#Driving Marketing Results with Big data For marketers trying to maximize their return on investment predictive analytics based on big data is an exciting new tool.
what works providing guidance that has never been available before for the fine tuning of advertising campaigns.
and combine it with their knowledge of television radio billboard and print campaigns to tailor marketing messages and ultimately improve return on investment (ROI).
With that data marketers can make better decisions about how to allocate their ad budgets. Indeed the analytics themselves will identify the smart choices.
A key challenge for any marketer is deciding what mix of media TV Internet direct mail radio print will best promote a product or service.
and machine learning says Madan Bharadwaj product marketing chief of Visual IQ an analytics firm based in Needham Massachusetts.
If you move a few thousand dollars here and there you can get much more marketing efficiency in terms of ROI.
and onetime promotions and see how those changes affect their key performance indicators (KPIS) which may be making an in store purchase or opening a new account.
Thanks to technologies such as cookies and browser pixels marketers can now tell exactly where a specific buyer saw their ads.
The data even shows how long that buyer watched a video or lingered on a page carrying the ad.
Paying search engines for stimulating clicks that led to purchases was fine but most consumers take a more circuitous route to their final decisions.
The marketing funnel can be long especially for big purchases such as automobiles where people may do research for nine months before taking a test drive.
Then the same algorithms can find similar audiences on other websites and present the ads to them.
With enough data and a good algorithm the analytics companies say they can determine just which ads made a difference.
A favorable product review in Consumer Reports or a celebrity endorsement at the Oscars falls outside the algorithm.
Sometimes though such events will cause a spike in discussion on social media here they are monitored
and a pricing structure that aligns advertising performance to actual conversions (rather than clicks or impressions) to avoid fraud David Perez Convertro s chief marketing officer wrote in a recent blog post.
In theory the algorithms should be able to allocate budget to advertising networks that police their inventory to avoid phony ads.
They should generate more key-performance indicators. By the same token ads that aren t viewable won t drive KPIS.
while working for a financial services client his company discovered that men who had been looking at boats in April
and planned to use the money for fun before remembering or being reminded that they should be funding their retirement accounts.
While working with a luxury cosmetics company Boppana adds Digilant discovered a correlation between women who were interested in exotic travel
#Laser-Radio links Upgrade the Internet The rise of Wi-fi and cellular data services made Internet access more convenient and ubiquitous.
Now some of the high-speed backhaul data that powers Internet services looks set to go wireless, too.
Technology that uses parallel radio and laser links to move data through the air at high speeds,
in wireless hops of up to 10 kilometers at a time, is in trials with three of the largest U s. Internet carriers.
It is also being rolled out by one telecommunications provider in Mexico, and is helping build out the Internet infrastructure of Nigeria,
a country that was connected to a new high-capacity submarine cable from Europe last year. AOPTIX, the company behind the technology, pitches it as a cheaper and more practical alternative to laying new fiber optic cables.
Efforts to dig trenches to install fiber in urban areas face significant bureaucratic and physical challenges.
Meanwhile, many rural areas and developing countries lack the infrastructure needed to support fiber, says Chandra Pusarla, senior vice president of products and technology at AOPTIX.
He says a faster way to install new capacity is to use his company wireless transmission towers to move data at two gigabits per second.
Pusarla says the service is particularly attractive to wireless carriers whose customers have growing appetites for mobile data.
Many U s. providers are currently scrambling to install fiber to replace the copper cables that still link up around half of all cellular towers,
he says, but progress has been slow and costly. In the suburbs of New york city, the cost of installing a single kilometer of new fiber can be $800,
000, says Pusarla. AOPTIX technology takes the form of a box roughly the size of a coffee table with an infrared laser peering out of a small window on the front,
and a directional millimeter wave radio beside it. The two technologies form a wireless link with an identical box up to 10 kilometers away.
A series of such connections can be chained daisy together to make a link of any length.
