But might use very soon…..

Toutiao – meaning “headlines” – boasts some 700 million users in China, with more than 68 million active daily users. The company and its app is essentially a news aggregation service that tailors the chosen headlines to users’ clicks. http://www.toutiao.com/

The success of Toutiao has been achieved, in large part, by using machine learning to figure out users’ interests and tastes, and tailoring its offerings accordingly to get more clicks. Facebook and Twitter also use machine learning to refine recommendations, but they rely more heavily on social connections.

In the coming year, Toutiao aims to develop more AI-focused services, and to expand internationally. The ultimate goal is to become the worlds’ number-one online content destination, eclipsing the likes of Facebook and Twitter, as well as the likes of the New York Times and Buzzfeed in their own markets.

So, how does the AI come into play? Toutaio team created an artificial reporter, called Xiaoming, that’s capable of generating short news reports on European soccer games. So, the idea is to use machine learning to get the relevancy correct, and the AI – to transfer that relevancy into a product.

Platform also has several ways to identify fake news. In China this mostly consists of dubious health recommendations. It does this using a mix of human reviewers along with automated analyses of posts and comments related to them.

Why It’s Hot:

The company currently gets most of its revenue from advertising, which is also tailored to users’ likes and interests. The app should be on the radar for potential use in China and US (for Chinese expats).

Vespa maker Piaggio’s new robot servant is yet another sign of the transportation industry reinventing itself. Meet Gita.

The robot is an experimental new way of transporting stuff. The top of the robot opens up, allowing it to store up to 40 pounds of whatever you might otherwise lug around yourself. The company is about to begin testing Gita in a number of industrial settings, including factories and theme parks. But the hope is that the robot may also appeal to consumers who might want a robot assistant as they walk, run, or ride a bike (it has a top speed of 22 mph). Video here!!!! 

Gita balances itself as it travels, keeping its cargo level. The robot runs for eight hours, and can recharge in a regular outlet. It has three different modes: following someone, driving autonomously, and platooning with other Gita vehicles. The company has not announced a price.

Still, as with many of the ideas being tested by transportation companies, including self-driving taxis, semi-automated trucks, and delivery drones, the underlying technology, as well as the potential applications, remain a bit unproven.

Why It’s Hot: Gita is a clear sign of the technological revolution currently shaking the world of transportation. As new technologies start to upend modes of mobility that have changed barely at all in decades, the automotive world is rapidly reinventing itself.

Smartphones have sidelined digital cameras and other special-purpose devices. Now Google thinks mobile phones will shove virtual-reality headsets like the Oculus Rift into the shadows, too.

Google Cardboard, as both the phone holder and the accompanying app are called, transforms the computer in your pocket into a virtual-reality headset. It’s something of a gimmick. But it’s also a serious attempt to create a new mass communication and entertainment medium. “Virtual reality will have an important role to play in entertainment, communications, work, and learning,” says Clay Bavor, who leads Google’s virtual-reality project. “Cardboard will be the way that we make these immersive experiences available for everyone.”

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, also thinks virtual reality will change the world. He has predicted that it is “the next major computing and communication platform.” But Zuckerberg and Google are trying to make it come true in almost opposite ways. In 2013, Facebook spent $2 billion to acquire Oculus VR, a company developing a sophisticated virtual-reality headset called the Rift (also on Hot Sauce) that is held to your face with a thick elasticated strap and attaches via a cable to a powerful PC. The Rift goes on sale early next year. The price is unknown, but a version that until recently was available to developers cost $350, and an Oculus-approved PC to power its forthcoming headset costs at least $950. Facebook has also collaborated with Samsung on a $99 headset called the Gear VR, which can use some Samsung smartphones as a screen, and boasted that it will widen virtual reality’s audience this way. But Samsung is unlikely to make the Gear VR compatible with its competitors’ devices, and Facebook’s main project is the high-end Rift experience.

In contrast, Cardboard works with iPhones and almost any phone running Google’s Android software. Google has released the design of the Cardboard phone holder for free, and other companies sell versions for $10, or more if you want one in plastic, metal, or wood. Google estimates that it and other companies have sold or given away more than a million Cardboard kits. This weekend the New York Times will send out over a million more to its subscribers, to promote a virtual-reality documentary on children displaced by war. Google has also begun sending Cardboard kits to schools with a special version of the app that lets a teacher take a class on a 3-D tour of a coral reef or Machu Picchu.

The Rift offers a far better experience than Cardboard and has spurred tech and media companies to invest hundreds of millions in virtual-reality startups, content, and copycat headsets from companies such as Sony and phone manufacturer HTC. But the technological tide that made the Rift possible also works against it—in Cardboard’s favor. Even as the smartphone industry slashed the costs of the displays and sensors needed to build a good virtual-reality headset, smartphones have made people less inclined to spend money on PCs or on single-purpose gadgets such as cameras or GPS devices—and perhaps virtual-reality technology.

