Month: January 2018

The next phase in data collection is right under your feet.

Online clicks give retailers valuable insight into consumer behavior, but what can they learn from footsteps? It’s a question Milwaukee-based startup Scanalytics is helping businesses explore with floor sensors that track people’s movements.

The sensors can also be used in office buildings to reduce energy costs and in nursing homes to determine when someone falls. But retailers make up the majority of Scanalytics’ customers, highlighting one of several efforts brick-and-mortar stores are undertaking to better understand consumer habits and catch up with e-commerce giant Amazon.

Physical stores have been at a disadvantage because they “don’t have that granular level of understanding as to where users are entering, what they’re doing, what shelves are not doing well, which aisles are not being visited,” said Brian Sathianathan, co-founder of Iterate.ai, a small Denver-based company that helps businesses find and test technologies from startups worldwide.

But it’s become easier for stores to track customers in recent years. With Wi-Fi — among the earliest available options — businesses can follow people when they connect to a store’s internet. One drawback is that not everyone logs on so the sample size is smaller. Another is that it’s not possible to tell whether someone is inches or feet away from a product.

Sunglass Hut and fragrance maker Jo Malone use laser and motion sensors to tell when a product is picked up but not bought, and make recommendations for similar items on an interactive display. Companies such as Toronto-based Vendlytics and San Francisco-based Prism use artificial intelligence with video cameras to analyze body motions. That can allow stores to deliver customized coupons to shoppers in real time on a digital shelf or on their cellphones, said Jon Nordmark, CEO of Iterate.ai.

With Scanalytics, Nordmark said, “to have [the sensors] be super useful for someone like a retailer, they may need to power other types of things,” like sending coupons to customers.

Using the data

Scanalytics co-founder and CEO Joe Scanlin said that’s what his floor sensors are designed to do. For instance, the sensors read a customer’s unique foot compressions to track that person’s path to a digital display and how long the person stands in front of it before walking away, he said. Based on data collected over time, the floor sensors can tell a retailer the best time to offer a coupon or change the display before the customer loses interest.   

“Something that in the moment will increase their propensity to purchase a product,” said Scanlin, 29, who started developing the paper-thin sensors that are 2-square feet (0.19-sq. meters) as a student at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater in 2012. He employs about 20 people.

Wisconsin-based bicycle retailer Wheel and Sprocket uses Scanalytics’ sensors — which can be tucked under utility mats — to count the number of customers entering each of its eight stores to help schedule staff.

“That’s our biggest variable expense,” said co-owner Noel Kegel. “That sort of makes or breaks our profitability.”

Privacy and surveillance

Kegel wants to eventually have sensors in more areas throughout his stores to measure where customers spend most of their time and what products are popular, but he said it’s too expensive right now.

The cost of having the sensors ranges from $20 to $1,000 per month, depending on square footage and add-on applications to analyze data or interact with digital signs, Scanlin said. He said he’s working with 150 customers in the U.S. and other countries and estimates that about 60 percent are retailers.  

The emergence of tracking technologies is bound to raise concerns about privacy and surveillance. But Scanlin noted his sensors don’t collect personally identifying information.

Jeffrey Lenon, 47, who was recently shopping at the Shops of Grand Avenue mall in Milwaukee, said he wasn’t bothered by the idea of stores tracking foot traffic and buying habits.

“If that’s helping the retailer as far as tracking what sells and what no, I think it’s a good idea,” Lenon said.

These technologies have not become ubiquitous in the U.S. yet, but it’s only a matter of time, said Ghose Anindya, a business professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

“In a couple of years this kind of conversation will be like part and parcel of everyday life. But I don’t think we’re there yet,” he said.
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Palestinians in the West Bank are finally getting high-speed mobile data services, after a yearslong Israeli ban that cost their fragile economy hundreds of millions of dollars, impeded tech start-ups and denied them simple conveniences enjoyed by the rest of the world.

 

Palestinian cell phone providers Wataniya and Jawwal are expected to launch 3G broadband services in the West Bank by the end of this month, Palestinian officials said, after Israel assigned frequencies and allowed the import of equipment.

 

“It’s about time,” Wataniya CEO Durgham Maraee said of the anticipated launch, speaking to The Associated Press at company headquarters in the West Bank last week. “It has taken a very, very long time.”

