Smart Archives - Business Intelligence Info

Tag Archives: Smart

Baidu’s smart home group seeks to raise capital at a $2.9 billion valuation

September 30, 2020 Big Data

Baidu today announced that it will seek to raise funding for its Smart Living Business (SLG), the internal group that maintains Baidu’s DuerOS voice platform and DuerOS-powered smart devices. Baidu expects a series A funding round valuing SLG at approximately RMB 20 billion ($ 2.9 billion) to close in Q4 2020, with definitive agreements from CPE, Baidu Capital, and IDG Capital. Baidu will hold super-voting rights in SLG and will continue to consolidate SLG’s financial results as a majority shareholder.

The pandemic has supercharged voice platform usage, which was already on an upswing. According to a study by NPR and Edison Research, the percentage of voice-enabled device owners who use commands at least once a day rose between the beginning of 2020 and the start of April. Just over a third of smart speaker owners say they listen to more music, entertainment, and news from their devices than they did before, and owners report requesting an average of 10.8 tasks per week from their assistant this year compared with 9.4 different tasks in 2019.

DuerOS, a suite of tools developers can use to plug Baidu’s voice platform into speakers, refrigerators, washing machines, infotainment systems, and set-top boxes, hasn’t quite reached the storied heights of rivals like Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service. But Baidu, which claims DuerOS now has over 4,000 third-party apps, continues to work with heavy hitters like Huawei, Vivo, and Oppo to build the framework into future flagship devices. The company has partnerships with automakers like BMW, Daimler, Ford, Hyundai, and Kia, as well as with hotel chains such as InterContinental. Just this summer, Baidu inked a strategic agreement with Midea — China’s largest smart device manufacturer with 70 million smart home appliances on the market — to sell bundles of appliances with Baidu-powered products.

During its Baidu World 2020 conference earlier this month, Baidu said over 60 automakers and more than 40,000 developers are working to integrate DuerOS with their products. As of March, DuerOS was handling 6.5 billion voice queries per month and 3.3 billion from Baidu’s Xiaodu smart speakers and displays alone. As of July 2019, the platform was on 400 million devices, in 500 vehicle models (and over a million vehicles), and in over 100,000 hotel rooms.

Baidu recently detailed DuerOS 6.0, which brings support for low-power voice processing chips and neural beamforming, a technique that employs algorithms to amplify the sound recorded by microphone arrays. Voice recognition error rates are now 46% lower compared with DuerOS 5.0, Baidu claims, and DuerOS 6.0 incorporates a more efficient text-to-speech model (WaveRNN).

Baidu also recently unveiled Xiaodu Pods, dual-microphone earbuds that last up to 28 hours on a single charge. Xiaodu Pods have a noise-canceling feature and can translate between several languages. Via voice command, they relay timely information like the weather, turn-by-turn directions, answers to math problems, and local news on command. A special Wandering Earth mode available in English and Chinese allows two users wearing one earbud each to translate conversations into their preferred language in real time.

The smart home device market is projected to reach $ 135.3 billion by 2025, according to a report by Markets and Markets. By 2026, the global voice assistant market could reach $ 5.6 billion, VynZ Research anticipated in a May 2020 survey. Amazon’s Alexa business is already estimated to be worth billions of dollars.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Big Data – VentureBeat

Build Your Smart City with TIBCO

September 22, 2020 TIBCO Spotfire

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Smart Cities Are the Future

With the rise of COVID-19, many countries are realizing how a smart city framework could help ease the spread and control of the pandemic. For example, sensors to track contacts and monitor those under quarantine have helped keep the spread under control in places like South Korea.

So, if a connected, responsive, data-driven city can help improve people’s health and well being – why don’t we have this tech everywhere? The answer: it’s hard to do.

Why Are Smart Cities Hard?

First, you need to note that a smart city is a system of systems. For instance, you have assets (let’s say cars or temperature tracking cameras) and those assets need to be able to run updatable software to make them ‘smart’ and then connected to individual systems. All of these individual systems are incredibly complex systems to build and, to make a true smart city, the many individual systems also need to be interconnected, which makes it even harder.

Plus, remember, there are lots of different applications of these interconnected systems: from economic development and civic engagement to sustainable urban planning or intelligent transportation. You might want to target data-driven public safety or focus on resilient energy and infrastructure. It can be challenging to address all these different use cases.

Thankfully, TIBCO has the capabilities to enable the smart cities of the future, with solutions that can:

Seamlessly connect systems and application sources all the way out to the edge where data is collected on IoT devices.
Unify disparate datasets, both static and real-time, so you have well controlled access to trusted, well-governed data.
Use that data to confidently predict outcomes with real-time data-driven machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI)I.

TIBCO provides all these capabilities and is already powering smart city components around the world. Let’s look at some examples in just one area: intelligent transportation.