AOPTIX teamed up the laser and radio links to compensate for weaknesses with either technology used alone.
while millimeter wave radio signals are absorbed by rain. Routing data over both simultaneously provides redundancy that allows an AOPTIX link to guarantee a rate of two gigabits per second with only five minutes or less downtime in a year,
whatever the weather conditions, says Pusarla. A typical fiber connection might be 10 or more times faster than that, due to the limitations of the radio frequency link.
But AOPTIX says the convenience of its technology makes up for that and it could be increased to four gigabits or more in the future.
The radio and laser equipment inside an AOPTIX device move automatically to compensate for the swaying of a cell tower caused by wind.
AOPTIX originally developed its laser technology for the Pentagon, designing systems that actively steer laser beams to keep data moving between ground stations, drones, and fighter jets.
Pursala declined to identify the three U s. carriers that have been testing AOPTIX technology over the past year or so,
or its Nigerian customer. Other early customers are being more open. The Mexican telecommunications company Car-sa recently switched on the first of several links it plans to use to link up cellular towers
and provide Internet to corporate customers. And before the end of the year, Anova Technologies, a networking company that specializes in the financial industry,
will use AOPTIX technology in New jersey to shave nanoseconds off the time it takes data to travel between the computers of Nasdaq Stock market and the New york stock exchange e
#A Battery to Prop up Renewable Power Hits the Market A new kind of battery that stores energy from solar
and wind power cheaply and cleanly has hit the market. It is by far the cheapest of a new generation of large,
long-lived batteries that could make it possible to rely heavily on intermittent, renewable energy sources. Aquion Energy, a company spun out of Carnegie mellon University,
recently delivered the first of its batteries to operators of small power grids, or icrogrids, that can operate independently of the centralized grid.
Microgrids, which typically use local energy sources such as wind solar, and hydropower, could help hundreds of millions of people who live beyond conventional grids get reliable electricity.
Batteries can store power from solar panels or wind turbines to provide round-the-clock power. Alternatively, diesel generators can be used.
Aquion batteries use sodium ions from saltwater as their electrolyte. Electrical current moves through this brackish liquid from positive electrodes based on manganese oxide to negative ones based on carbon.
The batteries are large and operate slowly, but they are manufactured also cheaply, using repurposed manufacturing equipment.
Last week Aquion announced $34. 6 million in funding to help it scale up production. The batteries cost about as much as lead-acid ones
which are used sometimes now, but they last twice as long, effectively cutting the long-term costs in half (see emo:
Storing the Sun. Other long-lived batteries exist, but they cost far more than lead-acid batteries. The new energy storage technology could be crucial to making renewable energy more viable, especially in remote locations.
By making solar power cheaper than diesel fuel in many places, it could help bring clean power to some of the more than one billion people in the world without reliable electricity (see Billion People in the Dark.
As costs come down further, the batteries could find new applications beyond microgrids, including stabilizing conventional power grids as they come to rely more heavily on renewable energy.
The company isn disclosing where its batteries are being usedxcept to say the projects are international a
#Police in California and Texas Test Networked Guns When a police officer draws a firearm he
or she often doesn have an opportunity to radio for backup. Yardarm, a California-based company, is building technology that will automatically alert headquarters in such situations.
The company makes a chip that goes into the handle of a regular firearm and transmits data over a cellphone network connection.
The data transmitted includes the location of a gun and whether it has been discharged unholstered or.
The company is also working to track the direction in which a gun is pointing.
The data can be fed to a police dispatch system or viewed on a smartphone. Founded in 2013
Yardarm started out making a consumer product for monitoring a firearm location. But since many American gun owners object to technology or policies aimed at regulating firearms,
it did not find many customers. ou have a social demand for smart gun technology,
but not necessarily a market demand, says Jim Schaff, Yardarm vice president of marketing. s a consumer product,
it going to be a long road. Gun owners didn flock to Yardarm, but law enforcement remained interested.
