WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

This is what your shopping experience will look like in the future.

Since 2009, Bank of America (BofA) has closed 1,597 branches in 253 counties across the US, selling the spaces to local banks in some areas and directing customers to further branches in others, according to The Wall Street Journal. For context, that's equivalent to 26% of the branches that the bank currently operates, and represents a big cut that's reflective of a rising industry trend.

Smartphones are driving all growth in U.S. web traffic, while tablets and computer web access has declined, according to new data from Adobe Analytics.

Walmart is investing in NVIDIA chips, which are high-level graphical processing units (GPUs), in order to build out its cloud network.

Download the Black Friday Ecommerce Health Check to see how to prepare your online store for success this holiday season.

Download the Black Friday Ecommerce Health Check to see how to prepare your online store for success this holiday season.

An Amazon team at Lab126, a research center based in San Francisco, has developed an algorithm that learns about a particular style of fashion from images, and can then generate new items in similar styles from scratch—essentially, a simple AI fashion designer. The approach is crude and hardly ready for Project Runway, but it hints at the possibilities.

Download the Black Friday Ecommerce Health Check to see how to prepare your online store for success this holiday season.

Download the Black Friday Ecommerce Health Check to see how to prepare your online store for success this holiday season.

McKinsey’s summary of leading FinTech articles is a fantastic summary of the issues facing global financial services players.  There are several sections in this 80-pager that we believe our clients will find the most value….

• Cutting through the noise (page 6) – this is a noisy space with many old and new entrants laying claim to a place in FinTech land.  This section of the report truly cuts through the noise and presents a very clear view of the primary value drivers for F/S players and love the “6 Digital Imperatives” chart on page 12. 
• Helping Incumbents not Disrupting (page 24) – the notion of cooperation vs. competition between FinTechs and Incumbents has emerged as a more realistic future for the industry.  Canada has a unique F/S model with large, dominant and highly successful incumbents controlling the vast majority of clients and assets.  We see cooperation as being the only role that we will play as a FinTech provider and this seems to be an increasingly popular position in our industry.
• Banking on the Cloud (page 49) – the movement from resistance to acceptance and now to adoption of cloud apps is accelerating.  In our business, revenues generated from Cloud services have increased from 10% to 50% in just 3 years and the discussions that we have had with clients around “resistance” to the Cloud have virtually disappeared.  Innovation at a higher pace and lower cost is becoming table stakes and embracing this technology is now an afterthought.

Artificial Intelligence seems to make headlines with every innovation, garnering both praise and fear. But is it really at the point where we should fear everyday AI? Here are 17 common place applications for AI systems and a look into where the technology could be going.

Meet Todai Robot, an AI project that performed in the top 20 percent of students on the entrance exam for the University of Tokyo -- without actually understanding a thing. While it's not matriculating anytime soon, Todai Robot's success raises alarming questions for the future of human education. How can we help kids excel at the things that humans will always do better than AI?

Singularity University has been talking about purpose for some time now. They describe a focus that is audaciously big and aspirational, causing significant transformation to an Industry, community, or the planet. There is a clear “why” behind the work being done, something that unites and inspires action. They call this a Massive Transformative Purpose.

Scientists developed a stretchable electronic sensor that looks like a temporary tattoo.

Forget flying cars or humanoid robots. The most disruptive inventions are often cheap, simple and easy to overlook

We surveyed eCommerce Managers and CEOs from European countries and prepared the report based on their experiences and our knowledge.

Businesses are under attack from cybercriminals. Here’s what companies are doing to safeguard their digital assets from hackers.

ARK Invest aims to identify large-scale investment opportunities resulting from technological change. We believe innovation is key to growth. From a broad spectrum of disruptive innovations, Big Ideas represents our annual breakout of technologies that we believe will accelerate significantly in the months ahead.

With the Supreme Court slated to rule next term on whether cellphone location data requires a search warrant, a new poll shows that a majority of U.S. adults support law enforcement accessing certain personal data for someone under investigation, but only if it's authorized by a warrant. Polling was conducted June 8 through June 12 among 2,200 U.S. adults. Morning Consult is the official polling partner of POLITICO, Vox, Fortune, and Bloomberg News.

AR/VR hype keeps reaching new heights. Funding to AR/VR startups reached an all-time high in deals and dollars last year. Both Facebook and Apple are reputed to have 1000+ engineers working on their respective headset efforts. And PlayStation said its PSVR, a $400 headset released in October, has sold 915k units in just 4 months. Unsurprisingly, startups of all kinds are flocking toward what could be the next major computing platform.

In this webinar we'll delve into:

• Major startup players in the AR and VR market
• Investigate new enterprise and industrial use cases for AR/VR
• Patents being sought by large corporates like Microsoft, Apple, along with startups like Magic Leap
• Highlight how media companies and movie studios are reacting and driving M&A

From cloud computing and lithium ion batteries to 3D printing and containerization, we collected the technologies that have done the most to shape the internet era.

Let’s say you randomly selected 1000 seed-stage startups based in the United States. How many of those would go on to raise a Series A? Of companies that go on to raise a Series A, how many would go on to raise a Series B? You could keep this process going until only

Have you looked at Google Trends? It’s pretty cool — you enter some keywords and see how Google Searches of that term vary through time. I thought — hey, I happen to have this arxiv-sanity database of 28,303 (arxiv) Machine Learning papers over the last 5 years, so why not do something similar and take a look at how Machine Learning research has evolved over the last 5 years?

Instacart is excited to announce our first public dataset release, “The Instacart Online Grocery Shopping Dataset 2017”. This anonymized dataset contains a sample of over 3 million grocery orders from more than 200,000 Instacart users.

For each user, we provide between 4 and 100 of their orders, with the sequence of products purchased in each order. We also provide the week and hour of day the order was placed, and a relative measure of time between orders.