Hello guys, I have awesome news to share with you. has announced that all their 7000+ expert-led courses are free for one-month, April 2020, to support people staying at home due to COVID-19. Pluralsight The way we work and live has changed a lot in the past few weeks and most people are now staying home. With so much uncertainty it’s even more important than ever to sharpen your skills. You can use this offer to sharpen your programming and development skills and learn a few more in-demand skills like AWS, Docker, and much more. Pluralsight Free April Here is what you can do with a free month of Pluralsight: See where their skills stand and what they need to work on with Pluralsight IQ Grow your career with 7,000+ expert-led video courses on top tech topics Build the right skills in the right order with paths that streamline skill development So, what are you waiting for? Here is the link to activate this offer: Pluralsight — Learn for FREE all April 20+ Free Pluralsight Courses for Python, Java,and Spring Developers If you are interested in any particular courses, here I have created a curated list of best Pluralsight courses. You can join these courses and learn brand new technology for absolutely no cost to you. 1. Python Fundamentals Python  Fundamentals gets you started with Python, a dynamic language popular for web development, big data, science, and scripting. 2. Java Fundamentals — Concurrency with Multithreading Today most programs have a concurrent element and knowledge of concurrency is vital. This course will teach you how to use the Java libraries to achieve concurrency via multithreading. 3. Understanding the Java Virtual Machine: Memory Management By Kevin Jones This course covers all aspects of garbage collection in Java, including how memory is split into generations and managed and how the different collectors do their job. We also cover the classes you can use to interact with the garbage collection, such as Soft, Weak, and PhantomReference. 4. by Understanding and Solving Java Memory Problems Richard Warburton Java applications can often suffer from memory problems such as OutOfMemoryError. This course shows you how to fix them using freely available tools. 5. By Bryan Hansen What’s New in Spring 5 Spring is the most popular framework for Java Development. This course will teach you about the new features in the latest release, Spring 5, including JDK requirements, Core changes, the use of Kotlin, WebFlux, and testing using JUnit 5. 6. Functional Programming With Java Learn to incorporate some tools and concepts from functional programming into Java code, both in Java 8 and earlier versions. 7. Design Pattern Library A reference library for design patterns of all types 8. SOLID Principles of Object-Oriented Design This course introduces foundational principles of creating well-crafted code and is appropriate for anyone hoping to improve as a developer 9. Modern Software Architecture: Domain Models, CQRS, and Event Sourcing This course covers DDD analysis patterns helpful in discovering the top-level architecture of a business domain. Architects and developers will find details of implementation patterns such as Domain Model, CQRS, and Event Sourcing. 10. What’s New in Java 13 This course provides an overview of the most important features in Java 13, such as preview language features like text blocks, API updates, as well as platform changes in Java. 11. Introduction to Spring MVC An introductory course for  building applications using Spring MVC. 12. Spring Framework: Spring Fundamentals This course is designed to give you a solid foundation of the fundamentals of the Spring Framework. It covers how to get started as well as advanced configuration techniques with Spring using the most recent versions. 13. Spring Security Fundamentals A course covering the fundamentals of using Spring Security for securing Java applications built with Spring MVC. 14. Building Your First App with Spring Boot and Angular Spring Boot and Angular make a great team! See how all the pieces work together by building a full app, step by step. 15. By Kesha Williams Spring Boot Fundamentals Spring Boot, an extension of the Spring framework, helps developers build applications quickly, with less code, by removing much of the boilerplate code and configuration that characterizes Spring. This course explores features of Spring Boot. 16. Spring Cloud Fundamentals By Dustin Schultz Spring  Cloud helps you take full advantage of developing microservices in the cloud. Learn how to develop cloud-native apps that utilize service discovery, distributed config, client-side load balancing, intelligent routing, and fault tolerance. 17. Core Spring Path This path contains some of the best courses to learn Spring for Java developers. 18. TensorFlow: Getting Started This  course shows you how to install and use TensorFlow, a leading machine learning library from Google. You’ll see how TensorFlow can create a range of machine learning models, from simple linear regression to complex deep neural networks. 19. Oracle Database 12c Fundamentals By Tim Warner This course will get you up to speed with the Oracle Database platform in general and the Oracle Database 12c release in particular. You’ll also get prepared to pass the Oracle Certified Administrator (OCA) certification exam. 20. By Toby Weston Scala for Java Developers This course is for Java developers looking to transition to programming in Scala. Translate what you already know in Java to Scala and start your functional programming journey. That’s all about what courses Java programmers can take from Pluralsight during this free month. This is a great opportunity, Do not miss out on this one: Just sign up and watch the courses when you get time. — Link to Sign up for FREE. (No Credit Card) Pluralsight Free April Offe r And I mean it’s literally free. . Although things are weird right now, you can make the best of it by investing in yourself and your skills. No credit card required No watch limits. Other you may like to explore Programming Resource articles The Complete Web Developer RoadMap 5 Courses to Learn React Native in 2020 5 Courses to Learn Big Data and Apache Spark 10 Places to Learn JavaScript for FREE 10 Web Development Frameworks Java Developer Should Learn The Complete React Developer RoadMap Top 5 Courses to Learn GraphQL For Beginners 10 Courses to learn Java in 2020 Top 5 Courses to learn Software Architecture Top 15 Free Courses to learn Python If you have trouble signing up for Pluralsight April Free Offer then please use this link to , links from home page ask for the credit card but this link will not ask for any credit card details. Update: sign up