Technology that tracks officersaction is slowly gaining acceptance as police chiefs and officers realize that the data can help clear them of wrongdoing
and save litigation costs. Meanwhile it is becoming increasingly common for many ordinary objects and devices to come with Internet connectivity.
The gun industry is gradually taking notice of these trends. The gunmaker Beretta already offers the
i-Protect, a sensor that goes on the front of the gun and captures data on the weapon use.
Meanwhile Taser, which makes a gun that delivers a nonlethal electric shock, also sells head-worn cameras to help police
and security workers document events in the field. ash-cams really set precedent, Schaff says. hen it comes down to it,
monitoring technology helps more than it hurts. Yardarm is holding tests to hone the tracking accuracy with police departments in Santa cruz
California, and Carrollton, Texas. The technology has been tested at firing ranges, but not during active police duty. t is going so well we don even know it there,
says Santa cruz sheriff Phil Wowak. he product brings so much data that wee going to have to figure out how to respond to every element.
Yardarm plans to start selling the hardware and tracking service in mid-2015. The next goal is to capture the direction in
which a gun was fired, but Schaff says this aspect of the technology needs to be improved.
And despite the rebuff Yardarm has given not up on consumers. e absolutely believe there a market of consumers perfectly happy deploying the technology,
Schaff says
#HP s Attempt to Blend Physical and Digital Work HP did something strange in the Chelsea neighborhood of New york city yesterday.
It began by splashing blue strobe lights and repeating the word wesomeenough times to suggest that it might have doubts about the merit of
what it planned to unveil. It then introduced the audience to a genuinely innovative product that will undoubtedly spark imitators,
but almost certainly not capture the large consumer base that the company hopes. The product, called Sprout, is a sort of Frankenstein monster of usually separate computing
and imaging technologies assembled into a single workstation. It combines a touch screen camera, infrared depth sensors, projector, touch-sensitive whiteboard,
and a conventional printer and scanner. Youe encouraged to hook it up to a 3-D printer,
like the one HP launched alongside the Sprout. All that is supposed to make Sprout into a powerful new tool for designers and other creatives.
You might use the device to scan, say, a Buddha statuette in 3-D, and then use a stylus to modify the digital scan once it is projected onto the workstation touch-sensitive surface.
After you made your change, you could print the new design out in 3-D. Sprout shows signs of HP history of making PCS and printers,
with matte grey casing and the bulbous contours of a Ford taurus. But it is clearly the product of some very clever engineering and an ambitious product strategy.
It is so unlike what might be expected from HP that it may not receive the attention it deserves.
If it works as advertised, Sprout offers a new way to bridge the gap between working on digital and physical designs and objects.
While computer processers and memory have advanced over the decades, we have continued to interface with them via monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
More recently, tools for making things in the physical world have changed a lot too, with the advent of maker spaces and affordable, computer-controlled lathes, mills,
and 3-D printers. But in neither of these cases do you have the opportunity to take control of the world of physical outputs
and software-based design and computing together. Sprout is a clunky device to gaze upon,
but it dreaming in a big way about the very nature of work. You can do things with Sprout that had previously only had been possible by piecing together at least a half dozen different devices.
Your digital creations can move back and forth between the real world fairly seamlessly, as you refine your ideas.
Sprout might never gain anything close to mass adoption, but kudos to HP for bringing out some of the spirit that circulated in the suburban garage where the company started y
#Will a Breakthrough Solar technology See the Light of Day? The power unit is a rectangular slab about the size of a movie theater screen.
It mounted on a thick steel post, and equipped with a tracking mechanism that continuously points it at the sun. The slab is made of over 100,000 small lenses
and an equal number of even smaller solar cells, each the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen.
This contraption is part of one of the most efficient solar power devices ever made. Semprius, a startup based in Durham, North carolina,
claims that the next generation of this power unit will make solar power the cheapest option for utilities installing new power plants.
