Importance of Digital Marketing for E-commerce Stores

Using digital marketing can create huge revenue as it supports to get customers and brand value. Today, customers are no more dependent just on the content or word-of-mouth before making a purchase. They check the reviews about any particular product or service on all the platforms on which the product listed.

As per the recent reports, 37 million social media visits let to 529,000 orders on average. In which, the biggest social network Facebook supports to get more traffic to the site that leads to sales constituting an average of 85% of all the orders. It has become vital to grab consumers’ attention as they get distracted easily. This is where Digital Marketing comes into the frame and its importance came into light. Here, we are listing some more points that show the importance of digital marketing for an e-commerce store:

Equal Opportunity for all

Online marketing presents an equal opportunity to all kinds of the business unlike old days scenario when multinationals and big business house mostly embraced in the market. Small and medium scale businesses or startups now have the assets to perform sales and marketing processes. Before digital marketing, these opportunities were accessible only to giant companies.

Cost-Effective Solution

Digital marketing is more cost-effective than traditional marketing. It allows small businesses with no assets and capitalization to find a superior and financially savvy marketing channel in the marketing. Data says that up to 40% of respondents claimed to get considerable savings by utilizing digital marketing techniques of promotion for their products and services.

Delivers Conversion

With the help of digital marketing, you can easily measure accomplishment by the rate of approaching traffic gets converted into leads, supporters, subscribers, deals or sales. It is not like traditional marketing techniques, there occurs no conversion, where all your marketing endeavours will go to squander.

Generate Better Revenues

Apart from the better conversion rates, DM also assures you for amazing revenues. It conveys heaps of gainful benefits for you and your business appreciates better as well as higher incomes. You can gain better odds of optimizing your business by utilizing different digital advertising strategies.

Interaction with Targeted Audiences

Digital advertising methods effectively cooperate with the target audience and assure result driven interactions. This role makes you sure that the engagements that your clients hope to get while interacting with your business. When you facilitate your clients with legitimate engagement, you came to know your prospect’s needs.

Great for Mobile Consumer

Present-day, mobile marketing is the most advanced way for data dispersal that is also today’s basic correspondence channel. These mobile phones have become a major part of our life. With digital marketing, you can easily connect with those mobile users and convert them into potential customers.

Create Brand Loyalty

The best part of digital marketing is that it can pull the target audience. It also creates a reputation for your brand and might intrigue enough to buy what you bring to the table. When you offer what you guaranteed. It will allow you to build up a superior association with them that ultimately influences them to develop into paying clients.

 

The 10 Best Mobile Applications to Maintain Weight

The mobile application is incredibly useful in maintaining weight and taking care of health. You can easily download them to your mobile device and use it to track different lifestyle habits like calorie intake and exercise. Some of them hold unique characteristics and different financial rewards and support forums that help keep motivate towards your weight loss goal.

We have rounded up 8 great applications for the support you manage your weight effectively, and work on better and more intelligently:

1. MyFitnessPal

MyFitnessPal presents a huge food database, offering more than 5 million various foods. It works as an effective calorie counter; it can take you less than 5 minutes a day to track your diet and exercise. The app works in conjunction with over 50 devices and application including Fitbit, Garmin devices, Apple Health, etc.

2. MyPlate Calorie Tracker

MyPlate Calorie Tracker is considered as a user-friendly option for losing weight. This application supports you find out which food you eat contains the most calories, allowing you to set personalized daily calorie goals. It also allows you to keep track of your water intake, and create custom goals for micronutrients and macronutrients.

3. Headspace

The Headspace application is a winner as far as bringing the practice of meditation to the masses. It is said that optimal health needs more than just logging 30 minutes at the gym. The Headspace application is on top of bringing the practice of meditation to the masses.

4. Fitness Buddy

If you are looking for a personal trainer in your pocket, then go for Fitness Buddy. It holds more than 100 gym workouts for all types of fitness goals, over 1,000 home workouts, and eight comprehensive fitness programs, animations, instructions, and videos.

5. Aaptiv

A specially designed app for fitness freaks, Aaptiv is the best option for personal training. It is an in-ear personal trainer who takes your exercises to a whole next level. It has over 2,500 audio sessions, 1 personal trainer, creating new courses every week. Aaptiv holds everything you need for comprehensive training.

6. Keel

Get yourself into a fast and effective workout with the Keelo app. This application provides fast-paced workouts by taking leverage of training methods. It lasts from a minimum of 8 minutes to 20 minutes that will provide results when done at least thrice in a week.