 

The belated move to 3G comes a decade after Palestinian operators first sought Israeli permits and at a time when faster 4G is increasingly available in the Middle East.

 

This keeps Palestinian mobile companies at a continued disadvantage, including in competition with Israeli companies that offer 3G and 4G coverage to Palestinian customers in the West Bank through towers installed in Israeli settlements. The World Bank has criticized this state of affairs because the Israeli firms do not pay license fees or taxes to the Palestinian authorities.

 

The Israeli ban on 3G also remains in place in the Gaza Strip, making that Palestinian territory, dominated by the militant group Hamas, one of the last without such services across the globe. Mobile internet is available in far-flung places, from the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan to the Atlantic’s volcanic rock island of Ascension.

 

In blocking 3G for years, Israel has cited security concerns, without going into details. Officials suggest, for example, that high-speed mobile data could make it easier for Palestinian militants to communicate while reducing the risk of Israeli surveillance.

 

Israel’s Shin Bet security agency declined comment Sunday.

 

COGAT, an Israeli Defense Ministry branch, said it worked on implementing a 2015 memorandum of understanding with the Palestinians on 3G, and that it expects a launch in two to three weeks. Officials did not respond to questions about Israel’s yearslong ban on 3G.

 

Israel has delayed approval for Palestinian economic development projects in the past, leading to efforts by high-level international efforts to try to speed things along. Most recently, President Donald Trump’s Mideast team has urged Israel to make economic gestures to the Palestinians.

 

Palestinian officials have said they suspect such projects are being used as political leverage.

 

At the same time, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for so-called “economic peace” with the Palestinians, as he stepped back from offers by predecessors to negotiate the terms of an independent Palestinian state on lands Israel captured in 1967.

 

At Wataniya headquarters, where employees got 3G as part of pre-launch tests, the mood was upbeat.

 

The CEO said the 3G launch and the company’s recent expansion into Gaza, after Israel lifted restrictions on importing equipment, could translate into profits in 2018 — the first since Wataniya began operations in 2009 as the second Palestinian cellphone provider.

 

“The future is bright,” Maraee said.

 

But the company’s struggles also illustrate the difficulties faced by Palestinian entrepreneurs, large and small, as they operate under Israeli obstacles to trade, movement and access.

 

Israel has kept a tight grip on the daily lives of Palestinians since its 1967 capture of the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, areas sought for a Palestinian state.

 

It annexed east Jerusalem and retains overall control of the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority, a self-rule government, administers 38 percent of the West Bank, while the remaining area, home to 400,000 Israeli settlers, is largely off-limits to Palestinian economic development.

 

Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, but has enforced a border blockade, along with Egypt, since Hamas seized the strip in 2007. The West Bank-based Palestinian Authority of President Mahmoud Abbas is trying to regain a foothold in Gaza in stop-and-go reconciliation talks with Hamas.

 

The World Bank has repeatedly urged Israel to unshackle the Palestinian economy to allow private sector growth, essential for lowering double-digit Palestinian unemployment.

 

In 2016, the bank said the Palestinian mobile phone sector lost more than $1 billion in potential earnings over the previous three years, largely due to Israeli restrictions.

 

It noted that Israeli providers siphoned off as much as 30 percent of the potential Palestinian customer base in the West Bank with offers of 3G and 4G services.

 

Maraee said Wataniya has stayed afloat in part because of the continued support of its main investors — the Qatar-based telecommunications company Ooredoo and the self-rule government’s Palestinian Investment Fund.

 

Wataniya is now at the break-even point, but that it once suffered losses of as much as $20 million a year, he said.

 

“If it wasn’t for the commitment of the PIF and the Ooredoo Group … to the Palestinian economy, probably Wataniya would not have survived under these trying circumstances,” he said.

 

Smaller Palestinian entrepreneurs also expect an immediate 3G bump in business.

 

Ali Taha launched Rocab, an online taxi booking service, last July, but has so far captured only a tiny slice of the market. He expects a significant increase with 3G, since customers would be able to summon a ride from anywhere, instead of having to search for a location with WiFi.

 

Shadi Atshan, founder of the Palestinian start-up accelerator FastForward, said he expects app development to flourish and generate more Palestinian tech jobs.

 

For ordinary Palestinians, everyday life will get just a little easier.