With fields of over 1 000 of these devices, utilities would produce electricity at less than 5 cents per kilowatt-hour.
That is even cheaper than today least expensive option: a new natural gas plant. The technology originated in the lab of John Rogers,
a professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois. Semprius has raised $45 million from investors including Siemens,
and has set records for solar-cell efficiencyeaning the amount of energy in sunlight that is converted into electricity.
This year it demonstrated that it could use a version of its technology to make a novel kind of solar cell that,
some believe, could convert half of the energy in sunlight into electricity, about three times better than conventional solar cells.
Yet for all the promise of the technology Semprius is in a tough financial spot. For its technology to be cost-effective,
Semprius must scale up the production of its solar cells significantly. Right now it can make enough solar units to produce six megawatts of power per year,
but it needs to raise that to at least 200 megawatts. The company is raising $40 million in hopes of doing this.
Its current investors say theyl contribute, and for now theye loaning the company money to keep it in business,
but they won do so forever. The company needs a new investor soon. Otherwise it could go under.
Semprius predicament has become a familiar one for solar startups. Founded in 2005 Semprius was part of a wave of venture capital investments a couple of years later that funded hundreds of new solar companies (see lta Devices:
Finding a Solar Solution. It one of only a few of those companies still standing. Many of the others failed
or were acquired for pennies on the dollar. Investors lost more than $1 billion. The resulting backlash has made it difficult for any solar companies, regardless of their merits,
to get the investments they need to prove their technology. n 2007, venture capitalists were throwing money at solar companies.
All you have to have is solar in your name. Or at least start with the letter S, says Scott Burroughs, Semprius chief technology officer. ow it the exact opposite
he says. nstead of throwing money at companies, theye not even considering one if it associated with solar.
That raises a disturbing possibilityight a breakthrough technology that could make solar power truly competitive never see the light of day, not because of any lack of technical merit,
but because investors have been scared off? Magic Stamp Semprius is not actually asking for that much money.
In the heyday of the solar technology bubble, the ill-fated startup Solyndra raised about $1 billion from venture capitalists
and got another half billion from the U s. government in the form of a loan to build a large factory to prove its technology.
A few years ago, Semprius would have had no trouble raising $40 million so that it could increase capacity
and lower costs to the break even point. Unlike many earlier solar startups that gambled on developing entirely new manufacturing equipment
Semprius mostly uses inexpensive, off-the-shelf equipment, some of it from the LED industry. It could grow simply by using excess capacity at existing LED manufacturing facilities.
The company wouldn be possible without one key bit of new manufacturing technology, but that, too, is remarkably simple.
At Semprius pilot factory in Henderson, North carolina, that technology can be found inside two glass-enclosed devices, each not much bigger than an office copier.
At the end of a robot arm, and kept deliberately out of view, is embossed a rubber stamp with a pattern. This stamp is
what makes Semprius high-efficiency, low-cost solar power possible. The stamp, developed in Rogers lab, allows Semprius to improve upon a type of solar power called concentrated photovoltaics,
which has been around for decades (see ltra-Efficient Solar. The idea is that you can increase the amount of energy any solar cell gathers by putting lenses over the cell to focus light into it.
Existing versions of this technology might use a lens with an area of about 400 square centimeters and focus it on a one-centimeter solar cell, for a concentration ratio of 400.
Semprius stamp makes it possible to make arrays of solar cells that are far smaller and thinner than the ones that had been used in concentrating photovoltaics.
For the concentrating technology to work the solar cells need to be picked up and arranged in an array
so they can be paired with an array of lensesnd that where the rubber stamp comes in.
It can pick up and transfer thousands of the tiny solar cells at once without breaking them, completely changing the economics of using small solar cells.
Small cells have many advantages; because they require little material, they can be made of expensive types of semiconductors that are far more efficient than silicon.