7. Sworkit

Do you hate the gym due to the crowd or any other reasons? Sworkit is a perfect option and you do not worry too much about working out. With it, you only need to set your goal and provide your current details, and that is it. You will be able to get a 6-week program with goals to accomplish every week.

8. Lose It!

Have you heard about Lose It! It is goal-oriented applications that will support you accomplish your fitness goals through food and exercise tracking. This app is the perfect way to log what you are eating to reach your goal weight. This app feature makes doing so even easier by taking a photo of your meal to log it and get the calorie count.

Trump signs bill that creates the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency

US President Donald Trump signed today a bill into law, approving the creation of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

The bill, known as the CISA Act, reorganizes and rebrands the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD), a program inside the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as CISA, a standalone federal agency in charge of overseeing civilian and federal cybersecurity programs.

The NPPD, which was first established in 2007, has already been handling almost all of the DHS’ cyber-related issues and projects.

As part of the DHS, the NPPD was the government entity in charge of physical and cyber-security of federal networks and critical infrastructure, and oversaw the Federal Protective Service (FPS), the Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM), the Office of Cyber and Infrastructure Analysis (OCIA), the Office of Cybersecurity& Communications (OC&C), and the Office of Infrastructure Protection (OIP).

As CISA, the agency’s prerogatives will remain the same, and nothing is expected to change in day-to-day operations, but as a federal agency, CISA will now benefit from an increased budget and more authority in imposing its directives.

“Elevating the cybersecurity mission within the Department of Homeland Security, streamlining our operations, and giving NPPD a name that reflects what it actually does will help better secure the nation’s critical infrastructure and cyber platforms,” said NPPD Under Secretary Christopher Krebs. “The changes will also improve the Department’s ability to engage with industry and government stakeholders and recruit top cybersecurity talent.”

With its promotion to the rank of federal agency, CISA is now on the same level as the US Secret Service or FEMA, but still under the DHS’ oversight. The new agency is expected to improve the cyber-security defenses across other US federal agencies, coordinate cyber-security programs with states, and bolster the government’s overall cyber-security protections in the face of mundane criminals and nation-state hackers.

 

The Amazing Ways Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Genomics and Gene Editing

By 2021, consultant firm Frost & Sullivan expects that artificial intelligence (AI) systems will generate $6.7 billion in revenue from healthcare globally. One area that machine learning is significantly evolving is genomics the study of the complete set of genes within an organism. While much attention has been paid to the implications for human health, genetic sequencing and analysis could also be ground-breaking for agriculture and animal husbandry. When researchers can sequence and analyze DNA, something that artificial intelligence systems make faster, cheaper and more accurate, they gain perspective on the particular genetic blueprint that orchestrates all activities of that organism. With this insight, they can make decisions about care, what an organism might be susceptible to in the future, what mutations might cause different diseases and how to prepare for the future.

Genome Sequencing and Gene Editing

Since the illnesses an individual experiences in a lifetime are largely determined by their genetics, there has been significant interest to better understand our genetic makeup for years. Our progress was stalled by the complexity and enormity of the data that needed to be evaluated. With advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, researchers are better able to interpret and act on genomic data through genome sequencing and gene editing.

A genome sequence is a specific order of DNA building blocks (A, T, C, G) in a living organism; the human genome is made up of 20,000 genes and more than 3 billion base pairs of these genetic letters. Sequencing the genome is a critical first step to understanding it. The latest technology called high-throughput sequencing (HTS) allows the sequencing of DNA to occur in one day—a process that once took a decade when it was first done.

When changes are made to DNA at a cellular level, it’s called gene editing.

Personalized medicine and life-saving therapies

One of the most exciting prospects about gene technology is the development of precision or personalized medicine. The field, which enables interventions specific to a patient or population of genetically similar individuals, is expected to reach $87 billion by 2023. Historically, cost and technology limited the implementation of personalized medicine, but machine learning techniques are helping to overcome these barriers. Machines help identify patterns within genetic data sets and then computer models can make predictions about an individual’s odds of developing a disease or responding to interventions.

 

Microsoft acquires conversational AI and bot development firm

SAN FRANCISCO: Microsoft has announced to acquire a conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) and bot development company XOXCO for an undisclosed sum.

Texas-based XOXCO has been paving the way in conversational AI since 2013 and was responsible for the creation of Howdy, the first commercially available bot for Slack that helps schedule meetings.

“It also developed Botkit which provides the development tools used by hundreds of thousands of developers on GitHub. Over the years, we have partnered with XOXCO and have been inspired by this work,” said Lili Cheng, Corporate Vice President, Conversational AI at Microsoft on Thursday.