 

Alaa Amouri, 20, a student, said she gets 4G from an Israeli provider that offers only partial coverage in the West Bank.

 

Mobile data from a Palestinian provider would offer real-time updates on potential trouble on the roads, said Amouri, who commutes between east Jerusalem and her West Bank university, passing through the crowded Israeli-run Qalandiya crossing almost daily.

 

“It (3G) helps in getting news updates,” she said. “Sometimes when we are at the Qalandiya crossing, we find it blocked without knowing why.”

 
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[Uganda is mulling over the idea of creating its own social media platforms. But social media users and government critics see this as a potential effort to control free expression.

Facebook and Twitter should brace themselves for competition from Uganda. With no name yet or date on when the new services will be operational, the Uganda Communications Commission is planning to launch its own social media platforms.

Commission Director Godfrey Mutabazi says Uganda has many young people who have come up with innovations and applications that can be deployed to serve the population.

“There is open information for everything. We have got over almost 70 percent penetration,” he said. “We are moving into digital era, data communication. We are hope that by the end of this year 20-25 percent, maybe 30 percent of Ugandans will be on data communication. So we shall access the information, education-wise, research, name it, will be available.”

Nicholas Opiyo executive director of Chapter Four Uganda, a local civil liberties organization, says Uganda is not seeking to develop its own social media space because it appreciates the innovative power of social media. He fears a darker purpose.

“One I don’t believe they can do it, but if they want to do it, it’s not for the best of intentions,” he said. “Recent studies have shown that the government of Uganda is now involved in active filtering of particular information. Namely; information about corruption, information about same sex relations, critical government policies on the first family, that’s what they are trying to do. That’s what they are trying to do, because the biggest threat to this government now, is an informed citizenry.”

In 2016, the Ugandan government shut down social media twice — on Election Day and during President Yoweri Museveni’s swearing in ceremony. For social media users like Jackie Kemigisa, a move by the government regulator to set up its own social media is cause to worry.

“As a person who uses social media and whose source of employment, everything that I do is online, it was a horrible idea. At first I thought it was a joke. So, counting on the sad part of it that they don’t have the money, and if they do, well then, Ugandans will have to re-strategize, go back to the drawing board and see how we can still fight for our freedoms,” said Kemigisa.

Critics say a social media platform controlled by the government will put Uganda in the same league as countries such as Iran, China and North Korea. But the Uganda Communications Commission has described those who see this innovation as eroding freedom of speech as patronizing. The government agency insists they just want to keep hate speech out of Ugandan social media, and says the new platforms are going to be positive.

 
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Vietnam is adding pressure on foreign internet firms to keep data on local users and be more accessible to the country’s authorities as the country tightens control over online dissent.

A bill that the Southeast Asian country’s Ministry of Public Security offered to legislators this month would require foreign internet services to open representative offices if they have at least 10,000 Vietnamese users or if otherwise requested, official media say.

The bill being reviewed by the National Assembly also calls for making the same foreign companies store data on Vietnamese users in Vietnam, VnExpress International reported Jan. 11. 

Those providers should collect “important data collected or generated from activities in the country,” the report adds.

Legislation on normally free-wheeling foreign internet firms such as Facebook and Google, both popular among Vietnamese, extend the Communist country’s tightening of control over online dissent after initial moves over the past two years, analysts say.

“In recent years Vietnam has witnessed a boom on the Internet and social media plays a very important role in Vietnamese citizens’ lives, and so I think that the government is aware of the importance of social media,” said Trung Nguyen, international relations dean at Ho Chi Minh University of Social Sciences and Humanities.

“That’s the reason why they want to establish their presence, because they want to control social media,” he said.

Trend of tightening

A series of arrests of bloggers in 2016 and 2017 bared the Vietnamese government’s sensitivity to public views about graft and inefficiency among officials, experts believe. 

Those views weigh increasingly on state-to-people relations despite Vietnam’s fast economic growth that has brought perks such as job creation.

In June 2017 the Ministry of Public Security initially proposed the law to give it more power over prohibited content, including cyber-crime, and anti-government activities. 

Owners of Internet cafes had already been asked to install monitoring software and make customers show identification that inspectors could check.