Making Intelligent Transportation Possible

In the intelligent transportation realm, TIBCO is helping CargoSmart look at over 5500 vessels using visual analytics and data science capabilities to optimize their journeys to save fuel and manage arrival times. As a result, CargoSmart developed a vessel speed and route monitoring application that analyzes the vessel’s speed and distance against a complex variety of factors. The application has helped ocean carriers reduce fuel consumption by up to 3.5% over the past two years.

Another great example comes from an Australian Capital city that used TIBCO for a quick win pilot to track real-time car park occupancy and notifications as well as car park optimization and parking anomaly detection. These solutions are, more and more, being powered by data science, AI, and Machine Learning that is able to recognize moving objects – such as cars – and then use that to track traffic going into, or out of, different places such as car parks. Staff from the TIBCO office in Sydney, Australia, recently demonstrated just how that might work using a public webcam looking out on the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

One last example is seen in how Aeroporti di Roma uses TIBCO to integrate and correlate all its information sources, in order to effectively analyze passenger flow & behavior, improve customer experience, and support operational awareness to better mitigate problems. In 2018 and 2019 Rome Airport won EUROPE Best Airport Award in the ‘over 25 million passengers’ category.

Need More?

To learn more about how TIBCO is enabling cities of the future and how these capabilities can help your business, please download the How to Build a Smart City & Smart Nation whitepaper, watch the “How to Build a Smart City in 40 Minutes (or Less)” on-demand webinar or contact us today.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

The TIBCO Blog

Z-Wave Long Range protocol supports up to 2,000 smart devices on a mesh network

September 9, 2020 Big Data

The Z-Wave Alliance today detailed a new specification intended to accommodate setups with thousands of devices in environments stretching hundreds of feet. The Alliance says that Z-Wave Long Range (Z-Wave LR), which supports things like door locks, garage door sensors, thermostats, and smart lightbulbs, is backward-compatible with both existing Z-Wave networks and previously installed Z-Wave devices.

Z-Wave, which was born out of Danish company Zensys and came to the U.S. in 2000, is a wireless mesh protocol for smart home, multi-unit, and hospitality use cases. It’s popular — there are an estimated 100 million Z-Wave devices installed worldwide — but ensuring complete home, building, or yard coverage historically required a repeater (or several).

Z-Wave LR eliminates this need with up to four times greater range than regular Z-Wave signals. Z-Wave LR boasts a range of 400 meters and bumps the number of supported devices to 2,000 on a single network, up from the previous limit of 232, while still operating on such low power that some sensors will last 10 years on a coin cell battery.

Gearbrain reports that three major Z-Wave Alliance companies are in alpha testing with the new specification. A Z-Wave LR beta will launch sometime in Q4 2020 so that other partners can begin developing products ahead of a general release in 2021.

In spite of the improvements, Z-Wave LR, which operates on the 800-900MHz radio frequency range, still falls short of competing protocols including Zigbee and the forthcoming Amazon Sidewalk. The 2.4GHz Zigbee supports up to 65,000 nodes at a range of up to 100 meters, while the 900MHz Sidewalk is reportedly capable of sending data up to a mile away.

But Z-Wave has the advantage of broad vendor support. The Z-Wave Alliance counts Ring, Assa Abloy, Silicon Labs, and Qolsys among its over 700 members, and an estimated 3,300 Z-Wave-enabled devices are available on the market.

The Z-Wave Alliance says the Z-Wave LR specification will be managed and certified under the Z-Wave Plus program and that technical details will be highlighted in a session at Silicon Labs’ virtual conference this week. Z-Wave Plus, which launched in 2004, included features like increased range, extended battery life, over-the-air updates, and additional radio frequency channels.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Big Data – VentureBeat

5 Smart Ways to Make Dynamics 365 Work Better for You

August 3, 2020 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Your Dynamics 365 is already doing many things for you. But software developers are here for you to make it work even better. Check our suggestions on how you can improve the performance of your CRM, increase security and cut maintentance costs.

xscott graham 5fNmWej4tAA unsplash min 1 625x417.jpg.pagespeed.ic.Hp9Vb1Ajaq 5 Smart Ways to Make Dynamics 365 Work Better for You

Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

Integrate Dynamics 365 with SharePoint

Documents in the CRM – contracts, invoices, payment orders, etc. – are usually stored as attachments against Notes. But a much better way of keeping them organized is transferring them to SharePoint.

This organization gives several advantages. SharePoint is a great team and document collaboration platform. You receive online editing tools in SharePoint and document versions are taken care of. As it often happens in any kind of organization, salespeople save documents in multiple folders: on OneDrive, Google Drives, on their personal desktops. Documents get lost. Also, chances are, document versions get confused and colleagues have to do double work. Storing sales-related documents in SharePoint relieves all this pain. In addition, SharePoint provides much more storage space than Dynamics 365 Notes, so you will hardly ever run out of space.