Conversational AI is quickly becoming a way in which businesses engage with employees and customers — from creating virtual assistants and redesigning customer interactions to using conversational assistants to help employees communicate and work better together.

According to Gartner, “by 2020, conversational artificial intelligence will be a supported user experience for more than 50 percent of large, consumer-centric enterprises”.

The Microsoft Bot Framework, available as a service in Azure and on GitHub, today supports over 360,000 developers.

“With this acquisition, we are continuing to realise our approach of democratising AI development, conversation and dialog, and integrating conversational experiences where people communicate,” said Cheng.

Over the last six months, Microsoft has made several strategic acquisitions to accelerate the pace of AI development.

The acquisition of Semantic Machines in May brought a revolutionary new approach to conversational AI.

In July, it acquired Bonsai to help reduce the barriers to AI development by combining machine teaching, reinforcement learning and simulation.

In September, Microsoft acquired Lobe, a company that has created a simple visual interface empowering anyone to develop and apply deep learning and AI models quickly, without writing code.

“The acquisition of GitHub in October demonstrates our belief in the power of communities to help fuel the next wave of bot development,” Microsoft said.

How to make AI less biased

With machine learning systems now being used to determine everything from stock prices to medical diagnoses, it’s never been more important to look at how they arrive at decisions.

A new approach out of MIT demonstrates that the main culprit is not just the algorithms themselves, but how the data itself is collected.

“Computer scientists are often quick to say that the way to make these systems less biased is to simply design better algorithms,” says lead author Irene Chen, a PhD student who wrote the paper with MIT professor David Sontag and postdoctoral associate Fredrik D. Johansson. “But algorithms are only as good as the data they’re using, and our research shows that you can often make a bigger difference with better data.”

Looking at specific examples, researchers were able to both identify potential causes for differences in accuracies and quantify each factor’s individual impact on the data. They then showed how changing the way they collected data could reduce each type of bias while still maintaining the same level of predictive accuracy.

“We view this as a toolbox for helping machine learning engineers figure out what questions to ask of their data in order to diagnose why their systems may be making unfair predictions,” says Sontag.

Chen says that one of the biggest misconceptions is that more data is always better. Getting more participants doesn’t necessarily help, since drawing from the exact same population often leads to the same subgroups being under-represented. Even the popular image database ImageNet, with its many millions of images, has been shown to be biased towards the Northern Hemisphere.

According to Sontag, often the key thing is to go out and get more data from those under-represented groups. For example, the team looked at an income-prediction system and found that it was twice as likely to misclassify female employees as low-income and male employees as high-income. They found that if they had increased the dataset by a factor of 10, those mistakes would happen 40 percent less often.

In another dataset, the researchers found that a system’s ability to predict intensive care unit (ICU) mortality was less accurate for Asian patients. Existing approaches for reducing discrimination would basically just make the non-Asian predictions less accurate, which is problematic when you’re talking about settings like healthcare that can quite literally be life-or-death.

Chen says that their approach allows them to look at a dataset and determine how many more participants from different populations are needed to improve accuracy for the group with lower accuracy while still preserving accuracy for the group with higher accuracy.

“We can plot trajectory curves to see what would happen if we added 2,000 more people versus 20,000, and from that figure out what size the dataset should be if we want to have the best of all worlds,” says Chen. “With a more nuanced approach like this, hospitals and other institutions would be better equipped to do cost-benefit analyses to see if it would be useful to get more data.”

You can also try to get additional kinds of data from your existing participants. However, that won’t improve things either if the extra data isn’t actually relevant, like statistics on people’s height for a study about IQ. The question then becomes how to identify when and for whom you should collect more information.

One method is to identify clusters of patients with high disparities in accuracy. For ICU patients, a clustering methods on text called topic modeling showed that cardiac and cancer patients both had large racial differences in accuracy. This finding could suggest that more diagnostic tests for cardiac or cancer patients could reduce the racial differences in accuracy.

The team will present the paper in December at the annual conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) in Montreal.

How Artificial Intelligence is Changing SEO

Artificial intelligence and digital marketing are quickly becoming intertwined systems. AI development is occurring at a feverish pace, improving the efficiency with which developers and marketers can do many tasks.

AI goes beyond enhancing market research. Because it doesn’t rely on static methods for data collection, it can do far more to categorize and classify data than almost any market research firm working today.

What this means for techniques like SEO is having tools that can offer data collection for predictive keyword phrases long into the future. In most cases today, SEO is based on the ideas of keyword research and speculation for keywords that can produce excellent results in ranking the webpage.