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Magento is one of the most used platforms for eCommerce stores. It offers flexibility, thanks to a wide range of themes and plugins. It’s the equivalent of WordPress, but designed specifically for eCommerce websites. To make the most of the eCommerce platform, you need to select the right hosting plan. So, Here’s a closer look at the main features to consider. what’s the best hosting for eCommerce sites? What Is Magento Hosting? Magento hosting is a web hosting plan optimized for hosting the Magento platform. Magento is an open-source eCommerce platform available for installation on any type of hosting plan. However, some hosting solutions provide features that enhance the performance of Magento. For those unfamiliar with the software, Magento is a free program for setting up and managing eCommerce stores. It comes with flexible solutions to handle eCommerce sites of all sizes. No matter if you have just a few products or thousands of items to sell, the Magento platform makes it easy to manage and sell your inventory. It also provides access to various plugins and tools for marketing and search engine optimization, helping to bring more visitors to your store. As with WordPress, Magento is written in PHP and relies heavily on MySQL databases. Some hosting plans include technologies that work better with PHP and MySQL. For example, choosing a plan that uses the instead of Apache may lead to faster loading times. LiteSpeed is a drop-in replacement for Apache with a custom PHP LSAPI to increase PHP performance. LiteSpeed web server A standard shared hosting plan may not meet your needs, especially if you’re expecting to build a large eCommerce platform. WooCommerce Versus Magento – What’s the Difference? Magento is a full-featured platform that includes customizable eCommerce solutions, including shopping carts and inventory management. WooCommerce offers many of the same features, but it is not a complete platform. WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress. It was originally developed by WooThemes and later purchased by Automattic – the company that operates WordPress.com. WooCommerce has become the most-used eCommerce plugin for WordPress. About 30% of eCommerce sites use this WordPress plugin. Magento and WooCommerce are the top two choices for eCommerce stores. While both options are great, each has separate advantages. WooCommerce is more geared toward beginners. It’s a WordPress plugin, so those that already use WordPress should have no problem setting up WooCommerce. Magento has more of a learning curve, but it also provides more in-depth features. Some of the benefits of choosing Magento over WooCommerce include: Magento is a scalable solution that can handle an unlimited number of products. The platform provides a streamlined checkout process. You can easily integrate PayPal and other third-party payment processors. If you want a platform that you can count on as you grow your business, consider going with Magento. It can support the largest eCommerce stores when paired with the right hosting plan. Types of eCommerce Hosting Solutions One of the challenges of setting up an eCommerce store is choosing the right eCommerce hosting provider. Many hosting providers, including and other affordable providers, offer a wide range of hosting services, including: YottaHost Cloud web hosting NVMe SSD hosting WordPress hosting Some hosting solutions are better suited for eCommerce platforms. For example, when using the WooCommerce plugin with WordPress, a WordPress optimized hosting plan may deliver better results. WordPress hosting includes database optimization and may come with the Jetpack plugin pre-installed. Jetpack provides convenient access to dozens of useful features, from search engine optimization tools to various utilities. NVMe SSD hosting and cloud web hosting may cost less compared to WordPress hosting. These options also tend to include a few extra features that may improve the performance of your eCommerce store, such as faster speeds. Top Factors for Reliable eCommerce Website Hosting No matter if you choose Magento or the WooCommerce plugin for WordPress, you need a dependable eCommerce hosting solution. Pay attention to the following features when comparing providers for eCommerce website hosting: Type of server technology Disk storage solutions Magento or WordPress optimization Available bandwidth These are the issues that are most likely to impact the performance of your eCommerce site. You should also compare prices, read reviews, and check out any other features that matter to you. Server Technology – Look for LiteSpeed Servers When it comes to the servers that deliver your webpages to visitors, most sites still use Apache. LiteSpeed is currently the fourth-most used web server. While it’s not as popular, it provides several advantages for eCommerce stores. LiteSpeed was developed with custom configurations to speed up PHP scripts, which are the main files used for WordPress and Magento. By using LiteSpeed, your pages should load quicker when a visitor opens one of your URLs in their browser. With built-in DDoS protection, LiteSpeed increases the security of your eCommerce website. Security is an essential consideration if you accept payments on your site. As a drop-in replacement, LiteSpeed is also compatible with all Apache security features. Along with the server technology, check the server uptime guarantee. Some of the most reliable hosting solutions offer 100% server uptime guarantees thanks to the use of CloudLinux OS and other technologies. was designed for shared hosting services to improve stability and security. It separates all users on the server into individual lightweight virtualized environments (LVEs). CloudLinux OS Each LVE has dedicated resources, preventing one user from throttling the performance of other websites on the same server. This gives you some of the same benefits provided by dedicated hosting, but without having to pay hundreds of dollars per month. Disk Storage Solutions – NVMe Storage The type of disk storage directly impacts the speed and reliability of your eCommerce website. storage is the latest disk storage solution, providing a wide range of advantages over standard solid-state drives (SSDs). NVMe NVMe drives have much faster disk read/write speeds, which determines how quickly your site loads. Online stores often use a lot of resources. The site makes hundreds of requests to databases and runs dozens of PHP scripts to load a single page. With NVMe technology, you get the fastest disk speeds available. This ensures that your pages load as fast as possible. Magento or WordPress Optimization As mentioned, some eCommerce web hosting plans come optimized for Magento or WordPress installations. You may even find an option that offers a one-click installation for these platforms. What does optimization mean for eCommerce platforms? An optimized eCommerce hosting plan should include features that serve PHP files and handle MySQL requests faster, such as NVMe drives and LiteSpeed. The hosting plan should also use a simple control panel. cPanel is one of the most used options. It has an easy to browse layout, allowing you to quickly view MySQL databases or install a new copy of WordPress or Magento. Another useful feature for eCommerce stores is CloudFlare CDN. CloudFlare is the leading content delivery network (CDN). CloudFlare CDN caches static files, such as images and JavaScript files that don’t change frequently. It then serves content to visitors based on their location, boosting the speed of your website. How Much Bandwidth Do You Need for eCommerce? If you receive a few thousand visitors per month, bandwidth isn’t a major issue. When you start receiving hundreds of thousands of visitors, limited bandwidth slows the speed of your site. Affordable web hosting plans typically offer a minimum of 300GB of bandwidth. For an eCommerce store, you’ll want at least 500GB of bandwidth to prevent bottlenecks that keep visitors from viewing your pages quickly. If a page doesn’t load within several seconds, you lose visitors. As your online business grows, you may need more bandwidth. Some of the top eCommerce web hosting plans provide unlimited bandwidth or at least 1000GB of bandwidth, along with unlimited domains and free SSL certificates. Comparing the Average Price of eCommerce Web Hosting Entrepreneurs that are just getting into the eCommerce game may want the cheapest hosting plan. Typically, shared hosting is the least expensive option. Traditional shared hosting also comes with several major disadvantages. Shared hosting plans require you to share bandwidth with other users. If one site gets a boost of visitors, your site may slow. A DDoS attack on another site on the same server could jeopardize the security of your site and files. and NVMe SSD hosting reduce these risks. You don’t need to worry about bandwidth issues or other sites hogging the resources. The CloudLinux OS keeps everything running smoothly while LiteSpeed and additional DDoS protection increase the security. Cloud web hosting Conclusion – What’s the Best Hosting for eCommerce? A successful eCommerce site should receive tens of thousands of monthly visitors. To ensure that your website continues to load swiftly and process transactions without errors, make sure that you select the best hosting for eCommerce sites. If you want to build an eCommerce empire, you need the right foundation. Start by comparing hosting plans and look for the technologies that work best with Magento or WooCommerce. Features such as LiteSpeed servers, NVMe disks, and PHP and MySQL optimization help boost the performance of your website.

