Formula for Success

Work like a startup, Deliver like a startup (Agility), and offer nothing less than a Ritzy customer experience

Object Detection APIs will change the future of camera apps

Google launches tensorflow object detection api. This can help stir a new trend in photo apps where the apps can be then used to remove detected items from a photo and may be even replace an object with a different object. Think #SNAPCHAT AR ads, and enhance them to allow objects from your own photos replace those in another pictures. Potentially in the future, this can be moved to videos when combined with Google cloud Video Intelligence API. Take it one step further and let computers build your marketing ads on the fly and publish with human intervention.

https://research.googleblog.com/2017/06/supercharge-your-computer-vision-models.html

AI for self-optimizing E-Commerce Experiences

Aritificial Intelligence (AI) in E-Commerce can be used to personalize, influence and guide customer shopping behavior to items, products and services that they actually will buy or are indeed looking for. This would make use of "in-the-moment" personalized recommendations based on a user's actions on the website in near realtime vs relying upon prevalent recommendation strategies based on historical data such customer who saw item A bought item B.

AI can also be used to revolutionize A/B testing where instead of human beings defining, building, optimizing and then determining the experience winner, machine learning can be leveraged to run multiple A/B tests simultaneously and then run different combinations of all the experiences, followed by the best possible combination, selecting the winning customer experience that ensures highest conversion rates. An E-Commerce giant planning to change the look and feel of their site can take all the different designs across say their home, promotional, product and cart pages and have the AI based A/B testing engine run all the different combinations. AI based A/B testing can even self optimize the winning combination to test potential increase in conversion rates. Let's use machine learning to drive E-Commerce. #RiseOfBots #RiseOfMachines

Some work being done in this space by Sentient Technologies

http://www.sentient.ai/ascend/

The Rise of AI and the End of Online Privacy

Online Privacy - Does the Generation Z care about online Privacy? The impending death of privacy combined with the ever increasing use of Algorithms, AI and Machine Learning to predict, Infer, suggest, recommend and potentially even make future decisions will shape a new world where human decision making may rely solely on machines vs. input from their fellow beings. Bots telling you when to buy stocks, air tickets, concert tickets etc are becoming prevalent today and will more likely be used by humans in the near future for most of their decision making. If you get a chance do listen to the following. #RiseofMachines


Dr. Michael Kosinski - Assistant Professor, Stanford Graduate School of Business

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Securing Microservices

Securing Microservices that are serving internal as well as external requests can become tricky. If the services are serving APIs for internal requests only, its easy to place them behind the firewalls and grant access to them from the internal systems/clients only. However, when it comes to microservices that serve external clients security becomes critical and should be given utmost importance. API Gateway pattern is an approach aimed at micro-services management and security.

A few implementations based on the above pattern are AWS API Gateway, and IBM API Manager etc. OAUTH, JWT (Tokens by Reference for External Access & Tokens by value for Internal Access) are well established approaches for securing the micro-services. Commercial Products such as Ping Access also allow for token based API/Micro-services access. The key aspect that these solutions are yet to unravel is to identify a seamless and secure way of allowing browser based clients access without having to authenticate via an Identity service. The aforementioned solutions though can be modified to facilitate such an approach. If you have micro-services that are in the cloud such as AWS or Google Cloud, AWS API Manager with its API access key solution or using a custom Authorizer can provide security for your apis.

Accelerated Mobile Pages aka AMP

Back in September 2015, the first official specs for the Accelerated Mobile Pages project were launched. The goal of the project is to provide a mechanism that facilitates faster delivery and rendering of content served over mobile web pages. Google is backing this project and when combined with Progressive Web Apps project it can help publishers of content as well as mobile site owners to reduce current high bounce rates attributed to a variety of performance and page load concerns. Google is also allowing free use of Google AMP Cache and has stated that "it will provide a cache that can be used by anyone at no cost, and all AMPs will be cached by Google’s cache". You can easily create your own AMP pages. Discovery of AMP pages by Google and other search engines is easily handled by the <link> tag with "amprel". AMP also provides for creating responsive page by simply appending "layout=responsive" to the AMP Html tags. Check it out at the following links

Google AMP Project

Google AMP Cache

Swift - An Interactive & open source attitude towards iOS programming by Apple - Is Apple aiming for write it once, run it anywhere?

Later this year, Apple will be making it's Swift programming language open source. The concept makes all the sense as it aims to re-invigorate and define new benchmarks across the mobile computing universe of phones, phablets and tablets. Of course, arguments were and will continue to be made regarding the market share of Apple vs the glut of Android based devices, however Swift may be a game changer. There have already been attempts at making a compiler that can convert Swift code into Java byte code that can then be converted into an Android Package (APK) for installation on Android Devices (Use Apple Swift to make an Android App). Once Swift is released as Open Source, there will definitely more attempts at this. Think about companies who would like to write it once and release their apps to both iOS and Android based devices.


Swift Playgrounds lets you see the results for every line of code that is typed. This lends itself naturally to viewing UI changes specially code snippets for an animated SpriteKit scene. Stay tuned for the Open Source Launch and get ready for a new mobile app development era.