Why It’s Hot: VR will transform entertainment, collaboration, medical, education industries for the better. The applications are vast and exciting. Google will make it happen faster and more affordable, so the testing and improvement can take place immediately.

Though 60 percent of Web traffic occurs on mobile devices, only about 15 percent of online purchases are made through that medium.

The online payments company Stripe is betting that people want to buy things via mobile but are hamstrung by the annoyance of entering personal data and lengthy credit card info on a small screen.

Its solution is Relay, a new service within the Stripe API that a retailers can use to simplify mobile purchases by embedding a simple “buy” button in native apps or even in a tweet. Twitter is an active launch partner with Stripe on this product and has incorporated Relay into its mobile app. Using Relay, retailers can embed a “buy” button in tweets, which will launch a simple Stripe purchase confirmation dialog box to those customers who have chosen to save their credit card info in the Twitter app.

The new feature comes as Twitter searches for new ways to make its service useful – and profitable. Twitter will allow third-party retailers to charge transactions through their feeds for free, though that could change in the future.

There are two ways Relay works. By enabling purchases directly from Twitter feed. Once the customer clicks on a buy button, a secure interface box from Stripe opens, asking for confirmation and then completing the transaction instantly, assuming that the user has opted in to save credit card information in the Twitter app. For security reasons, Twitter will not save the information itself – it delegates that encryption headache to Stripe.

Other companies with less Twitter-centric business models will incorporate Relay directly into their mobile apps. ShopStyle is a fashion-oriented search engine that works with hundreds of retails, like Target, Sacks, etc. Using Relay, ShopStyle customers would have to enter card and personal data just once. Then they would be able to shop from all retailers searched across the app.

Why It’s Hot: Nearly two-thirds of Americans own a smartphone, and retailers could see a surge in online sales if the buying process were easier.

Facebook’s “Like” buttons have been logging data on our browsing for years – now the company will start using that data to target ads.

Facebook’s ad targeting algorithms are about to get a new fire hose of valuable and controversial personal data.

Starting next month, the millions of Facebook “Like” and “Share” buttons that publishers have added to their pages and mobile apps will start funneling data on people’s Web browsing habits into the company’s ad targeting systems. After the change, the types of sites you visit could be used to tune ads shown to you inside Facebook’s social networking service, its photo-sharing service Instagram, and mobile apps that use Facebook’s ad network.

Facebook first offered the Like button to publishers in 2010 as a way to help people tell friends and the company what was interesting. The buttons take the form of a snippet of code to be added to a page. That code directs a person’s browser to contact Facebook’s servers, allowing them to know the page you’re visiting, and to see the “cookie” files that Facebook pushes to its users’ browsers to identify them.

The company said in a blog post Tuesday that it will now officially start using the logged data to target ads. The post also announced a new privacy setting that lets you opt out of seeing ads targeted based on data collected on your online activity.

Why It’s Hot: How Facebook collects and uses its data has implications on privacy and the online ad business.

A handful of companies are coming up with ways to extend your phone’s battery life when you’re far from a power outlet.

Energy harvesting technologies are getting their way into the cell phones. Imagine a cell phone case that doesn’t look weird but it’s doing something pretty out of the ordinary: capturing some of the radio waves that the phone transmits when connecting to cell-phone towers and Wi-Fi routers, converting them to electricity, and feeding that power back to the phone’s battery. Produced by Nicola Labs and potentially available next year for $100. Gives about 25-30% charge back.

Moore’s Law, which predicts that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years, has held steady since 1975. Yet battery technology hasn’t kept the same pace, probably because its evolution is dependent on advances in chemistry. So while smartphones have gotten increasingly capable, with faster processors, better displays, and higher-resolution cameras, it can still be a challenge to get the battery that’s powering all these features to last throughout the day.

A French solar technology company called Sunpartner Technologies is already working on this with a thin, see-through overlay called WYSIPS Crystal (the acronym stands for “what you see is photovoltaic surface”) that sits between the glass and touch-screen layers on a smartphone or other mobile gadget. The WYSIPS layer is covered with small solar cells; when the phone is exposed to artificial or natural light, it captures the light and converts it to an electric current. A connection to the gadget’s battery would enable the layer to send power directly to it.

Much chunkier but perhaps more suited to that job is a wearable charger from Ampy, a startup based in Evanston, Illinois. The device contains a battery you fill up by moving around. The charger, which is the size of a deck of cards, contains inductors — essentially, magnets moving within a coil.

Why it Matters: Almost two-thirds of Americans have a smartphone, according to the Pew Research Center. This number varies by country and continent and is expected to grow.

Shortly after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit Nepal on Saturday, social media lit up with unverified reports of people trapped and buildings damaged. But how could humanitarian organizations know where to respond first? How could they know which accounts were actually true?

To weed out false rumors that can waste precious time, Justine Mackinnon, the president of Standby Task Force, has enlisted some local volunteers to use an experimental Web tool to crowdsource rumor verification as quickly as possible.