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In January 2020, we met with about 45 companies. This enabled us to refine our vision ( ), understand our go-to-market, and start to build a list of potential clients. Once we felt confident about the product, we entered into full implementation mode. 3 pivots in that month It took 5 weeks to build the first alpha version of the product and 6 weeks to have our first paying customer. This article’s goal is to shed some light on what happened during these 6 weeks, and to take a step back on what we did right and wrong. Continue to meet with other customers to identify patterns When you start to build your product, you want to have as much uninterrupted maker time as possible. You want to give yourself as much chance to get in the zone as possible, so you can build fast. The issue with this is that you might lose track of the problem you are solving for your customers and whether or not the solution you’re building actually solves this problem for your potential customers. There is a very high chance that the early feedback you got was unique to the few companies you met with. You absolutely need to meet with several companies to identify patterns and understand which companies land in the general use case and which ones have specific needs. Then, you can decide to use the former as design partners - companies with whom you’ll go back and forth while building your product and that will give you feedback along the way. Even when you have design partners, you should still continue to meet with other potential customers to ensure that the patterns you are focusing on are the general use case. You might identify several general use cases by doing that. Now how do you optimize for both maker time and customer meetings? Assign maker time in your calendar first, and leave some blanks for some potential meetings. Try to fill the slots with customer meetings, and if you can’t, that’s just more maker time :). Never lose sight of the customer’s context One thing we learned while continuing to meet with customers is the context they are in, and your product will be in. Indeed, if you build a B2B company, your product will sit in a stack and will most likely have to integrate well with some tools. Depending on the stage of the company you’re targeting, the context will be completely different. If you can meet with several companies in different stages, it will help you understand if the first versions of your product will provide a lot of value, and what the requirements should be. Get intermediary validation with early mockups The first thing we did in early February was to work on the architecture and the mockups of our product. As soon as we had basic mockups, we tried to get feedback on them from customer meetings -  but only if the potential customers were experiencing the problem we were trying to solve. We wanted educated feedback on the mockups. This feedback was really helpful, as it showed us sometimes that we were not focusing on what provided the most value to our customers. Sell the product immediately, as soon as you have a demo or even mockups (if you can) The best way to gauge the interest of a potential customer is to see if they are actually willing to pay for your product right now. And that means using order forms, and not letters of intent (LOIs). LOIs aren’t proof of anything I don’t personally consider them a validation of anything. A portion will surely lead to a purchase at one point. But a LOI is non-binding. It means that even though your product might need the approbation of the security / privacy team, you can get a LOI without going through them. That means you can get LOIs even though your product might never go through the security compliance process successfully. At my former startup, we could get LOIs easily, but we learned over time that our sales cycle was way longer than we would have imagined. It also means that you can put any pricing in there; it’s non-binding and it doesn’t show that your potential customer is actually willing to pay this amount. Use binding order forms with conditions to be triggered instead There are several reasons why this model is way better than trying to get LOIs. As soon as an order form is signed, it means this prospect has become a paying customer. You can have an order form signed without having the features ready. You just need to add triggering conditions to your order form. This will help you align your customers with the essential features they want to see. You should definitely ask whether or not they’re willing to pay without one of the features. It will give you a better idea which feature has the most value in the eyes of your customers. You will be able to really test your pricing with them. Order forms are binding. So you can get a good idea of what your clients are actually willing to pay. Order forms will give you a better idea of your sales cycle as well. Even if you don’t have the product yet, it will go through a company’s standard procedure. Paying customers have a lot more value in the eyes of an investor. They are an actual validation of your product. Here is a great article on the that investors will consider. ladder of proof You can start selling your product with order forms as soon as you can with LOIs. So don’t just settle for LOIs. Get requirements for the free POC and conditions to get them to pay Sometimes companies won’t be ready to sign an order form directly. They want to make sure your products work before they are willing to talk about pricing. That’s when you want to offer a free proof of concept (POC) - or better yet, a paid one if you can. For enterprises, POCs are the way to go, because they’re used to it. On our side, is actually a new category of product (we enable you to access your adblocked traffic across your analytics, attribution and marketing tools). So every time we had a potential customer, we included a free POC. What we would do is: Dataline First set up our tool with their Google Analytics to show them that what we were saying was true - you are missing between 20% and 40% of your analytics and attribution data, and we give it back to you. While we were setting it up, we would start discussing which other tools they wanted us to unblock, and would start building the order form for the triggering conditions. We didn’t talk about pricing until it was all set up. Why? Because they had their “aha!” moment when they saw this inbound flow of new data and leads they had not seen before. This was the best leverage for the best negotiations. Don’t wait to have the self-service ready to sell your product At the time of writing, we still don’t have our self-service ready. We have quite a few paying customers that we onboarded manually. You can definitely do that with your customers. You don’t need to have everything ready on your site (settings, Stripe, unsubscription, authentication, etc.) to start selling. You just need the features you’re selling. The rest is just an excuse you give yourself - wrongly! - not to start selling yet. Ok, that might be a bit harsh...there are definitely some exceptions, but you get the mindset. Hope that was useful. Let me know if you think we could have done differently and better! Always happy to learn! Previously published at https://dataline.io/articles/our-story/how-to-go-from-idea-to-first-clients-in-6-weeks/