The good news is that Microsoft provides a native SharePoint integration in Dynamics 365. And it is straightforward. In this post, we show how to set the integration and move your documents from Dynamics 365 to SharePoint.

Protect sensitive information between Dynamics 365 and SharePoint

Quite a lot of companies use the option of integrating Dynamics 365 with SharePoint. However, not all of them know that security roles in Dynamics 365 don’t automatically apply in SharePoint in such an integration. Why is it important?

Many of us store sensitive documents in the CRM: contracts with values, information about prospects, stamps, etc. With privileges, you define who has access and editing rights for these documents in Dynamics 365. But when the documents are stored in SharePoint folders, they get available to any SharePoint user in your organization, and not only to those who have privileges. Obviously, this carries risks to the information integrity, the trust to your organization, and potentially violates the GDPR.

The lack of synchronization between Dynamics 365 privileges and SharePoint permissions happens because the two Microsoft products have significantly different security models. But this is not helpful for organizations, right? What you can do in this case is customize the integration by writing code, or use an out-of-the-box product CB Dynamics 365 to SharePoint Permissions Replicator.

Remove attachments from Dynamics 365 to an alternative storage

“One of our clients is having a problem with increasing database size very quickly. The huge database size is also becoming a performance issue. Besides, the client is looking for decreasing the storage costs. The current database size is 530GB. We have checked the free add-on from Microsoft but we are reluctant about bringing it in our org full scale. Besides, looking for more functionality like extracting old and new documents”. This request from a D365 admin reflects a typical constraint of the cloud CRM: free storage that is the default subscription capacity runs out sooner or later, especially so if you track emails in Dynamics.

Dynamics 365, just like every other cloud CRM system, has been primarily designed to manage customer relations and not store documents. When too much space is occupied, the CRM performance suffers significantly.

Monitoring D365 health is essential. By doing that, you ensure the system’s optimal performance and enough space for growth.

You can leverage alternative storages like SharePoint, Azure Blob or Azure File Storage to move heavy attachments from your CRM and optimize its performance.

Connect from any on-prem database to D365 Online

With many organizations transitioning to cloud services, it won’t be a surprise if you use Dynamics 365 online. SaaS is a great thing in many ways except for connecting with on-prem databases or applications or migrating to the cloud if you use an on-prem CRM at the moment.

The problem is that, generally, exposing back-end databases of SaaS services to the outside world is considered bad practice and can bring security risks. Therefore, Microsoft does not provide access to the back-end database of D365 online. Instead, to perform data interaction with D365 online, Microsoft offers the official API services, as we explain in this article. Thankfully, there are solutions now that help you to set up the integration easily – like, for example, D365 Database Sync Solution.

Seal Documents in CRM with Blockchain

Now that more document exchange is done online due to the COVID-19 lockdowns and natural processes like digitalization and decentralization, the question arises: how to keep the integrity of your data.

Many organizations look for a solution to prove the integrity and authenticity of documents and processes, ensuring trust in their business, in a fast and cost-effective way – unlike traditional methods that are slow and manual, demanding a lot of resources and interrupting the workflow.

And blockchain comes to help – with a practical application that can be used on a daily basis and in a familiar environment like your CRM. Smart Stamp Document Sealing with blockchain technology is an up-to-date solution to the issues of data compliance, storage and auditability. With one click, you seal a document, and with another click, you can verify if the document is the same as it was at the time of sealing or someone has tampered with it.

Summing up

Security, performance, cost-saving are important factors to consider when working with a CRM system. Dynamics 365, being one of the leading CRM systems on the market and an advanced tool for managing your sales and customers, can be upgraded using Microsoft tools and add-ons from software integrators. Good luck in your quest! We are always here to give a helping hand in your strive for a more productive and compliant workplace.

***

Written by Anastasia Mazur from Connecting Software, a producer of synchronization and integration software for business needs. For more stories, visit our blog.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

Document Attachment and Document Management – Dynamics 365 CRM now has a smart app for it!

May 8, 2020 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

628x359xAttach2Dynamics 3.jpg.pagespeed.ic.4rrJoMtkuU Document Attachment and Document Management – Dynamics 365 CRM now has a smart app for it!

Inogic is one of the leading ISV partners for Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM and has been providing solutions to enhance its productivity. Over the years, many applications like Click2Clone, Click2Export, etc. have been developed. These apps have been a huge hit with businesses and industries all around the world. And recently, Inogic came up with a webinar series that gives insight into how these Dynamics solutions work, what they are for and, why everyone should have them installed in their Dynamics 365 CRM environment.