What more, they dissipate heat well and can operate under very concentrated sunlight. That makes a 1,
600-to-1 concentration ratio possible rather than 400-to-1. You need far less material
and real estate to generate the same amount of power as a typical solar cell. These advantages,
and some clever lens designs, allowed Semprius to break a solar power efficiency record in 2012.
Semprius demonstrated another advantage of the rubber stampsheir ability to quickly and very accurately stack cells made of different semiconductors on top of each other.
since it would allow them to match semiconductor materials to each part of the solar spectrum.
and the rest would pass to the semiconductors below, and so on. Physically stacking cells wasn practical with conventional manufacturing equipment.
Semprius rubber stamp and extremely thin layers of semiconductor make it relatively easy to align the cells
Valley of Darkness Siemens acquired its stake in Semprius in June 2011. After a detailed examination of its technology, says Thomas Mart, the global head of solar activities at Siemens,
hat we saw is a way to get to very low costs of electricity. The plan had been for Siemens
and Semprius to work together, with Semprius producing its concentrated photovoltaic devices and Siemens drawing on its expertise in building solar power plants.
But 15 months after Siemens invested in Semprius, everything fell apart. Huge investments in conventional silicon solar power, especially in China
had lowered costs of production but also flooded the market with cheap solar panels. Given the supply of cheap solar panels,
it became nearly impossible for companies with alternative technologiesuch as thin film solar or concentrated photovoltaicso compete.
Dozens of promising solar startups failed and the projected market for concentrated photovoltaics shrank, convincing Siemens to get out of the business,
ending the partnership and marking the beginning of hard times for Semprius. Semprius solar devices are suited best for use in solar power plants.
Having the backing of Siemens would have helped convince utilities to take a chance on novel technology. Without such a partner
that job is much harder. Making matters worse for Semprius, conventional silicon solar panels still have room to become significantly cheaper and more efficient.
New ways of manufacturing silicon wafers, the most expensive part of a solar cell, could cut wafer costs in half
or more (see raying for an Energy Miracle. New solar cell designs are edging up their efficiencies.
Such advances might eventually make solar power cheaper than fossil fuels, even without Semprius technology. But silicon-based solar power is not yet there,
and that the opportunity for Semprius. The U s. Energy Information Administration estimates that new solar power plants will produce power at just under 15 cents per kilowatt-hourar higher than the 6. 5 cents per kilowatt-hour for natural gas power.
Thus, if Semprius is right that it will soon have technology to make solar panels capable of producing electricity at around 5 cents per kilowatt-hour,
its technology could be attractive to those planning new power plants. o invention is required, just good, solid engineering,
Burroughs says. So Semprius continues its search for a new investor to scale up its technology.
It has leads in sunny places, where its systems work best, like Saudi arabia and parts of Mexico.
At least one potential investor in China is interested, says Burroughs. iven all the stuff that happened in the solar industry over the last two to three years,
including implosions of other small startups, our investors have every reason to head for the hills,
says Semprius CEO Joseph Carr. ut our customers and partnersverybody says we live up to what we say wee going to do.
That convinces our current investors that if we can get through this valley of darkness, there an opportunity at the end.
Those investors are hopeful that a strategic investor can be signed soon. Theye been keeping the company funded
while it raises more money ot because wee into giving charitable gifts, says Semprius investor Clinton Bybee,
a venture capitalist at ARCH Venture Partners. e believe this could be very big. e
#Google's Secretive Deepmind Startup Unveils a Neural Turing Machine""One of the great challenges of neuroscience is to understand the short-term working memory in the human brain.
At the same time computer scientists would dearly love to reproduce the same kind of memory in silico. Today Google s secretive Deepmind startup which it bought for $400 million earlier this year unveils a prototype computer that attempts to mimic some of the properties of the human brain s short-term working memory.
The new computer is a type of neural network that has been adapted to work with an external memory.
The result is a computer that learns as it stores memories and can later retrieve them to perform logical tasks beyond those it has been trained to do.