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Introduction Last September, Microsoft released a bunch of new features with C# 8.0. One of the major features that they introduced is Default interface methods. In this post, we'll explain what they are, show a few examples and provide guidance to avoid common pitfalls. What are default interface methods in C# 8.0 Interfaces in C# used to be definitions or contracts without any behavior. This assumption is no longer true. Now, with default interface methods, you can define a default body for any interface methods. When you do so, they mostly behave like virtual methods in an abstract class. Why are default interface methods important If they behave like virtual methods on an abstract class, why not simply use an abstract class? There is one big difference that justifies their existence: In C#, you can only inherit from one base class, but you can implement as many interfaces as you want. That subtle point makes all the difference when it comes to code reuse, a.k.a. the . That new feature will enable many scenarios that were previously difficult or impossible to achieve. Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle e.g. Extend interfaces safely by adding methods with implementations Create parameterized implementations to provide greater flexibility Enable implementers to provide a more specific implementation in the form of an override Real examples of default interface methods Without default interface methods { ; ; ; ;
} : { {
        Console.WriteLine( );
    } { .WriteCore(LogLevel.Information, message);
    } { .WriteCore(LogLevel.Warning, message);
    } { .WriteCore(LogLevel.Error, message);
    }
} : { { (level)
        { LogLevel.Information:
                Trace.TraceInformation(message); ; LogLevel.Warning:
                Trace.TraceWarning(message); ; LogLevel.Error:
                Trace.TraceError(message); ;
        }
    } { .WriteCore(LogLevel.Information, message);
    } { .WriteCore(LogLevel.Warning, message);
    } { .WriteCore(LogLevel.Error, message);
    }
} internal interface ILogger ( ) void WriteCore LogLevel level, message string ( ) void WriteInformation message string ( ) void WriteWarning message string ( ) void WriteError message string internal class ConsoleLogger ILogger ( ) public void WriteCore LogLevel level, message string $" : " {level} {message} ( ) public void WriteInformation message string this ( ) public void WriteWarning message string this ( ) public void WriteError message string this internal class TraceLogger ILogger ( ) public void WriteCore LogLevel level, message string switch case break case break case break ( ) public void WriteInformation message string this ( ) public void WriteWarning message string this ( ) public void WriteError message string this For every implementation of `ILogger` we have to repeat this same code block: { .WriteCore(LogLevel.Information, message);
} { .WriteCore(LogLevel.Warning, message);
} { .WriteCore(LogLevel.Error, message);
} ( ) public void WriteInformation message string this ( ) public void WriteWarning message string this ( ) public void WriteError message string this With default interface methods { ; { .WriteCore(LogLevel.Information, message);
    } { .WriteCore(LogLevel.Warning, message);
    } { .WriteCore(LogLevel.Error, message);
    }
} : { {
        Console.WriteLine( );
    }
} : { { (level)
        { LogLevel.Information:
                Trace.TraceInformation(message); ; LogLevel.Warning:
                Trace.TraceWarning(message); ; LogLevel.Error:
                Trace.TraceError(message); ;
        }
    }
} internal interface ILogger ( ) void WriteCore LogLevel level, message string ( ) void WriteInformation message string this ( ) void WriteWarning message string this ( ) void WriteError message string this internal class ConsoleLogger ILogger ( ) public void WriteCore LogLevel level, message string $" : " {level} {message} internal class TraceLogger ILogger ( ) public void WriteCore LogLevel level, message string switch case break case break case break Haaaaa... this is much better. Now the implementations only contain the relevant code. Pitfall to avoid As much as multiple inheritance is awesome, you also need to be very mindful of the dreaded . diamond problem It's an ambiguity that arises when two classes B and C inherit from A, and class D inherits from both B and C. If there is a method in A that B and C have overridden, and D does not override it, then which version of the method does D inherit: that of B, or that of C? Closing There, you have another great tool to put in your toolbox to keep your code clean and maintainable. This approach is also very non-intrusive and won't conflict with existing code, which means it will be easy to slowly adopt it. If you want to hear more on this subject, let me know in the comments. References Microsoft documentation Tutorial diamond problem All code samples are available on github

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Technological innovations are necessary to cope up with the customer demands. Customers nowadays use multiple channels to access the services from a business. Thus, they expect multiple channel customer service from companies. "Conversational AI is a programmatic and intelligent way of offering conversational experience to mimic conversations with real people, through digital and telecommunications technologies." In the midst of new emerging technologies, AI powered solutions have created a wave of chat enabled customer service. have become an underlying aspect of any industry that plays a significant role in delivering personalized services. AI-based solutions Conversational artificial intelligence is being used by businesses to facilitate communication between computers and humans. It has significantly changed the way industries interact with the customers, that is, in a frictionless and convenient manner. According to a , the Conversational AI is estimated to grow into a $15.7 billion market by 2024. report Its power can be measured by its ability to carry out personalized interactions with a large number of individual customers. Before moving ahead, let us understand what Conversational AI is. Defining Conversational AI Conversational AI refers to the set of technologies behind automated messaging and speech-enabled applications that offer human like interactions between computers and humans. The conversational AI brings together eight technology components – • Natural language processing It is the ability to read or parse human language text. • Intent recognition It is the ability to understand the intent of the user; that is what he is expecting even if phrased unexpectedly. It is also important to differentiate between good and bad user intent. • Voice optimized responses It is the ability to engage in a human like conversation with the use of emotions to deliver an optimized experience. • Dynamic text to speech It converts text to speech in natural voice and accent, allows for the emphasis of capital letters and tonal inflection. • Entity recognition Understand that some text refers to informative abstract categories (entities) such as "February 2" = Date - Necessary for more complex commands and analysis. • Machine learning Learn how to respond to users by analyzing human-agent conversations. • Fulfillment The ability to pull data from web services or databases using APIs, run conditions, and inform the Dialog Manager. • Contextual awareness Ability to follow conversation history, translate, recall, and memorize information over conversations - necessary for natural, human like back and forth communication. Many businesses are incentivized to continuously deliver excellent customer experience in order to keep customers happy. Therefore, businesses are increasingly plugging conversational AI into their customer support for faster customer on boarding, better retention rates, and shorter claims cycle. Best Customer Services Use Cases: Engagement The number one use case for conversational AI is customer engagement. Companies can achieve frictionless customer interactions by deploying chatbots and virtual assistants to solve customer queries. According to , customer engagement represents a 23% premium in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth. Gallup Understanding Conversations Conversational AI's second-best utility is understanding conversations. At a narrative level, businesses get to know their customers through the insights they derive from thousands of messages. While at the magnitude level, AI-enhanced solutions can convert hundreds of calls to text, parse through thousands of emails, and route them to the right departments. How Are Customers And Businesses Reaping The Benefits Of Conversational AI? Conversational AI makes it easy for the customers to find information about products and services and make a purchase anytime, anywhere. It also facilitates the purchasing process by offering customers personalized products and recommendations according to their buying history. 1) Improve Customer Acquisition can even be scaled up and down to serve new customers in a cost-efficient way. AI-powered chatbots For Example, the cosmetic giant Sephora uses Facebook messenger bots to book appointments to reserve a makeover at Sephora stores. The , Sephora reservation assistant Converts natural language The bot has seen an 11% higher conversion rate versus any other channel for booking in-store makeover appointments. Image Credit: Google 2) Increase Personalization Delivering personalized customer service is more than just addressing the customer by their names. Instead, it is a way to capture customers’ attention and create a relevant experience for the customers’ journey. Businesses practice tailor messaging their customers at an individual level based on their interests, purchasing behavior, and past responses. AI-enhanced solutions like virtual assistants and can be used for mass personalization. These AI elements harness a massive amount of data from data sources and uncover the patterns in human behavior. chatbots For instance, the online fitness firm Verve Health's helps users to set individual fitness goals. Ziggy guides the users to customize goal-setting process and comes up with a measurable fitness goal. fitness bot Ziggy Image Credit:Google 3) Reduce Cost and Increase the Efficiency Conversational AI-enabled channels allow a reduction in costs for the customer interaction channels. The algorithms in AI assistants are trained organically, which enables cost-efficient improvement continuously. Also, the AI assistants increase the efficiency of the sales teams by freeing up human power that can be used for other significant tasks. The conversational AI assistants are available to the customers at any time of the day. This feature reduces the need for human resources and the operating costs significantly. Since conversational AI performs the regular customer interactions, this provides the opportunity to the agents to sell more products and services. Leveraging it to power customer conversations can enable sales by making the whole process of buying contextual, personalized, and simpler. 4) Help Drive Sales To leverage conversational AI to improve sales performance, businesses must build a digital sales ecosystem. In such an ecosystem, the on its own and also enables the sales specialists to focus more on value-added work. conversational AI drives interactions The Key Takeaway An overwhelming number of enterprises have already adopted conversational AI. One of the primary reasons is the large number of benefits that this technology offers businesses, which ultimately yields increased efficiency, cost savings, and improved ROI. Also, the customers have embraced AI-enhanced solutions as they are reliable, easy to talk, and stay available for 24*7. Conversational AI will undoubtedly bring a lot of improvements and advancements in the industry. Industry leaders should consider incorporating more technologies that leverage conversational AI within their business strategies to stay competitive and provide an exceptional customer experience.

