5/5 (1)

Is the once vibrant and booming mobile market decreasing? After offering anything in between a mobile 3D camera and a removable battery or even the option to assemble all the parts yourself, is mobile setting as one of the major startup platforms?

To get a clear idea of what I mean I recommend reading this article on TechCrunch. To shortly summarise it, the author says that the only two serious players left in the mobile market today are Google and Apple. Essentially what he says is that mobile phones are on the verge of disappearing and that the next big thing will be much cooler.

In another article, Fred Wilson reports that mobile growth is indeed slowing down. According to the comScore US mobile app report confirms that as many apps as there are out there, people are actually using on average just 30 of them and all these are owned by a few big corporations. So the mobile market is not only maturing but also consolidating to be dominated by a few well-known companies.

So what’s going to follow?

Perhaps you have heard of this infamous statement that Marc Andreessen made a few years back that software is eating the world. What he meant back then was that software was disrupting industry after industry and that in the end this trend is going to help bring back the economy to its previous state (the article was written in 2011 right after the economic turmoil of 2008-2009).

Today – 5 years later, in a podcast I recently listened to of him and Ben Horowitz (the co-founders of A16Z) he is expanding his thesis. He is saying that software is actually programming the world. In essence, he believes that AI, machine learning, deep learning and quantum computing are going to be ruling the world of innovations in the following years and eventually become mainstream.

Indeed we are witnessing Google, Apple and Amazon are already trying to build an AI personal assistant with Google Assistant, Apple Siri and Alexa. In addition, I have already blogged about the rise of the chatbots and their application in marketing and customer communication. Finally, CrowdFlower is a machine learning based startup that helps data scientists to train their algorithms to learn.

And the examples don’t stop here! 29 machine learning companies have been acquired only this year and by the end of 2016, these type of deals will likely exceed the 37 that took place last year (informationweek.com).

What do you think? Do you think this is feasible or do you believe AI and machine learning are a bit far-fetched? Let me know in the comments! 🙂

5/5 (2)

With the rise of social media several years back, many businesses recognized the value of being customer-oriented. At the same time consumers changed their search habits and started trusting social media to conduct product research. A type of conversational culture towards customers settled not only in the small innovative startups but also in big corporations.

Companies used social media as a platform to share content, promotion, extract consumer data and communicate directly with all of their followers. But if a brand has a million followers on a social network, is it possible to get in touch and reply to all of them?

The answer is: Deploy a Chatbot

A chatbot is a set of algorithms that leverages artificial intelligence to engage in human interaction.

What can they do for businesses? Chatbots are most likely going to centralize the way consumers interact with any company. Currently, social media serves as a bridge that re-directs social media users to the brand’s website. The use of a chatbot will allow direct and fast, targeted and personalized communication with the consumer. For instance, Facebook integration already provides an infinite source of consumer data for chatbots, which will in turn make them even more customer-oriented – i.e. post when the consumer is on their device, deliver context-related updates and information.

Companies are already using Chatbots

Dominos were one of the first to implement this type of AI in their order options. The idea is that people should not have to switch the media they are using at the moment to order pizza. They can just send a message with a pizza emoji to any of the social media profiles of Dominos and then a bot will scan the message and process the order. Of course, there are some disadvantages and you can read more about them here.

Chatbots are also presenting the perfect opportunity for innovative startups to emerge. For example, Niki.ai is developing a personal shopping assistant bot that can perform different tasks such as online shopping but also taxi booking and mobile recharge. At the moment, Facebook has over 11,000 bots for you to try and the number is always growing.

The hype

Still the evolution of chatbots is largely dependent on the development of AI. Experts share their concerns that AI is still not to the level that we read about in the media. On top of that, chatbots bring their own set of privacy concerns and reliability issues.

So even though there is a huge potential for chatbots, and in my opinion they can definitely turn into a big platform for both developers and marketers, the questions is can chatbots live up to the hype?

What do you think? Do you think we can witness a completely bot-driven social media? Let me know in the comments?