One of the highlights of this ongoing webinar series is the popularity of our Attach2Dynamics app. Viewers showed a great deal of interest in this particular application so its time we quickly summarize all the important features of Attach2Dynamics.

Attach2Dynamics is an application that increases productivity and efficiency of Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM by providing integration of cloud storage within Dynamics 365 CRM. It currently supports three different cloud storage – SharePoint, Dropbox, and Azure Blob Storage. This attachment management solution has multiple features that help in managing documents, notes, files, and folders, etc.

Let’s walk through some helpful features of Attach2Dynamics which makes it different and a must-have app for your Dynamics 365 CRM:

Drag and drop single as well as multiple files and folders at a time to the configured cloud storage.
Create anonymous sharable links of files/folders and copy for external use.
It allows renaming of files and folders.
It also allows downloading of documents from configured cloud storage easily.
One can use Deep search filter for entered keywords and also delete files from Cloud storage.
The app allows configuration of multiple connectors and also supports single sign-on.
One can email a file’s link or file as an attachment from within CRM.
Attach2Dynamics supports hierarchy structure to store all the attachments/documents in SharePoint.
User actions can be controlled on Attach2Dynamics by administrator.
Attach2Dynamics supports all types of entities.

With help of these bunch of features, one can organize all documents in cloud storage according to their needs. From bulk migration to using the drag and drop features, Attach2Dynamics is sure to increase productivity of your Dynamics CRM users.

Attach2Dynamics is supported in the latest versions of Dynamics CRM 365 including On-premises, Online, and Partner-hosted.

Safeguard and manage your attachments and documents now by downloading Attach2Dynamics from our Website or from Microsoft AppSource. With the free trial experience the seamless benefits of the application yourself.

To register for our webinar series, click here. We also have provided video links to our concluded webinars on Attach2Dynamics. Click here to watch them.

For a personalized live demo email us for a walk through how Attach2Dynamics makes document management an easy task on crm@inogic.com.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

How Automakers Are Saving Lives With Smart Partnerships

April 21, 2020 SAP

In previous blogs, we talked about how automakers can protect their employees and financially guard their companies. Today, we talk about how they can go on to contribute to the fight. How can automakers apply the depth of their manufacturing knowledge to make things that save lives?

Making something other than cars at a moment of national crisis is nothing new to the automotive industry. In times of war, many wondered if automobile companies could build fighter planes. They did.

Today, the needs are different but similar questions persist. Are the big automakers nimble enough to make lifesaving equipment? Since people’s lives are at stake, many car companies have wisely chosen to form partnerships with firms with deep medical expertise.

Lamborghini’s race to save lives

Personal protective equipment (PPE) protects individuals from the highly contagious coronavirus. Medical professionals – the very people that safeguard us at our most vulnerable – are in dire need of PPE. Given supply chain fractures, normally plentiful equipment such as face masks, shields, gowns, and gloves are in short supply.

Lamborghini, the maker of some of the most iconic automobiles in the world, is putting its workforce to make such vital equipment. Given the urgent need, the company has been very effective at finding skills that can readily transfer to their new products. For example, the people who stitch the interiors of their supercars are now tasked with stitching masks. The company claims it can make 1,000 in a day.

Face shields are particularly useful in preventing infection through the soft membranes in the eye. Lamborghini’s R&D teams are using 3D printing technology to manufacture up to 200 such shields per day.

Crucially, the company is not going at the challenge alone. After all, it has little previous background in testing and quality control of PPE. Towards this end, it has partnered with the University of Bologna. Medical experts from the school will help Lamborghini ensure that the PPE is of sufficiently high grade to protect medical staff.

Making ventilators

Devices that can breathe for patients are essential at times like this. To make them portable and reliable is no small feat.

GM, for example, is taking on this challenging task. Instead of doing everything by itself, the carmaker is partnering with Ventec to make a portable ventilator (V+Pro) that can be produced with fewer parts, thereby accelerating their rollout. Moreover, GM has chosen to make these devices at its Kokomo, Indiana, plant because it will require minimal retooling.

Regulatory hurdles

The healthcare industry is perhaps one of the few sectors of the economy that is more regulated and scrutinized than the automotive sector. Maintaining compliance with laws and guidelines across the organization as automakers make ventilators is a monumental challenge.

Medical expertise is essential, as is legal guidance. Be it working with a medical university that can help test the PPE or using regulator-approved designs, such partnerships accelerate the time it takes for automakers to contribute to the effort against the present crisis.

Do you have other stories of automakers helping in the fight? Let me know! Reach out to me on Twitter @mannepalliAswin.