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Understanding Conversational AI: As Chat Enabled Customer Service

Ever wondered how streams are working in Node.js? I had. So far I know that using streams will most certainly reduce memory usage on the server when processing large files. Instead of reading whole file into memory we stream it in chunks to whoever requested it and apply transformations to that stream if needed. That's huge benefit as it allows to avoid vertical scaling. Processing files is common task but not as common as interacting with databases and that's going to be my focus now. I'll build simple API with 2 endpoints. Both will be returning large amount of records from Postgres DB. One endpoint will stream data to the client and another will read whole data into memory and return in one chunk. If I work in Node.js environment, there's usually Express.js framework in front of it with Sequelize orm. For this experiment I decided to try something different and choose Koa.js framework and Knex orm. Let's start. I'll setup the project first: mkdir streamer && streamer npm init -y # let's name our project "streamer" cd # I'm happy with npm defaults for this project so: Now time to add app dependencies. You can see all packages . To setup my development environment I'll use and Let's see how looks like: here Docker docker-compose. Dockerfile.dev node: . API_PORT ${API_PORT} FROM 12.16 1 # create new working directory WORKDIR /src # expecting to receive API_PORT as argument ARG # make sure to run latest version of npm RUN npm i npm@latest -g # fetch dependencies on a separate layer first as it's not changing that often, # will be cached and speed up the image build process COPY ./package.json ./package-lock.json ./ RUN npm i # copy the rest of the source files into working directory COPY . . EXPOSE CMD [ , , ] "npm" "run" "start:dev" Pretty standard right? Now to add DB dependency and bootstrap whole thing: docker-compose.yml version: "3.7" volumes: streamervolume: name: streamer-volume networks: streamernetwork: name: streamer-network services: pg: image: postgres:12.0 restart: on-failure env_file: - .env ports: - "${POSTGRES_PORT}:${POSTGRES_PORT}" volumes: - streamervolume: /var/lib/postgresql/data networks: - streamernetwork streamer_api: build: context: . dockerfile: Dockerfile.dev args: API_PORT: ${API_PORT} restart: on-failure depends_on: - pg volumes: - ./:/src ports: - "${API_PORT}:${API_PORT}" networks: - streamernetwork env_file: - .env Now that environment is pretty much ready, I'll continue with application logic itself. Let's look at : app.js ( ).config(); Koa = ( ); errorHandler = ( ); router = ( ); app = Koa();

app
  .use(errorHandler)
  .use(router.routes())
  .use(router.allowedMethods()); .exports = app; // src/app.js require 'dotenv' const require 'koa' const require './middleware/errorHandler' const require './routes' const new module I first load vars, import Koa, my custom error handling middleware and router. The error handling middleware looks like this: .env .exports = (ctx, next) => { { next();
  } (err) { .error(err);
    ctx.status = err.status || ;
    ctx.body = { : err.message || ,
    };
  }
} // src/middleware/errorHandler.js module async try await catch console 500 msg 'Oops. Something went wrong. Please try again later' According to documentation, error handling middleware has to be added first in Koa app in order to capture all exceptions. Next stop is router: Router = ( ); router = Router();

router.get( , ( ));
router.get( , ( )); .exports = router; // src/routes/index.js const require '@koa/router' const new '/nostream' require './users/nostream' '/stream' require './users/stream' module Interesting thing to mention is that in I use middleware that handles unsupported methods with for me. Lets look at the handlers next. app.js router.allowedMethods() 405 Method Not Allowed nostream: db = ( ); .exports = (ctx) => { { users = db.select( ).from( );
    ctx.status = ;
    ctx.body = users;
  } (err) {
    ctx.throw( , err);
  }
}; // src/routes/users/nostream/index.js const require '../../../services/db' module async try const await '*' 'users' 200 catch 500 Pretty sure you're wondering how that looks like: db config = ( ); knex = ( )({ : , : { : config.dbHost, : config.dbUser, : config.dbPwd, : config.db,
  },
}); .exports = knex; // src/services/db.js const require './config' const require 'knex' client 'pg' connection host user password database module is just simple object literal that exposes some env vars. You can see it . I require knex, establish db connection and export instance of it. Since all node modules are singletons, no matter how many times I'll require this package, initiation will be performed only once. Everything else in handler is pretty much straightforward. Please refer to Koa or Knex documentation for more details. Next let's look at handler: config here nostream stream Stringify = ( ) db = ( ); .exports = (ctx) => {
  ctx.type = ;
  ctx.set( , ); { stream = db
      .select( )
      .from( )
      .stream();

