Weekly Digest #6: Romantic Poems Written by Google and IoT Button Created by Amazon
May 20th, 2016
Check out our Weekly Digest for news on e-commerce and mobile development market outlook, artificial intelligence from Google and IoT button from Amazon, IBM Watson cyber security guard, and other!
MARKET RESEARCH: Apple, Sencor Tower, ABI Research
A few interesting e-commerce and mobile development studies have been announced last week. IDC research company presented figures regarding the mobile applications economy. According to IDC, users will install more than 210 billion mobile apps by 2020. In 2015, this number was already 156 billion apps. In the past year, mobile software developers earned $34.2 billion and by 2020, the revenue could reach $57 billion. At the same time, despite the positive performance of the mobile economy, its growth rate will slow down due to reaching market maturity.
In 2015, Apple App Store has secured almost 58% of the proceeds from the applications sale, but Apple’s share in the total volume of installed apps dropped by almost 8%. Google Play Store has provided 60% of the total number of installed mobile apps, but their revenue was only 36%.
Sencor Tower research company has presented their report on the mobile apps economics, estimating the revenue of development companies from the mobile software. According to the report, 1% of developers generate 94% of the revenue in the App Store and provide 70% of app downloads. We’re talking here about 623 companies involved in the mobile app development. Their revenue was $1.34 billion last year and total revenue of developers has reached $1.43 billion.
Another interesting study concerns technological solutions for the Internet of Things. ABI Research company has presented its analysis of the BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) technology. Analysts expect the market for it to double in 2016 and by 2021, 400 million devices with this tech to be delivered to market. At the moment, BLE radio beacons are used for various mobile ads and marketing campaigns. In the future, they will also become a part of the “smart home” technologies for communication between devices and ensure their safety. Handheld devices also is an actively developing market for the BLE tech. The report said that by 2021, Bluetooth will be present in over 60% of all manufactured devices on the market. BLE will be supported by over 16%.
GOOGLE CHIRP
Google decided to use data analysis tools and artificial intelligence in an IoT-device to create an intelligent voice assistant - an analog of a “smart” Amazon Echo speaker. It is expected that the novelty will be presented at the Google I/O developers’ conference that takes place on May 18-20.
The preliminary name for the new Google gadget - Chirp. It will look similar to an OnHub router and connected with the Google’s search engine and because of this, it will be able to answer the users’ requests better as well as offer advice and tips. Amazon Echo is a popular device that can control the music playback, connect to the “smart home” devices, search the Internet for the user - and all of this is done with voice commands. Considering that over 3 million Echo devices were sold, we can guess these things are popular among consumers and, therefore, Google Chirp should also generate quite an interest. Future Chirp is going to become an Internet of Things device that will use AI. Looks like Google is trying to merge different technologies in their innovative products.
AMAZON AWS IOT BUTTON
Amazon isn’t lagging behind Google either, at least in the segment of IoT-gadgets development. The company has released a small device called AWS IoT Button. Its main purpose is to control the IoT devices. The Amazon doesn’t hide the fact that the main reason for developing this product was improving the Dash Button concept, used to order goods in “one-click” way. Owners can program the Amazon AWS IoT Button to control specific “smart home” devices, for example, start playing music or video, change the lighting, fill out some automatic basic forms online. It can also be connected to a variety of online services, such as Twitter, Facebook, or Slack.
WATSON, THE CYBERSECURITY GUARD
Developers from IBM decided to apply data analysis and artificial intelligence to a noble goal of fighting online threats. IBM is teaching its Watson supercomputer to work in the cyber security field. The global task that will be entrusted to Watson is the assessment of potential threats and recommendations to prevent them. For example, it will be able to analyze the information about new malware that appeared online, “understand” it, and tell where such malicious programs may appear and how to deal with them. IBM analysts estimated that about 10,000 information security research papers are published as well as up to 60,000 blog posts. While reading and analyzing them all is not possible for a person, a supercomputer can do it.
IBM Security Unit have developed a so-called “cyber language” for training purposes that helps to understand the threat information. During the first year, Watson will have the task to analyze the contents of the X-Force library - the largest to date data storage with information in the field of information security research, various attack types, vulnerabilities, and other investigated threats. Every month Watson will analyze up to 15,000 new documents from the X-Force library and afterward, the supercomputer will have the ability to understand the information in its natural language and find and analyze such information from the Internet. This project is going to turn into a project called Watson for Cyber Security.
SyntaxNet goes Open Source
Last week, Google has focused on its own initiatives in the data mining and artificial intelligence fields and announced that SyntaxNet (the system of natural language perception) goes open-source now. The technology consists of a neural network that is used as a part of the Tensor Flow machine learning system. The global objective of SyntaxNet is to understand human language, perform the analysis of text and sentence structures, and evaluate the significance of each word.
Google Brain AI
Google also demonstrated the work of their artificial intelligence system called Google Brain, in particular focusing on the system’s ability to analyze and understand texts. Previously, Google Brain has analyzed more than 11,000 books and afterward it was offered to write a few sentences on its own. Actually, this is the main task of the system - to generate logically correct texts in the natural language. Google Brain didn’t simply generate text, but instead it wrote poems. The system’s attempts at poetry remind Japanese haiku more than poems of William Frost and symbolism is going overhead, however, it is clear that Google Brain didn’t just assemble random words. Here’s one of the poems (you can find more here.) The first and last lines were written by people and AI added the part in between):
it made me want to cry.
no one had seen him since.
it made me feel uneasy.
no one had seen him.
the thought made me smile.
the pain was unbearable.
the crowd was silent.
the man called out.
the old man said.
the man asked.
It would be interesting to read the analysis of this poem by specialists, under the condition that they don’t know AI wrote these. We would probably read a lot about symbolism, drama, and other things.
New Vacancy by 2019: Chief Data Officer
Another interesting news about data analysis - forecast about the technology from the Gartner analysts. According to their report, 90% of large organizations will introduce a new vacancy - CDO (Chief Data Officer, Director of Data Management.) The tasks would include using data mining techniques to improve the performance of the company. At the same time, analysts predict that the work of CDO and the field in itself will not be funded adequately - this is due to the fact that business, on one hand, understands the perspectives of data mining technology, but on the other, is not yet competent to use them.
E-commerce Markets' Future
Forrester and Assocham research showed the most promising markets for the e-commerce sectors. The fastest growing area is India. This year, the forecast revenue for e-commerce is $30 billion and by 2020, the figure will increase to $120 billion. The rate of growth of this business segment in India is much higher than those of countries such as China, South Korea, and Japan. If e-commerce growth rate in India is 51% per year, in China this market is growing annually by 18%, in Japan - 11%, and in South Korea - 10%.