How can you achieve your business goals with SAP S/4HANA? Find out more about the next generation of SAP business scenario recommendations for SAP S/4HANA in our upcoming webinar on April 27.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Digitalist Magazine

The Smart Money’s on These Finance Sessions at SuiteWorld20

March 8, 2020 NetSuite

Posted by Barney Beal, Content Director

From its very beginning more than 20 years ago, NetSuite has provided finance professionals, along with other business leaders, with a single, cloud-based solution for transactions, real-time visibility and compliance. And now, in its 10^th year, SuiteWorld will offer finance teams a broad array of opportunities to learn more about those capabilities, including new features and functionality, expand their skillsets and extend their careers.

Financial transactions are at the core of the NetSuite cloud ERP product and make up the bulk of the more than 200 sessions at SuiteWorld, which is being held April 20-23, returning to the Sands Expo and Convention Center in Las Vegas. There are 89 sessions at SuiteWorld 20 covering financials and OneWorld. These are targeted toward finance professionals across all levels of NetSuite experience and spanning multiple disciplines. Each session promises front-line advice, technical expertise and valuable insights, but here are some of the core sessions finance pros should consider.

New to NetSuite

For those just getting started, Tips and Tricks for New NetSuite Users is always a valuable starting point. The fast-moving session offers 40 tips for newer users. For the more experienced and those running international operations, Thursday’s How to Maintain and Organize your Global General Ledger emphasizes current and future NetSuite features that will help finance pros grow their business around the world while maintaining a lean and effective operation.

Getting More out of NetSuite

The Ask the Experts sessions continue to be a staple at SuiteWorld, and Wednesday’s session, Ask the Experts: Meet the Financials Product Team offers a unique opportunity to meet the NetSuite Financials, SuitePeople and NetSuite Planning and Budgeting product management teams and ask questions. Attendees can ask product managers questions about current financials capabilities, future plans and developments.

Similar to its younger cousin, Tips & Tricks for NetSuite Users will, on Thursday, provide 40 tips for NetSuite users in a fast-moving session. On Wednesday, in Automating Your Business’s Cash Management Process with NetSuite, attendees can learn about the innovative Bank Feeds SuiteApp, the newest automated capability in NetSuite’s bank reconciliation functionality. The new Bank Feeds SuiteApp provides daily updated cash balances to help monitor and manage cash flow with better accuracy and predictability. Attendees will learn how to automatically import banking transactions and account balances from hundreds of banks and financial institutions directly into their NetSuite accounts, eliminating the need to manually import bank files.

Planning and Budgeting

The NetSuite journey for Edgewood Companies, a real estate firm, began when it implemented SuiteSuccess Starter to improve financial reporting processes. To provide trend-based planning and operational reporting, the company then expanded its suite with NetSuite Planning and Budgeting. It will detail that experience on Thursday at the Expanding the Suite with NetSuite Planning and Budgeting session. On Tuesday, another Planning and Budgeting customer, Neutrona, will explain how a fast -growing, award-winning, multinational high-tech company customized NetSuite Planning and Budgeting to provide accurate reporting, dashboarding, and forecasting that supports business expansion at How Neutrona Took Budgeting, Forecasting and Reporting to the Next Level.

Employees represent the largest cost to most companies, and using external payroll products and GL imports often leads to expensive integrations, incomplete data or just not enough detail. On Tuesday, NetSuite customer, R.A. Miller Industries Inc., will explain how it is using SuitePeople U.S. Payroll to reduce the cost of running payroll with a more efficient process at Increasing Operational Efficiency with SuitePeople U.S. Payroll. Attendees will learn how SuitePeople U.S. Payroll, eliminates the need for manually importing payroll data while providing much more detail. With recommended payroll batches and batch previews, the time to process payroll is greatly reduced and accuracy is more achievable.

On Wednesday in the Investing in People for Outstanding Customer Experiences session, PropLogix, a real-estate property intelligence company, will share how it expanded its NetSuite investment beyond financials to include NetSuite SuitePeople and SuitePeople U.S. Payroll, which provide a scalable solution for managing and paying employees. Presenters will show how SuitePeople helped PropLogix grow from 10 employees to more than 200 within five years and describe the real ROI and savings the company experienced by replacing leaky payroll vendors with a unified solution.

Reporting & Analytics

SuiteAnalytics Workbooks offers powerful reporting capabilities for finance. In the Leverage the Power of SuiteAnalytics Workbooks session, attendees will learn how to leverage sample workbooks, share workbooks and create a new workbook. They will also learn how to build data sets and create pivot tables and charts that will bring data to life for easier consumption and better decision making. NetSuite customer RealWear will share how the company used SuiteAnalytics Workbooks to analyze SuitePeople HR information, improving financial reporting.

On Tuesday in Take Your Reporting to the Next Level: Automating Custom Reporting & Searches, attendees can learn how to create a custom report, including how to decide whether to start with a standard report or design their own from the ground up. Presenters will explore the differences between saved searches and reports, and show how to set up automatic report generation and email distribution lists.