    ctx.status = ; pipe(stream, ctx.res, { : });
  } (err) {
    ctx.throw( , err);
  }
}; { ( { .pipe(Stringify())
      .pipe(to, options); .on( , reject); .on( , resolve);
  })
} // src/routes/users/stream/index.js const require 'streaming-json-stringify' const require '../../../services/db' module async 'application/json; charset=utf-8' 'Connection' 'keep-alive' try const '*' 'users' 200 await end false catch 500 ( ) function pipe from, to, options return new Promise ( ) => resolve, reject from from 'error' from 'end' Here I call on my query to get stream instance. I then pipe this query stream to client. In order for that to happen I have function that returns a promise and we don't exit the handler instantly but rather wait until streaming is done or error occurs. I added stringify package here because response (writeable stream) expects an input of a type string or an instance of Buffer and DB stream operates with Object types. .stream() pipe By the way, all will be captured by middleware we created previously. Now before I jump into testing my server I need some data in DB. Since I have Knex already installed locally, I need a config file for it to be able to run migrations, seeds etc: ctx.throw errorHandler ./node_modules/.bin/knex init This will generate . I have slightly changed it to use my env vars. You can see it . Now I'll generate the migration: knexfile.js here ./node_modules/.bin/knex migrate:make users This will create a migration file in You can review it . Before I run it, start the application: migrations/{timestapm}_users.js here docker-compose up --build Now since app is up and running, time to run migration: POSTGRES_HOST=localhost npm run migrate:up I specify postgres host here since I run migration from host machine for DB  that runs in docker environment under pg host name and if I don't specify it, pg name will be used from env vars which will end up with failed connection attempt. Now what I need is some records in users table for my API to serve. Knex cli can ease this process. It has command to generate a seed file: ./node_modules/.bin/knex seed:make create_users This will generate a seed file in directory. You can see what I did with it . If you'll run into issues running it, try reducing amount of records you try to create. Currently it'll try to create 60k records. Lets run it: seeds here POSTGRES_HOST=localhost npm run db:seed OK, with all that in place, I can now test both endpoints and see how well they perform. Let's start with nostream endpoint: And now stream endpoint: So, streaming might be less memory intensive operation but it takes a bit longer to retrieve all data (60k users in this case). That certainly works when sending/processing large amounts of data and could be perfect fit for file processing or BI where we have to work with large data sets. When it comes to common tasks though, say admin panel that retrieves 10-100 records per page, most likely streaming wouldn't be the best fit. Not only because it takes a bit more time, but also due to code complexity as it requires more code to achieve same output. It all boils down to good old saying: I hope you have learned something useful. You can find the whole project . "choose the right tool for the job". here

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2022 - HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - Rest Api

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Node.js Streams in Action

When most people hear the word “chip” in the context of a smart home, they immediately imagine the microchips at the heart of their smart devices. But whereas chips power the brains of an individual smart device, will power the brains of an entire smart home. CHIP will offer huge conveniences to consumers, but its openness may make it harder for hardware startups to build ecosystems and defend against inexpensive knock-offs. CHIP What is CHIP? (or CHIP for short) is a new software protocol that allows all devices on a network to classify, announce, and control themselves and each other, with backing from Google, Apple, Amazon, and others. Whereas today connecting devices between different services require the developers to build API support for each other and consumers manually connect each service to each other, CHIP allows these devices to discover and talk to each other natively, without any configuration on the side of the user. Connected Home over IP Why this is great for consumers Because CHIP allows devices from different brands to natively communicate with each other, end-users will be able to mix and match hardware from different vendors without ecosystem lock-in. Not only will motion sensors from SmartThings, cameras from Wyze, lights from Phillips Hue, and locks from August all be automatically detected and added to Alexa and Google Home, but they also will be able to easily and automatically discover and coordinate with themselves. Further, consumers will not be forced to always buy from the same vendors, allowing them to mix and match bulbs from LifeX, Wyze, Hue, GE, and any other brand and coordinate their brightness and colors perfectly, without using third-party tools like IFTTT. Why startups should be worried Some startups will undoubtedly benefit from the implementation of the CHIP standard, as it means engineers can spend more time focusing on product, and less on integrating with tons of other APIs. However, the ease of integration with other devices comes at a high cost: ecosystem development and defensibility. Most players in the smart home space have rapidly expanded from their core product into an ecosystem of products that work together. This ecosystem strategy is essential for them, as it allows them to grow revenue from both new and existing users. The home security space is an excellent example of ecosystem expansion. Ring has expanded from doorbells to cameras, security systems, and smart outdoor lighting, Wyze has expanded from cameras to sensors, locks, and lights, Nest has expanded from thermostats to cameras, smoke alarms, and entire home security kits, and August has expanded from locks into keypads and door cams. Users who buy a Ring doorbell are far more likely to buy a security system from Ring than from Nest, simply because they have an expectation that the entire system will interoperate better together. CHIP will make everything interoperable, greatly reducing the ecosystem incentive to buy products from the same manufacturer, and making inexpensive knock-offs a much more attractive option to the everyday consumer. Just as easy integration with Google Assistant and Alexa has led to an explosion of inexpensive smart plugs that undercut Belkin’s WeMo product line, we expect CHIP to create a glut of inexpensive competitors to virtually every smart home device, making it difficult for the early innovators to compete with their new low cost competitors. Hardware founders may need to develop new business models to generate recurring revenue, hopefully in ways that don’t irritate the user by selling data or charging monthly fees.

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What the New CHIP Standard Means for Smart Home Startups

Coronavirus outbreak has trembled the world with global . This outbreak has affected the world catastrophically. Scientists have galvanized in order to find a vaccine against this virus, and a lot of funding is being raised in this regard. This has proven to be a life-threatening virus, and with more deaths with every passing day, it's safe to say chaos is being created all across the globe. cases reaching 182,742 with death toll crossing 7,174 The Coronavirus outbreak is expected to cut the global economy by half. Flights to and from many countries are banned to avoid this viral spread. Various technologies are being deployed for employee attendance, passenger’s verification or boarding at the airports, contactless ID verification in the form of facial recognition to ensure security from fraud as well as from coronavirus simultaneously. Various Touchless Technologies Following are some of the technologies being deployed to provide security while restricting the spread of this deadly virus: Contactless Biometric Biometric fingerprint scanning used in immigration checkpoints at airports, offices, buildings, hospitals are the carriers of coronavirus and many people come in direct contact with them. Coronavirus is spread across 150 countries across the globe affecting more than 183,000 patients. The flights and business operations are grounded in fear of the spread of this virus. Fingerprint scanners carry different germs on them including viruses and bacteria. These scanners are considered contaminated and any direct physical contact with such scanners can transfer the virus to healthy ones becoming a reason for the widespread virus. Therefore are required for identification for security purposes as well as to stop the spread. ID verification at airports using contactless biometrics instead of fingerprint scanning can be very helpful. Facial recognition technology is a contactless form of biometric and verifies a person just like taking a selfie without coming in physical contact with any scanner or device. Contactless and palm vein features by generating image acquisition can also be used for identification purposes. Less-constrained biometric systems are of high interest for implementation at public places to identify people from a greater distance. contactless biometric systems Palm recognition Identity Verification of Masked People Advanced facial recognition technology is being used which helps to identify and verify the faces of people donning face masks at public squares. With high efficiency and precision rate, this technology is able to identify the faces of people wearing masks. This technology is used for many purposes including traveler’s ID verification during onboarding, attendance of staff, and even recognizing people not wearing masks as a preventive measure. y can help ensure security from fraud as well as from coronavirus simultaneously as no human interaction is required by deploying this technology. Facial recognition technolog Touchless Bag Drop for Luggage To simplify and streamline the baggage check-in process . In this, passengers use their reference number to print a boarding card or to weigh their luggage and print a tag. Once the luggage is tagged, it is taken to the self-service kiosk to automatically dispatch the luggage. Such a system is already in use at several airports around the world. This contactless technology has won praise from customers and staff for enhancing passenger’s experience and restricting the spread of the virus. touch-less bag drop is deployed at London Luton Airport Digital Payment Solutions Whether you are a business providing digital services to customers, running e-stores, any online business having the facility of online transactions is a must as cash is now the declared source of spreading COVID-19. The major responsibility is on digital banks, financial institutions, and e-commerce sites. So digital transactions are a must in this pandemic. First Canadian bank has recently introduced digital identity verification into their systems. Drones and Robot Nurses: Drones are being used to supply safety equipment and medicines to suspected people. By this technology no direct contact takes place between humans and the spread of this virus can be stopped. As this deadly disease is highly contagious, so to minimize human interactions robot nurses are being used in hospitals to provide necessary things to patients and also to disinfect the areas. COVID-19 has created several challenges for the world as it is reaching every corner of the world. Preventive measures need to be taken to stop its spread. in many ways. But the challenge of incorporating the coronavirus spread that happens because of contamination is that scanners at airports can be handled using contactless technologies to identify and ease people without spreading coronavirus. This is the time to adopt innovative touchless technologies for airports. Technology is helping to fight back coronavirus

