Just as word-of-mouth can make or break your business, your online reputation can either help or hurt your business. In today's digital world, our "real" lives are increasingly becoming merged with our digital lives and it is transcending to the world of business and e-commerce. But how can you ensure what is being said about your company or one that you plan to do business with is true? The answer rests in the power of the blockchain. Blockchain technology stands to change online reputations in more ways than you think, and it is worthwhile incorporating online reputation management (ORM) [...]

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The rise of cloud storage has helped companies collect and manage massive amounts of data. Data comes from corporate systems, Internet of Things objects and unstructured sources like online forums. New analytics tools like Hadoop help companies make sense of that data. Yet simply having data and analysis tools doesn't mean the results of an analysis are meaningful. Getting true insight from data depends on the data being correct. With the many sources that feed into data lakes and the many transformations big data goes through to be processed, there are many possible ways for errors to be [...]

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The Internet of Things is expected to grow to 8.4 billion devices in 2017, with predictions of more than 20 billion devices by 2020. While this market is growing rapidly, it faces a major barrier on the way to its success. Connected devices are vulnerable, as seen in the DDoS attack on October 21st, 2016, which took down the DNS provider Dyn. Large websites such as Etsy, Twitter, PayPal, Verizon, Comcast and Reddit were among the many that were virtually unusable during this attack. The hackers turned to unsecured IoT devices to create an extensive botnet so they could push enough traffic to [...]

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With technological advancement, artificial intelligence is set to touch and modify the financial sector, specifically retail banking in many different ways. It's still the beginning stages of AI adoption for most banks. A Narrative Science survey highlighted that 32 percent of financial executive participants utilize AI technology, such as voice recognition and predictive analytics. Moreover, an Accenture survey noted that 76 percent those surveyed believe most banks will use AI interfaces primarily for customer interaction by 2020. But AI is changing retail banking in more ways than one. [...]

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Distributed ledger technologies such as Blockchain are a hot topic at the moment. Startups incorporating blockchain technology are raising hundreds of millions of dollars using a new form of crowdfunding called the Initial Coin Offering (ICO). Many of these startups offer new solutions for existing problems or are adapting existing services with Blockchain to differentiate themselves. It seems that almost any industry or service can and will be disrupted by Blockchain. One area that I would like to discuss in this article is the usage of Blockchain for the democratic process, because as it [...]

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Our identity system is hopelessly outdated. You might not be aware of it because you are using it on a daily basis and all seems to be fine. However, identity faces a major crisis and some big challenges need to be solved, which can only be done by bringing identity into the 21st century. However, what is identity? Only if we know what identity is, will we be able to change how we deal with identity. Know thyself, it was already inscribed in the forecourt of the Greek Temple of Apollo at Delphi and since then philosophers, psychologists, scientists, poets, authors, artists and politicians [...]

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The earth is having a difficult time, for quite a while now. Deforestation is still happening at a large scale across the globe, in Brazil alone, 40,200 hectares were deforested in the past year. The great pacific garbage patch is still growing and smog in Beijing is more common than a normal bright day. This is nothing new, unfortunately, and with Trump leaving the Paris agreement, it seems that problems will remain for a bit longer. However, there is some good news. Since a few years, scientists, companies and governments are turning to Big Data to solve climate change problems or even [...]

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Prescriptive analytics can be seen as the future of Big Data. If we see descriptive analytics as the foundation of Business Intelligence and we see predictive analytics as the basis of Big Data, then we can state that prescriptive analytics will be the future of Big Data. There are three stages of big data analytics: descriptive analytics, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics, where each stage offers more and better insights to create a better organisation. Each phase also growths in complexity as does the value it can offer the organisation. Descriptive analytics enables [...]

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Of course, you know all about web analytics or social media analytics, which has been around for years. However, web analytics and social media analytics alone is not enough to gain an understanding of your (online) business. There is another type of analytics that cannot be overlooked, which is content analytics. What makes it so special and why should you be paying attention to it? Content analytics can be defined as unlocking business value from unstructured content via semantic technologies to find answers to important questions or discover causes to certain trends. Companies can use [...]

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We are at a global crossing point and if we manage to solve some of the problems that we have created in the past decades, the world can become a better place. When the world wide web was developed 28 years ago, the objective was to create a decentralised world wide web. However, somehow, we ended up with a world wide web which is in the hands of a few very powerful companies. As a result, the internet can go down for millions of people if one of those companies has a problem. This was the case a few months ago, when AWS experienced ‘a glitch’, or better know a typo, which brought down the[...]

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