Stronger algorithms

Search engine algorithms typically have set patterns for the way they rank websites, but with an introduction of AI enhancements to search, marketers may be forced to use the same tools. This is because AI enhancements mean the algorithm can change almost daily. AI enhancements to search engine algorithms can learn from query to query and decide relevant search engine results based off the volume of every search on a much timelier basis.

Introducing SEO tools and software that can adjust keywords on the fly can help to make sure that a page is always in its best position to perform based on current search engine algorithms. Being able to adjust and select main keyword phrases to optimize content regularly or include new variations of content can remain essential to ranking a page.

More relevant, high-quality content

AI simulations can also be extremely helpful with managing technical and on-page SEO. Testing and diagnostic software are only improving with the use of learning algorithms. Performing multiple search engine queries for voice-based search, mobile searches and more could help to make sure that a page is optimized correctly to perform. As most search engine algorithms will place enhancements and search engine ranking to a site that is well optimized for mobile users and fast loading, this can present great opportunities for marketers to optimize further.

AI is also delivering improvements in relevance and quality of content. Google AI tools for search can weed out content that is light on information or simply optimized to rank. Google AI works to check on content relevancy by measuring time spent on each page. AI can go even further with sorting analytics data to check into the content that is producing the best on-page results and categorizing subjects that can keep your viewers returning to the page. Insights on quality of content are giving marketers the tools they need to rank and produce improvements for their viewers too.

These are just a few of the top ways that AI is changing SEO. It seems as though both on a technical side from a search engine perspective and from the side of marketers, an evolution is taking place as these AI systems improve.

Cybersecurity: Eight Ways You Can Boost Employee Buy-In

Cybersecurity threats are an ongoing problem, and one that’s growing: It’s hard to go a month without some organization reporting a breach or other problems. There were, for instance, more reported instances of data breaches in the U.S. during the first half of 2018 than in all of 2013, according to a report on Statista.

Yet, no matter how extensive cybersecurity measures are, the human element is a regular issue: Specifically, how well employees comply with the new procedures, sometimes handed down from people far removed from the employees’ department, who don’t necessarily understand all the ins and outs of how those employees do their daily work. A well-thought-out plan can go sideways, for instance, if team members ignore some of the steps involved to save time or avoid hassles — something quite possible, if they don’t understand why a task exists in the first place.

So how do you ensure individual buy-in, in order to keep your organization protected against data breaches or other security issues? Below, eight members of Forbes Technology Council share their preferred methods for boosting cybersecurity buy-in, as well as discuss why the approaches work. Here’s what they said:

  1. Make Understanding A Priority

Security and compliance actually have two separate goals. A compliance program should focus on the minimally invasive way to meet all public policy and industry rules to prevent fines or other sanctions. Security is about providing the correct level of protection to make an asset an unattractive target for a criminal. When employees understand the objective and outcome, you create buy-in. – Bret Piatt, Jungle Disk

  1. Lay Out All Of The Facts

It has become abundantly clear in the last 12 months in the world of cutting-edge technology companies, that customer data must be protected and respected to a massive degree. Such behavior does not merely grant your firm a competitive advantage. Rather, it is singularly pivotal to your firm’s very survival in the digital age. Make this fact clear to your teams on day one, and every day after. – Zia Yusuf, Velocity

  1. Clearly Define Policies

Often employees are left guessing “what’s our policy?” The ISO Compliance regime allows companies to clearly define those policies or rules, and then audit. Employees aren’t left guessing, for example, whether they can connect their personal Bluetooth fitness tracker. Employees need to feel good about their role in security, model good behaviors, and to be the sentinels when things don’t look right. – Phil Quade, Fortinet

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  1. Make It An Employee-Managed Initiative

Make cybersecurity an “employee-managed initiative.” Involve them in the “internal security committee” that tracks compliance. Communicate cybersecurity’s importance and the impact it has on the business using terms and language they understand. We use comic book-like imagery and sci-fi and comic language in posters across the office that reinforces the message without being suffocating. – AshwinRamasamy, PipeCandy, Inc.

  1. Demo A Break-In

Typical security procedures seem more like theatre than security, forcing employees through repetitive steps with no clear meaning. One of the best ways I’ve found to get employee buy-in is to demonstrate how vulnerable the company is to security violations. You can do this by having employees attempt to break in themselves, or watch someone else do so. It makes security real to watch it fail. – Sean Byrnes, Outlier AI, Inc.