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Contactless Technology Spikes in Demand Amid Coronavirus

A “ready” UX designer is a rare encounter in the wild. Designers usually do know how to make things pretty – but when it comes to the product logic and interactions design, few feel at ease. The inevitable solution is to hire people with a relevant background and upgrade them to real UXers:  host lectures, give homework, provide practice opportunities. In this article, I offer tips based on how we educate and coach teams at , where I'm a co-founder and designer, as well as share our experience and "homework" examples. I'll also be touching upon the cost and results of this process, and debating who is or isn't worth spending your time on. ANGRY UX This material will be useful to anyone who is looking to build an in-house UX team, retain strong employees and upgrade the overall level of the staff. Here we go! Skills a UX designer needs Interface design is different from web design in a sense that you have to think through a multi-step process in detail, keep in mind complex scenarios, negative and alternative states, and take into consideration limitations and business processes of a client. All of the above means that you have to be extremely meticulous and considerate. To draw a parallel, web design is like a business card: a person looks at a website and decides in several moments whether he wants to deal with a company, or not. UX design is more like a quest, where you have to take in account every single action and possible mistake, to make sure a user does not get lost and always feels comfortable. Here are the skills a UX designer can’t do without: 1. Logical thinking and analytical mind Lack of logic makes it hard for a designer to think through every step of a user. To evaluate these skills during an interview, we pay attention to how a candidate structures the story about his/her experience and analyzes the test task. Sometimes, the way cases are structured in a portfolio can tell you a lot. . Hint: technical education comes as a strong plus 2. Attention to details Once, a super nice guy came to an interview: all tattooed, with dreadlocks and relevant background. We were charmed. He proudly showed us a presentation for a well-known bank from his portfolio, and bam – it was full of little mistakes: typography, spelling, layout. Such negligence consumes time of more experienced team members, as they have to take over the editing role. Creating services is like an embroidery with multiple little things; that’s why we prefer scrupulous candidates. Hint: this leads to a gender inequality problem in UX. From our experience, girls typically do accurate work better. Boys show more efficiency in creative design concepts. 3. An eye for proportion and aesthetics This skill is hard and lengthy to master, but absolutely inevitable for UX design. You can see it pretty well in a portfolio. Hint: background in professional photography or art comes as a huge plus. is also well appreciated. If we see in a portfolio that colors don’t match – it’s the sign that we will have a hard time together. 4. Knowledge of coloristics 5. UX writing Most interviewees sincerely answer “no” when we ask whether they understand how to write texts for interfaces. This is a must in the education program. 6. Empathy A good UX designer cares about user’s needs and tries to walk in his shoes. Hint: pay attention to how a candidate analyzes interfaces and talks about the task during the interview – does he/she speak about a user or about him/herself? 7. Tolerance to criticism When you work in design, sometimes you get this moment of “this is bad, this has be redone, here and here”.  We don’t want a person to run out of the office furiously in the middle of a project – a designer has to be resilient to critique and corrections. Hint: inexperienced candidates, unfamiliar with waterfalls of comments from clients and colleagues, are usually at risk. To work in UX, you’ve got to be a nerd in a good sense of this word. Often, experienced professionals are unwilling to condescend and review every pixel. Their concepts might be great, but others are forced to stay alert for small mistakes, and this can be extremely tiring. To sum up, – it helps to spot mistakes and grow. a perfect candidate for an upgrade is a designer with 1+ year of experience, neat portfolio and self-discipline Education system: how to make a UX designer out of a designer From our experience, a person with a relevant background can upgrade his/her skills in interface design in several months. We have come up with 5 major education blocks for our staff: 1) lectures, 2) checklists, 3) writing UX texts, 4) honing interface design skills, 5) immersion in user experience. 1. Lectures: sharing knowledge with the team A convenient way to share experience. Every Thursday night we host short meetings, where more experienced team members give tips on typography, grids and so on, review Behance cases – in other words, share practical matters, experience, give and check homework. Once in two weeks we host demos, where project teams show and discuss new cool user features that we have come up with: modernized search, upgraded notifications system. We integrated this format for team members share successful practices and solutions. From time to time, we also invite experts from related fields to dispute and host Q&As. There are no “right” ways in design: everyone follows their own path and comes up with their own system, so it’s always fascinating to listen how others work, to get tips and learn from each other’s mistakes. 2. Checklists: synchronizing the team In order for the team to work harmoniously and not repeat same minor mistakes, we have compiled checklists in four key areas: 1) : how to build an info scheme or business process, how to think through all interactions from the first screen to the last SMS message, how to create basic and alternative scenarios, and so on. Designing UI-states 2) : how to write and check interface texts: basic rules, order, aspiration for simplicity. UX texts 3) : line breaks and abbreviations, dangling prepositions, dashes, and other details. Typography 4) : working with atomic design kit, components, constraints Design Checklists are stored in the app, serving as working material for beginners and teams. These are the basics that you need to know for sure so that the leads don't waste time making minor edits, and everyone can learn and double-check each other. Notion 3. Writing UX texts Our designers do microcopy themselves, so we have to teach everybody. Reading popular books is not enough: it is one thing to read and study, and another – to apply your knowledge. Thus, we gradually came up with a three-level system of practical tasks: : applying basic rules. 1 lvl : write four or five sentences a day. The topic does not matter, e.g. how the day passed, what new things I learned, who pisses me off the most. The main thing is to write regularly and clean the text up with services like or Grammarly to see the mistakes and hone the skill. How to train Hemingway Editor : analyzing texts inside a user scenario. 2 lvl : fix script bugs from real applications. For example, analyze the process of searching a car on Booking, find errors and design 2-3 screens with UX-text. How to train : being able to write a couple of paragraphs in a single tone and style, with specificity, transparency and emotion. 3 lvl : pick a website/an app and ask the designer to suggest alternative texts,  thinking about the target action and user portrait. How to train 4. Honing interface design skills When interviewing, we ask candidates to evaluate an interface in order to check their level of design skills and their ability to think analytically. Examine what a candidate pays attention to and how they explain their point of view. Do they simply express a personal opinion, e.g. "I think it will be better this way", or provide well-backed arguments. When teaching, the art director analyzes results with each team member individually. Experience has shown that group sessions are as good as useless: while one actively defends his/her concepts, others remain silent. That's why we discuss homework one-by-one as if we were tutors: we read, listen to arguments, and walk our “students” through theory again and again. Everyone gets individual homework. For example, if one constantly ignores typography, he will get the task to find and screenshot typographical errors in major services (Amazon, Asos, Booking, taxi and delivery services – a treasure trove of typographical and textual errors). 5. Immersion in user experience Our approach is based on numbers and user needs. We spent 6 years doing UX research in the fintech field, accumulated a large knowledge base, and only then did we start designing. Our UX researchers are involved in every stage of product creation: from user portraits to usability testing. For example, for weekly tasks analysis, a researcher collects analytics and insight on a specific process. A researcher acts as an advocate for users and defends their interests, based on  experience, numbers and results of a UX-research and usability tests. This is how designers adopt expertise, immerse themselves deeply in a project and make decisions based on data rather than their own insights and perceptions. In the course of a project, we collect controversial hypotheses to test them in the final usability test. Designers participate in tests, see how users perceive their decisions and thus understand what works and what does not. Sometimes we let them do the usability test themselves and test their own ideas. We show results of usability tests to the whole team, discuss conclusions, argue, review most important and critical moments and decide how to tackle problems. This is how the expertise of the whole team grows. How much time and money does it take? Educating employees is expensive, lengthy and not always productive. We pay a lot of attention to newbies and during the first month host weekly sessions to revise the direction, hear and offer feedback. With experienced employees (middle-level and higher), we host meetings once every 1-2 months, and develop individual plans. Important: self-development is a full responsibility of an employee. If he/she does not do homework and does not schedule meetings, it is a sign that a person is not ready to grow. Talking about the financial side and hours of the core team, we spend around $7500 USD per month on education. It requires time of the strongest team members – but it’s an investment in the future. Education allows us to grow the speed and quality of projects. Moral issues: when something goes wrong On interviews, everyone was super excited about our education system with regular meetings, homework and lectures. But once the work started (or the trial period was over), half of the people didn’t seem to care anymore and the director had to run around asking “Did you do? Why not?”. Meetings got postponed, progress slowed down. Now we understand we simply took on too much: we forced, imposed, managed. At one point, we changed our approach and just stopped pushing. Growth has to be voluntary: those willing to learn end up outperforming those who lack motivation in any case. It’s a great natural selection: the passive guys end up as a dead weight in a strong team and leave. We give resources, set goals, but don’t impose education. Some learn with pleasure, but with no effect on work. Game tasks with zero responsibility flow easily, but on a real project a person might get stuck, unable to make a decision. If such a barrier occurs – you need to find the reason and fight it. Sometimes it might be rooted in psychological struggles that can be tackled with a guidance and advice on how to gain experience and recognition from the team, how to get rid of the imposter syndrome, an so on. To sum it up Employees are the core resource. They are responsible for the final result, so investing in growth is strategically important. It costs time and money. Sometimes it ends up being wasted, but you better invest in education than loose in speed and quality of projects. Forcing does not work. Experience shows: those who want to grow, find resources, ask, show, inquire. If there is no motivation – you will most likely waste time. Investing in education leads to the growth in the average team level: passive members leave, motivated – upgrade. Each of our team members can take care of any task: both easy and difficult. We don’t have to search for an “easy enough” task for a particular designer. Thanks to education, we save time of the strongest and most expensive employees. The core team (middle, senior and lead designers) does not spend time on fixing mistakes anymore and does not carry those who lag behind. Education helps to retain staff. You can’t let strong professionals get bored. Alongside the main work, we help them to develop skills according to individual plans that we create together – to stay engaged, to progress and lead the team forward.

