genomics, materials science, and robotics, rise to the fore.

It's widely believed that the most successful entrepreneurs are young. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg were in their early twenties when they launched what would become world-changing companies. Do these famous cases reflect a…

Clo Willaerts Work experience plays a critical role. Relative to founders with no relevant experience, those with at least three years of prior work experience in the same narrow industry as their startup were 85% more likely to launch a highly successful startup.