For more experienced staff, Report Customization: Deep Dive into the Trial Balance, on Tuesday, will show how the NetSuite Trial Balance report provides an easy way to view all general ledger accounts in one place without having to rely on financial statements.

Compliance & Security Controls

A fundamental element of internal control is segregation of duties (SOD), the idea that no employee should be in a position to both commit and then conceal errors or fraud in the normal course of his or her duties. In It Takes Two to Tango: Preventing Fraud by Segregating Duties on Thursday, presenters will share real-life examples from NetSuite users and industry experts on the best practices for analyzing a company’s SOD and related NetSuite access controls.

Well-designed security and controls can set a company up for future success. In the Wednesday session Foundations of Security and Controls: Enabling Growth and Scalability, attendees can gain foundational good practices for logical access and controls, which are not only required from a regulatory perspective, but are also useful guardrails that drive consistency and quality as an organization grows.

That’s just a sampling of the finance sessions available. The full SuiteWorld session catalog is now online and discounted registration is available through April 4.

Posted on Tue, March 3, 2020
by Barney Beal

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

The NetSuite Blog

ProBeat: A smart speaker does not a smart home make

January 11, 2020 Big Data

To coincide with CES 2020 this week, Strategy Analytics released a survey claiming that smart homes had passed “the tipping point” and that “Most Homes Are Now Smart Homes.” Putting aside that U.S. homes don’t represent the world’s homes, the survey assumed that you had a smart home if you “own at least one smart home device.” First, owning doesn’t mean actively using. Second, a smart home is not defined by owning “smart speakers, interactive security systems, and smart thermostats.” Third, that begs the question: How should we define a smart home?

The smart home definition is important for a few reasons. Technology has been flooding into our homes, and CES 2020 showed this trend is not abating. Internet of things (IoT) devices are not going away, and neither is the dream of a smart home. That doesn’t mean all home devices marketed as “smart” are inherently useful, however, let alone make our homes “smart.” Additionally, there are plenty of valid privacy and security concerns in a potential smart home.

So, let’s try to make sense of all these devices.

IoT, AI, and smart

First and foremost, an IoT device is not a smart device. If your lightbulb, your thermostat, or your fridge is connected to the internet, that doesn’t mean you suddenly have a smart home. Think of it this way: If all you can do with your fancy new light bulb is turn it on and off from your phone, rather than a light switch, that’s not smart. Thermostats are a better example. If you can lower the temperature of your home after you’ve already left for vacation, that’s not smart. That’s an IoT device, and it’s neat, but it’s not smart. If, however, your thermostat can save your home energy and you money by making adjustments based on weather forecasting, occupancy patterns, humidity, and electricity costs, that’s smart.

Next — and this is what really caught my eye in this survey — a smart speaker doesn’t make a smart home. Your smart speaker needs to be doing more for your home than a virtual assistant can do from your phone. If you’re merely asking Alexa for the weather, or Google Assistant to play some music, that’s not much of a smart home.

(Speaking of, Google had a much more muted presence at CES this year. At CES 2019, the company built a freaking massive, rhyming, catchy, musical of a ride for its Google Assistant announcements. At CES 2020, the company dropped its Google Assistant news the old-fashioned way. What can you expect from Google Assistant this year? Among other things, you guessed it: deeper smart home integration.)

I would further argue that artificial intelligence alone is not a good measure of whether a device is contributing to a smart home. What matters is what the AI is enabling.

Pushing the limits of what’s possible

If your smart speaker is controlling your alarm, lights, blinds, fridge, and toaster, we’re getting somewhere. But there’s a difference between you telling your smart speaker to set an alarm, which you can do yourself with an alarm clock, and having it automatically turn off the alarm when you’ve gotten out of bed — something your alarm clock can’t do. If your Google Assistant can lower your blinds automatically when the sun goes down and raise them when your alarm goes off, that’s the inklings of a smart home.

Put another way, AI has to be doing something in the home that wasn’t possible before, or at least not reasonably possible. Sure, I could rig my blinds to move at certain times of the day and set complicated schedules on my thermostat, but neither is optimal.

A smart home contains devices that understand your home, its surroundings, and its inhabitants. And they actively make the home smarter. To be fair, that’s much harder to formulate a survey around.

One final note on the privacy and security front: I suspect that we may one day see smart home devices that are not connected to the internet. First we got IoT devices for the home. Now we’re starting to see smart IoT devices for the home. One day we will get smart devices for the home with built-in offline machine learning models. They will do their processing on-device without requiring a constant connection to the cloud. And that will be the real tipping point.