Deepmind s breakthrough follows a long history of work on short-term memory. In the 1950s the American cognitive psychologist George Miller carried out one of the more famous experiments in the history of brain science.
Miller was interested in the capacity of the human brain s working memory and set out to measure it with the help of a large number of students who he asked to carry out simple memory tasks.
Miller s striking conclusion was that the capacity of short-term memory cannot be defined by the amount of information it contains.
Instead Miller concluded that the working memory stores information in the form of chunks and that it could hold approximately seven of them.
This book about the Roman empire during the first years of Augustus Caesar s reign at the end of the Roman Republic describes the events following the bloody Battle of Actium in 31 BC
This is the ability to take a piece of data and assign it to a slot in the memory and to do this repeatedly with data of different length like chunks.
During the 1990s and 2000s computer scientists repeatedly attempted to design algorithms circuits and neural networks that could perform this trick.
Such a computer should be able to parse a simple sentence like Mary spoke to John by dividing it into its component parts of actor action and the receiver of the action.
So in this case it would assign the role of actor to Mary the role of action to the words spoke to
and the role of receiver of the action to John. It is this task that Deepmind s work addresses despite the very limited performance of earlier machines.
Our architecture draws on and potentiates this work say Alex Graves Greg Wayne and Ivo Danihelka at Deepmind which is based in London.
They begin by redefining the nature of a neural network. Until now neural networks have been interconnected patterns of neurons
which are capable of changing the strength of the interconnections in response to some external input.
But the fundamental process of computing contains an important additional element. This is an external memory
and read from during the course of a computation. In Turing s famous description of a computer the memory is the tickertape that passes back and forth through the computer and which stores symbols of various kinds for later processing.
This kind of readable and writable memory is absent in a conventional neural network . So Graves and co have added simply one.
This allows the neural network to store variables in its memory and come back to them later to use in a calculation.
This is similar to the way an ordinary computer might put the number 3 and the number 4 inside registers and later add them to make 7. The difference is that the neural network might store more complex patterns of variables representing for example the word Mary
. Since this form of computing differs in an important way from a conventional neural network Graves
and co give it a new name they call it a Neural Turing Machine the first of its kind to have been built.
The Neural Turing Machine learns like a conventional neural network using the inputs it receives from the external world
but it also learns how to store this information and when to retrieve it. The Deepmind work involves first constructing the device
if a network that had been trained to copy sequences of length up to 20 could copy a sequence of length 100 with no further training say Graves
They compare the performance of their Neural Turing Machine with a conventional neural network. The difference is significant.
The conventional neural network learns to copy sequences up to length 20 almost perfectly. But when it comes to sequences that are longer than the training data errors immediately become significant.
And its copy of the longest sequence of length 120 is compared almost unrecognizable to the original.
Once again the Neural Turing Machine significantly outperforms a conventional neural network. That is an impressive piece of work. Our experiments demonstrate that our Neural Turing Machine is capable of learning simple algorithms from example data
and of using these algorithms to generalize well outside its training regime say Graves and co. That is an important step forward that has the potential to make computing machines much more brainlike than ever before.
But there is significant work ahead. In particular the human brain performs a clever trick to make sense of complex arguments.
An interesting question that follows from Miller s early work is this: if our working memory is only capable of handling seven chunks how do we make sense of complex arguments in books for example that consists of thousands or tens of thousands of chunks?
Miller s answer is that the brain uses a trick known as a recoding. Let s go back to our example of the book
It is clearly worth the cover price. Once you have read and understood the first sentence your brain stores those seven chunks in a way that is available as a single chunk in the next sentence.
To Miller the brain s ability to recode in this way was one of the keys to artificial intelligence.
He believed that until a computer could reproduce this ability it could never match the performance of the human brain.
Google s Deepmind has stated that its goal is solving intelligence. If this solution is anything like human intelligence a good test would be to see
arxiv. org/abs/1410.5401: Neural Turing Machine e
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