Fact: Standby Task Force is a group of volunteer “digital humanitarians” that becomes active after disasters at the request of international agencies and local relief organizations. They are often put in charge of a massive effort to sift through hundreds of thousands of tweets from people in Nepal to help workers identify priority areas.

Often, a large number of tweets coming from the same place and reporting the same general thing is enough verification, says Mackinnon. But sometimes the team encounters tweets “that don’t quite fit” with what the crowd is saying. Often these are untrue, but it is crucial that they be verified as quickly as possible in case they contain vital information. To do this, her group posts a “verification request,” in the form of a yes or no question, on a new Web platform called Verily

Users can go to Verily’s website and read short tutorials on simple, established ways to verify things like the source of an image or the date and location of a report on a social network. They can answer yes-or-no verification questions about reports, provided they supply a piece of evidence supporting their answer—a corroborating photo, for example. Users can also share verification requests with their own social networks. Based on the evidence posted by Verily users, Mackinnon’s team can pass information along to relief organizations. The idea is to “crowdsource critical thinking,” says Patrick Meier, one of the creators of the tool and a co-founder of Standby Task Force.

Tools like Verily are only powerful if lots of people use them, and Mackinnon says that building a community has been the biggest challenge in Nepal, as well as during the first trial of the platform after a cyclone hit the nation of Vanuatu in March. For the past couple of days, the team has been teaching some 200 Nepali volunteers how to use the platform, with the hope that they can recruit others from their personal networks.

More about preventing the misinformation in critical moments: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514056/preventing-misinformation-from-spreading-through-social-media/

Youtube TedX talk on Digital Humanitarianism: WHATCH HERE

How Can Marketers Improve Landing Page Optimization? Recent eMarketer study revealed the LPO remains a challenging and often overlooked practice.

Landing page optimization (LPO) is critical for any marketer looking to turn site visitors into leads—and eventually, customers. Indeed, increasing conversions ranked as the most important objective of an LPO strategy among marketing professionals polled worldwide by Ascend2 earlier this month by a long shot, cited by 93%.

However, despite the importance of the landing page, just 27% of respondents said they were “very successful” at LPO. More promising was the fact that 54% were “somewhat successful.” What was preventing respondents from reaching the “very successful” level? The chart below shows:

Testing is key when it comes to landing pages, as A/B testing ranked as the most effective tactic to execute for LPO—and even better, it was the least difficult. Interestingly, though, just 18% of respondents conducted “extensive testing” of landing pages for optimization purposes, while 59% ran “limited” tests, and 23% did none. A/B testing may have been easy and effective, but the story wasn’t the same for many of the other effective tactics, with other leaders such as segmentation and targeting and copy optimization also landing among the most difficult. Landing pages are relatively common among marketers.

In November 2014 polling by Salesforce Marketing Cloud, 42% of marketers worldwide said they used landing pages. This ranked as the fifth most popular digital marketing channel or tactic used—but trailed Nos. 2 to 4 by just 2 percentage points.

Why it’s hot: For marketers to make the most of the landing pages they build, they’ll need to master LBO by improving internal skills, creating conversion-worthy content and mastering the most effective tactics.

At Reebok, we believe in breaking free from monotonous, unmotivating fitness routines and taking on a more inspiring approach to lifelong health and fitness. That’s why we promote a new type of physical activity—one that doesn’t shackle us to machines. The fitness we champion is a lifestyle that goes far beyond physical benefits and has the power to affect all facets of our lives for the better.

Campaign website: http://fitness.reebok.com/live-free-range/Stories/2014-12/Free-Range/ contains the video, inspiration message, 2-3 styles to shop right now, social links and a map to find the store – all streamlined to one single page.

Why it’s hot: Beautifully done. Inspirational. Right timing. And most of all – lives in consumable moments that touch a variety of audience.

According to eMarketer, 2015 will see mobile search reach the tipping point—the stage at which the majority of spend, organic traffic and paid clicks comes from smartphones and tablets, surpassing traditional desktop/laptop search activity, according to a new eMarketer report, “Key Digital Trends for 2015: What’s in Store—and Not in Store—for the Coming Year.” (unfortunately only available to corporate accounts, I will see if I can get it)

For marketers, there is an important caveat: Return on investment (ROI) has not reached a similar tipping point. ROI on mobile search is improving, but it will continue to trail desktop search ROI next year—and further into the future, until mobile performance measurement, particularly in relation to the impact on sales in physical stores, gets more precise.

But the ubiquity of smartphones, and consumers’ growing use of phones in almost every waking moment of the day, means that search will be more mobile than desktop next year. The importance of search in the digital experience makes this a trend that bears watching.

Why it’s hot: While the industry is not settled on ROI and how to tie in mobile performance to sales and other back-end metrics, I think agencies and their analytics arms should be on the forefront and try to come up with scenarios that would work for the clients in the meantime.