ProBeat is a column in which Emil rants about whatever crosses him that week.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Big Data – VentureBeat

Why smart search is the cornerstone of digital transformation (VB Live)

October 21, 2019 Big Data

Presented by Lucidworks

Employees have a full spectrum of content and data, but it’s easy to get lost in unproductive, dead-end hunts. Join this VB Live event to learn how AI-powered smart search boosts efficient data discovery and insights that deliver real-world, high-value solutions for complex problems of every size.

Register here for free.

Digital transformation means pivoting to become more efficient, data-driven, and nimble. Traditional enterprise search is anything but.

To do their jobs, enterprise employees need to tap into a huge amount of content and data available both inside and outside the company, and the tools they’re handed aren’t up to the job, says Simon Taylor, vice president worldwide channels & alliances at Lucidworks.

“The volume of data in those silos has created a form of disconnection, both from the employee to the information and the employee to the application, which ultimately drives down productivity,” Taylor says. “Also, if you have too much information, you get information overload.”

A lot of employees today are disengaged at work because they can’t get to the information that makes their role or purpose more relevant, he explains. Their search results aren’t relevant enough to their specific role, or surfaced to them in relevant contexts, and that’s why employees, particularly millennials, get frustrated in their workplace, he adds. They’re very used to tools they use externally, whether it’s social media or browsing or searching.

“The workplace is having to transform the way it does things, to provide the same type of demand level tools, relevancy level tools, insight-driven tools, to make employees more productive,” Taylor explains.

He warns that if you don’t have the right solutions in place, or even the right insight tools to drive productivity from employees, you’ll make bad decisions, and the company as a whole is going to spend more money on operationalizing things that fundamentally should be a lot easier — and that’s where you get a strong business case for search.

Two types of AI-powered search differentiate businesses today. In curated search you give the AI framework direction about what you need to learn, and then ask it to surface insight that’s relevant to your personal journey in order to make more informed decisions about how to use that information.

On the flip side of that is deep learning, which auto-curates the most relevant topics and classifications and categories, or the ontology, from the data, and then presents it as a corpus of information with recommendations about how to best use it.

In a business context, both curated and uncurated search is essential, and can drive value in three areas. The first is making access to information more efficient, and delivering contextualized, relevant results quickly — for instance, use cases like HR portals.

With natural language processing and machine learning, knowledge management tools can serve responses through an automated communication platform like chatbots. It improves efficiency and it saves money too, by reducing the amount of operational resources required to answer rudimentary questions.

The third category of solution is finding opportunities to make money, or the data discovery area, which helps employees find ways to do things more quickly and actually drive more revenue.

He points to an oil and gas company that had spent money repeating the same research three times in a 10-year period because their ECM (enterprise content management) was not able to find and pull up the records for previous studies. This was to determine the viability of a new drilling site, and, of course, each time the study gave researchers the same result — the area they were exploring would not be a lucrative drill site, and they would not be getting back the time and the money they had wasted discovering that again.

AI-powered search broke down the company’s information silos so that they were able to access research that had been done across the business, and better decide where to focus the company’s assets and resources in order to get the most value.

“That business case, for them, represented multi-billion-dollar savings and revenue generation,” Taylor says. “It’s the real power of search, when you can deliver some significant business-changing direction.”

Transitioning to an AI-powered search tool isn’t really optional these days, he adds — your competitors are doing it to get to information in the most efficient way possible.

“It’s not a resource thing, where you can throw more people at it,” he says. “You have to become clever in the way that you apply technology and think smarter about the way you use it.”

To learn more about how search and machine learning can deliver both savings and revenue opportunities, a look into some of the most compelling business use cases, and more, don’t miss this VB Live event!

Don’t miss out!

You’ll learn:

What operationalized AI means
How search and machine learning align to drive efficiency and Opex (operational expenditure) savings
How search and machine learning can create revenue opportunities
Success factors for operationalized AI and top lessons learned

Speakers:

Simon Taylor, Vice President Worldwide Channels & Alliances, Lucidworks
JP Sherman, Enterprise Search & Findability Expert, Red Hat

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Big Data – VentureBeat

5 smart ways to manage Attachments and Disk Space in Dynamics 365 CRM

October 4, 2019 CRM News and Info

607x346x5 smart ways to manage Attachments and Disk Space in Dynamics 365 CRM 1.jpg.pagespeed.ic.V2Th70Wc3P 5 smart ways to manage Attachments and Disk Space in Dynamics 365 CRM

Document management forms a crucial part of any business activity. Without proper document management system there are bound to be errors resulting in delay of accomplishing important business activities. Here, Attach2Dynamics has played a major role in substantially improving the management of documents or attachments in Dynamics 365 CRM. With Attach2Dynamics management and storage of document or attachments became more flexible and cost effective.

In our previous blog you have been introduced to Attach2Dynamics – a Microsoft Preferred Solution on AppSource – that manages document or attachments on cloud storages.