Read more in The Cybersecurity Maturity Model: A Means To Measure And Improve Your Cybersecurity Program

  1. Create Security Roles

Protecting your company against attacks includes having a reliable team of experts in place who will identify risks in your network and business systems, while proactively creating mitigation strategy. Creating security roles and setting limited access required by each position and educating employees by holding yearly cybersecurity seminars will play a vital role in cybersecurity compliance. – Lana Vernovsky, Dynamics Resources

  1. Illustrate Importance

The best way to improve employee buy-in and compliance on cybersecurity features is to illustrate the importance of these issues. Regular training can help improve your employees’ understanding of company policies and will help to strengthen mutual goals, even through interpersonal differences. – Schieler Mew, CS Design Studios

  1. Make It A Part Of New-Employee Orientation

In our industry, we deal with sensitive customer data, including their bank account information. As part of new-employee orientation, I personally ask all new employees to safeguard this data and explain how our policies and training help us exceed customer expectations on protecting their confidential data. – VinayPai, Bill.com

 

Cyber Security Today:Online holiday shopping tips

It’s the holiday gift-buying season, which means it’s time to carefully consider security features when buying Internet-connected devices. Plus, a kid’s watch with big security problems and a warning for Black Friday.

Welcome to Cyber Security Today. It’s Friday November 16th. To hear the podcast, click on the arrow below:

The Mozilla Foundation, which makes the Firefox browser, has a web page with mini-reviews of 70 toys, games, coffee makers, pet finders and other products. Many of them rate poorly for security. So here’s a few questions to ask when choosing a wireless gift: Can it spy on you with a camera, microphone or location tracking? If so, does it use encryption? Can you control it through a changeable password? Does the manufacturer issue security updates? Does it delete data it stores on you? Does it have a privacy policy you can understand? Most answers should be on the product’s website. But, does a child’s toy really need to connect to the Internet? To get a look at the list and Mozilla’s thinking go to Foundation.mozilla.org and look for the page “Privacy Not Included.”

One connected product for kids the MiSafes Kid Watcher Plus, a watch that allows parents to track the location of their children. However, this week the BBC reported that a researcher said the device can be easily hacked, the data wasn’t encrypted, nor was the data secured on each child’s account. The researcher said he could track children’s movements, listen in to their activities and make spoof calls to the watches that appeared to be from parents. Neither the researcher nor the BBC could contact the manufacturer.

Speaking of Firefox, the browser comes with a tool called Monitor, which shows if information from your online accounts has been leaked or stolen. This week an updated version of Monitor was released that adds the ability to give an alert if you visit a website that has recently hacked. However, a security company called High Tech Bridge warns this feature isn’t complete protection. Monitor uses a list of publicly-known hacked websitesIf the breach isn’t reported, Monitor doesn’t know about it. So you still have to be careful where you go on the web.

Finally, Black Friday, a day in late November when companies offer a number of sales online, has become a tradition this time of year. However, it’s also a time when criminals try to take advantage of your gullibility. Kaspersky says it already has discovered threats targeting 67 e-commerce brands including 33 consumer apparel sites, eight consumer electronic outlets and three online retail platforms. Scams include intercepting what you type to make off with your username and password, and redirecting users to phishing pages. So, as always, when buying online make sure you’re on a safe site. One way is to ensure the Internet address of the site you’re on starts with HTTPS. Always watch every page you get sent to.

That’s it for Cyber Security Today. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing. Thanks for listening.

BlackBerry to buy cybersecurity firm Cylance for $1.4 billion

BlackBerry Ltd raised its bets on artificial intelligence and cybersecurity on Friday with the $1.4 billion purchase of California-based machine-learning specialists Cylance.

The Canadian technology company, which dominated the smartphone market a decade ago, has shifted to selling software to manage mobile devices, as well as emerging areas like autonomous cars.

Privately owned Cylance uses machine learning to preempt security breaches before they occur. Its applications seek to block malware or infiltration attempts rather than react after a breach.

Cylance, which has over 3,500 active enterprise customers, had been considering filing for a stock market floatation, according to a report in Business Insider.

“Cylance’s leadership in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity will immediately complement our entire portfolio,” BlackBerry CEO John Chen said in a statement.

The California-based company’s chief executive Stuart McClure, in turn, said it would be able to leverage Blackberry’s strength in mobile communications and security to adapt its AI technology.
Besides the $1.4 billion that BlackBerry will pay, the deal also includes the assumption of Cylance’s unvested employee incentives, BlackBerry said.

Cylance will continue to operate as a separate business unit after the deal closes, BlackBerry said. The deal is expected to close by February 2019.
US-listed shares of Blackberry were marginally up in light pre-market trading.

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