But Vietnam lacks an Internet censorship scheme like its Communist neighbor China. Vietnam does not, for example, routinely filter websites for provocative keywords or block foreign social media networks. Authorities are, however, allowed to stop content that includes “propaganda against the state.”

About 70 percent of Vietnam’s total 92 million people use the internet, with 53 million on social media sites, government figures show. The country lacks widespread, homegrown social media, steering people instead toward foreign-registered services.

Officials also hope the law, now it its fifth draft, will also ease “fake news,” curb internet fraud and stop hacking that has hit 18,000 Vietnam-registered websites including that of the country’s chief airline, said Lam Nguyen, country manager with market research firm IDC. Risk of internet crime is particularly high in Vietnam, he said.

The representative offices required under the law would force foreign Internet firms to pay taxes and follow local regulations that they can avoid now by basing offshore.

Still, a chief mission of the pending legislation is to keep dissent offline, Trung Nguyen said.

“Obviously some things they feel sensitive about,” said Yee Chung Seck, partner with the international law form Baker & McKenzie (Vietnam). “And there’s such a degree of what’s the level of sensitivity — does it somehow cross the line into being abusive.”

Foreign firms expected to comply

Facebook and Google are expected to follow the new law once passed. Neither American internet giant replied to a request for comment for this report, but Vietnam’s Ministry of Information and Communications said Friday it had gotten initial compliance from both.

Google and YouTube have blocked or removed “many harmful and unlawful video clips,” though they still appear on Facebook, the ministry said in a statement. Facebook, it said, has taken down more than 670 of about 5,000 accounts that Vietnam said are “false” or “spread defamation, obscenity and violence.”

Facebook has closed 159 anti-government accounts and Google has removed 4,500 videos containing “bad or toxic content from YouTube,” VnExpress International said.

“The minister stressed that Vietnam was particularly concerned about information that incites anti-government and anti-Party sentiment, violence, or smears the regime, and called for Facebook’s collaboration to deal with the problem,” said the statement, which followed a meeting between the minister and Facebook’s regional regulatory affairs head Damien Yeo.

Internet firms are likely to comply as long as they can avoid hurting overall business.

“I think to a certain degree, probably, if it’s not too much of a cost and not so much disruption to their current business in Vietnam, they would probably try to comply,” Lam Nguyen said.

The Facebook legal affairs official pledged to work with authorities in “dealing with bad information in the global scale,” the ministry website said.
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Scientists build computer models in order to understand how complex systems, such as traffic, weather or cancer progression work. These simulations of real-world situations usually require dozens of scientists working for many months. But a new approach to building such models, together with new advances in artificial intelligence, may significantly speed up this process. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Kathryn Green and her husband prevented their young son from playing on screen devices until he was 2 years old.

Then they handed him a Square Panda, a screen that sounds out letters. He loved it.

“It was pretty incredible and actually scary in some ways to see how quickly he was drawn to it and knew what to do,” said Green, who works at Square Panda.

Square Panda, in many parents’ eyes, would qualify as good screen time. It teaches young children early literacy while also engaging them with fun sounds and cartoonlike figures. The company was among thousands last week exhibiting at CES, the large consumer electronics show that took place in Las Vegas.

WATCH: Tech’s Effects on Kids a Concern at Consumer Electronics Show

Worries about kids and screens

But while there was a lot of excitement at CES about the latest in drones, robots and wearable devices, there was also some ambivalence about how the digital life might be affecting children.

“We need to start to set our own rules,” said Robin Raskin, with Living in Digital Times, a firm that creates tech conferences. “And I don’t think you can depend on the industry to set them for you. But I think you can depend on them to make the tools so you can set your rules easily.”

Should Apple help parents?

Tech executives have also sounded the alarm, and earlier this month, two large Apple shareholders wrote to the iPhone maker to express their concerns.

They asked the company to do more to help parents who want to restrict their children’s use of mobile phones and requested that Apple fund research looking into the effects of smartphones and other technologies on children. 

“Eighth-graders who are heavy users of social media have a 27 percent higher risk of depression, while those who exceed the average time spent playing sports, hanging out with friends in person, or doing homework have a significantly lower risk,” the investors wrote.

“Wait Until 8th,” a parent group, invites parents to hold out until the eighth grade before letting their adolescents have their own smartphones. The organizers say that smartphones are addictive, affect sleep and interfere with schoolwork and friendships.