Here, in this blog you will see How, What and Why Attach2Dynamics is necessary for seamless management of documents or attachments in three different cloud storages i.e. SharePoint, Dropbox and Azure Blob Storage.

What is Attach2Dynamics?

Attach2Dynamics, as the name suggests is a productivity app that provides seamless integration of Dynamics 365 CRM with cloud storages like SharePoint, Dropbox and Azure Blob Storage for document or attachment management needs. Attach2Dynamics enables you to perform common file management actions like upload, download, create folders, rename folders, view files, delete files, deep search, create sharable links, attach files to emails, etc. right within Dynamics 365 CRM without having to navigate to the cloud storage application. Moreover, you can move attachments in bulk to cloud storages without interrupting the ongoing activities.

How does it benefit?

Attach2Dynamics ensures seamless document or attachment management from right within Dynamics 365 CRM. This benefits the Dynamics 365 CRM users in the following manner:

Release Dynamics 365 CRM space

With Attach2Dynamics you can easily free your Dynamics 365 CRM storage space by copying/moving Notes, Email and Sales literature attachments directly to SharePoint, Dropbox & Azure Blob Storage. In this way you can make optimum use of available Dynamics 365 CRM space for other activities without any fuss.

User-Friendly UI

Attach2Dynamics has a user-friendly UI which allows easy user-adoption. You can easily navigate through multiple features and functionalities of Attach2Dynamics. Drag and drop of files and folders, create folders, rename, email, etc. can be performed with ease.

Multiple Cloud Storages Supported

By backing up your Dynamics 365 CRM data on cloud storages you can save a lot of Dynamics 365 CRM space. To enable this Attach2Dynamics supports creation of multiple instances of same cloud storage such as SharePoint_1, SharePoint_2, Dropbox _1, Dropbox_2, Azure_1 and so on. This ensures more storage space at your disposal for document or attachment management. You can now easily bifurcate and store data across multiple instances as per your convenience.

File Management in Dynamics 365 CRM

Files and folders can be easily uploaded/downloaded from right within Dynamics 365 CRM with Attach2Dynamics. Moreover, you can configure Notes, Email and Sales Literature attachments to be moved to cloud storages thereby freeing storage space in Dynamics 365 CRM.

Access Control of Action

You can now control the access given to Dynamics 365 CRM users over various features of Attach2Dynamics such as Upload, Download, Email, Copy Link, Rename, etc. in all three cloud storages – SharePoint, Dropbox and Azure Blob Storage. With this you can easily delegate workload and supervise user activities.

Why use Attach2Dynamics?

Prior to Attach2Dynamics, it was difficult for Dynamics 365 CRM users to perform basic functions such as uploading/downloading multiple files and folders to/from cloud storage. And SharePoint was the only cloud storage that was natively integrated with Dynamics 365 CRM. With Attach2Dynamics, came the user friendly UI that enables users to perform all functions such as drag & drop, upload/download, email, copy link, preview, deep search, etc. with ease. It ensures an efficient way to store and manage document or attachments in multiple cloud storages such as SharePoint, Dropbox and Azure Blob Storage. Thus, Attach2Dynamics can be rightfully claimed to be an ideal solution for seamless document or attachment management in cloud storages from right within Dynamics 365 CRM.

For more information, download the app from our Website or Microsoft AppSource for a FREE trial of 15 days.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

Tag Archives: Smart

Build Your Smart City with TIBCO

Smart Cities Are the Future

Why Are Smart Cities Hard?

Making Intelligent Transportation Possible

Need More?

Z-Wave Long Range protocol supports up to 2,000 smart devices on a mesh network

5 Smart Ways to Make Dynamics 365 Work Better for You

Integrate Dynamics 365 with SharePoint

Protect sensitive information between Dynamics 365 and SharePoint

Remove attachments from Dynamics 365 to an alternative storage

Connect from any on-prem database to D365 Online

Seal Documents in CRM with Blockchain

Document Attachment and Document Management – Dynamics 365 CRM now has a smart app for it!

How Automakers Are Saving Lives With Smart Partnerships

Lamborghini’s race to save lives

Making ventilators

Regulatory hurdles

The Smart Money’s on These Finance Sessions at SuiteWorld20

ProBeat: A smart speaker does not a smart home make

IoT, AI, and smart

Pushing the limits of what’s possible

Why smart search is the cornerstone of digital transformation (VB Live)

5 smart ways to manage Attachments and Disk Space in Dynamics 365 CRM

What is Attach2Dynamics?

How does it benefit?

Release Dynamics 365 CRM space

User-Friendly UI

Multiple Cloud Storages Supported

File Management in Dynamics 365 CRM

Access Control of Action

Why use Attach2Dynamics?

Recent Posts

Categories

Archives