Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The four-minute videos produced by seven separate teams explored themes around human brains fusing with technology, including humans becoming so robotic as to be unable to experience romance, neural lacing allowing a “smart house” to reflexively relax residents with a sound bath or other emotional needs on a typical weekday rushed morning, and brain imaging as an extension of aura photography that could let people actually see how someone’s head works during conversation.

An audience of mostly participants voted after viewing all submissions. The prize for Most Hopeful Vision of the Future went to ReFLEKtion’s smart house. In such a house, one’s weekday morning rush would be eased by a mirror that reflexively responds to cues created by neural lacing. One response to anxiety might be a soothing sound bath. “You could have a hospital at home where AI is mapped on your ow personality. It kind of exists as this fairy godmother in your life… in a way that’s palatable to you,” said co-creator Emily Gureyeva, of Stern + Kind. The piece was conceived and produced with Evan Hembacher, Studio Director at Virsix.

Hembacher noted that the technology could be used not just as a constant diagnostic tool for serious physical ailments, but a daily productivity tool. The mirror could read when you’re getting distracted or avoidant, “so you don’t slide into procrastination. It course corrects you,” Hembacher said....

In the age of hyper-digital transformation, nine additional, incremental digital technologies join the eight from the previous age. These nine start with a relatively low level of importance today but increase by an average of 145% among digital leaders by the year 2020. These nine additional digital technologies reach the threshold of having an “important to very important” business impact among at least one-fourth of digital leaders:

Telepresence (Skype, Google Hangouts, etc.) (49%)

Digital currency (49%)

Artificial intelligence (46%)

Robotic process automation (software) (41%)

Sharing economy platforms like Uber (39%)

Nanotechnologies (35%)

Robots (hardware) (33%

Telematics (29%r)

Wearables (28%)

When combined, these seventeen digital technologies increase their business impact among digital leaders by an average of 112% between 2016 and 2020. The predicted business impact of these digital technologies mean that the business and IT organizations you operate today will need to look very different by 2020 in order to keep up and compete successfully....

One of the earliest applications of real-time analytics was in manufacturing plants to monitor the performance and health of their systems in real-time. Today, we see a wave of connected devices that are flooding the consumer market, and throwing open new doors of opportunity for consumers and businesses alike. Makes us wonder what the future of real-time analytics holds for us. Here are 7 trends that could turn out to be defining factors as the future of real-time analytics unfolds...

While the restaurant industry represents nearly $800 billion in annual spending in the US, it remains highly fragmented, with 90% of restaurants supporting fewer than 50 employees and 70% of restaurants operating just one location, according to the National Restaurant Association. To help restaurant managers improve operations, startups are aiming to integrate tech into nearly every aspect of the business, from CRM to inventory to engaging visitors while they wait for a table.

Investors have poured nearly $2.5B into the restaurant tech category globally since 2012, across over 600 deals. There have also been a number of acquisitions, including Yelp’s recent acquisition of seating management tool Nowait, and Subway’s acquisition of mobile restaurant payments platform Avanti Commerce. Revel Systems, which had been one of the most well-funded companies in the space with $128.5M, was also acquired for over $580M by private equity firm Welsh Carson Anderson & Stowe.

We’re also seeing new investors in the space. Food delivery startup Just Eat, for example, recently launched a food tech accelerator whose investments included several restaurant tech startups. To better visualize the emerging restaurant tech startup scene, we put together the infographic below highlighting over 100 of these startups and the parts of the restaurant they target....

A growing number of companies are looking at the viability of airborne, autonomous taxis as a way to ease urban congestion and transportation woes, but the city of Dubai could leapfrog those with a plan to deploy a passenger-carrying drone as early as this summer.

Uber, Airbus and others are still talking about creating test vehicles that would begin transporting cargo first, but Dubai’s Roads & Transportation Agency lead announced (via Mashable) at the World Government Summit in the city that they’re going to begin operating passenger service along predetermined routes starting in July, using the Ehang 184 autonomous quad-opener electric drone to ferry people through the air.

The Ehang 184 is a drone that can carry one passenger with a max weight of 220 pounds, for a distance of 31 miles on one charge and at a top speed of 100 mph. It’s plenty enough for short haul trips across a busy urban landscape. Dubai officials will remotely monitor the drones, and pilot them from a centralized command center, and the city says it’s already started test flying the vehicle in Dubai skies, so this isn’t just pure bluster....

The conversation around artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning today seems de rigueur, particularly in light of the recent introduction of “chat bots” by Facebook and other notable tech companies. With each new advancement in the field also comes the obligatory pronouncements of the impending 'robot apocalypse'. Not so much in the Terminator, Skynet-esque sense, but rather the extent to which robots can eventually replace humans in roles where decision-making is more constrained. 

While there have been some promising developments, machine-based intelligence is still at the stage where it can increase efficiencies to an almost infinite scale, but still struggles to provide adequate context to the intended audience. How then can there be a role for them in creative process?

I would argue that AI can be used to drive creativity today, but only in tandem with input from human designers....