At CES, some exhibitors aimed their products at anxious parents worried that screens are upending play.

Games beyond screens

When John Shi’s older two children received laptops, “they just disappeared behind screens,” said the long-time tech executive.

Inspired to do something differently with his third child, he created Beyond Screen, a company that makes interactive games that do not rely on screens. He says tech executives should make products and services they would let their own kids use.

“I’m not going to make all these things that will just simply suck in our children’s time, without providing benefits, that really take them away from social interactions, take them away from parents and teachers, make them feel lonely,” Shi said. “I’ll make products my children will actually use.”

An opportunity for tech

Raskin says the growing ambivalence is a chance for the tech industry to do something new.

“The industry has a big opportunity to say, ‘We will educate you, trust us, we got you covered,’” she said. “And they really do owe it to people.’’
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Even at CES, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, there is ambivalence about the ways technology affects children. VOA’s Michelle Quinn talked to people about the benefits and costs as technology is becoming more a part of young people’s lives.
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Gadgets that can make homes smarter are becoming more affordable for consumers. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, even simple devices were getting sophisticated new brains. VOA’s George Putic has more.
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General Motors Co is seeking U.S. government approval for a fully autonomous car — one without a steering wheel, brake pedal or accelerator pedal — to enter the automaker’s first commercial ride-sharing fleet in 2019, executives said.

For passengers who cannot open doors, the Cruise AV — a rebranded version of GM’s Chevrolet Bolt EV — has even been designed to perform that task. It will have other accommodations for hearing and visually impaired customers.

This will be one of the first self-driving vehicles in commercial passenger service and among the first to do away with manual controls for steering, brakes and throttle. What is the driver’s seat in the Bolt EV will become the front left passenger seat in the Cruise AV, GM said.

Company President Dan Ammann told reporters GM had filed on Thursday for government approval to deploy the “first production-ready vehicle designed from the start without a steering wheel, pedals or other unnecessary manual controls.”

GM is part of a growing throng of vehicle manufacturers, technology companies and tech startups seeking to develop so-called robo-taxis over the next three years in North America, Europe and Asia. Most of those companies have one or more partners.

On Friday, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration confirmed GM had petitioned for approval to operate up to 2,500 vehicles without steering wheels or human drivers.

 “Safety is the [Transportation] department’s top priority. The department will review this petition and give it careful consideration,” the agency said in a statement.

Ford Motor Co said on Tuesday it will partner with delivery service Postmates Inc as the automaker starts testing ways to transport people, food and packages this spring in its self-driving cars, which are being developed by Ford’s Argo unit.

Other companies, from Uber Technologies Inc to Alphabet Inc’s Waymo, have been testing self-driving vehicle prototypes in limited ride-sharing applications, but have been less explicit than GM in announcing plans for commercial robo-taxi services.

GM executives said the automaker has asked the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to allow 16 alterations to existing vehicle safety rules — such as having an airbag in what would normally be the driver’s seat, but without a steering wheel — to enable the deployment of the Cruise AV.

The automaker would then need to obtain similar approval from individual U.S. states. GM executives said seven U.S. states already allow the alterations sought by the automaker.

In other states — including those that stipulate a car must have a licensed human driver — GM will work with regulators to change or get a waiver from existing rules.

The company declined to identify the first states in which it plans to launch the vehicle or say when it would begin testing.

GM wants to control its own self-driving fleet partly because of the tremendous revenue potential it sees in selling related services, from e-commerce to infotainment, to consumers riding in those vehicles.

At a Nov. 30 briefing in San Francisco, GM’s Ammann told investors the lifetime revenue generation of one of its self-driving cars could eventually be “several hundred thousands of dollars.” That compares with the $30,000 on average that GM collects today for one of its vehicles, mostly derived from the initial sale.

GM’s Cruise AV is equipped with the automaker’s fourth-generation self-driving software and hardware, including 21 radars, 16 cameras and five lidars — sensing devices that use laser light to help autonomous cars “see” nearby objects and obstacles.

The Cruise AV will be able to operate in hands-free mode only in premapped urban areas.

GM’s prototype self-driving vehicles have been developed in San Francisco by Cruise Automation, the onetime startup that GM acquired in March 2016 for a reported $1 billion.
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