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How To Recruit, Train, and Retain Skilled UX Designers

I got sick of all the fake news and harmful conspiracy theories, so I wrote a balanced article that discussed real vs fake conspiracies. It ranked #1 on Google for keyphrases such as "How To Defeat The New World Order". Now, it has been censored from Google. Why? No, it wasn't a call to arms, or about violently bringing anyone to justice. Not even close. It was about us NOT blaming other people for the state of the World. It was about focusing on how YOU as an individual can make the World a better place through your own actions and decisions. . See the article Google censored Summary of the Censored Article You might think the article was removed because it contained "fake news" or something else Google considered "harmful", or against their policies. But that's just not the case. Here's what the article basically said: There are many unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, which are harmful. Educate yourself properly, and don't believe everything you read. But there are also real conspiracies, which are substantiated by verifiable facts. Like for example, ultra wealthy individuals who want to expand their wealth. This has happened since the beginning of history. It's nothing new. "Decentralized" projects such as Bitcoin aim to limit the possibility of corruption. Anything that is more resistant to corruption should be favored. Why wouldn't it be? Instead of blaming other people for the state of the world, we need to take responsibility for our own actions, and consider how we all contribute to problems. Never rely on violence. It should only used defensively, or it worsens the problem. Respect law enforcement. The police aren't our enemy. Respect government. Overall they exist to help us. But sometimes they get things wrong. And we cannot discount the possibility of criminals in positions of power.  That wouldn't be something new either. So governments must be fully transparent, and accountable for mistakes. We should support and demand critical technology, like renewable energy. Don't focus on "anger", because it isn't constructive. Sounds reasonable, right? So WHY was it censored by Google? Proof of the Censorship I've been watching the article's rankings on Google for some time. It was ranked #1 for keyphrases relating to conspiracy theories and especially the "New World Order". And now, it has completely disappeared from Google's index. Take any specific string of words in the article, and put them in inverted commas, and search in Google. The article is gone from Google's search results. WHY Did Google Censor It? Google has said it would censor "fake news". So I first thought maybe Google's automated algorithms accidentally censored the article. Firstly, there is no fake news in my article. It's just balanced and reasonable advice, mostly saying "stop focusing on conspiracy theories and blaming problems on others, and focus on how YOU can make the world a better place." And secondly, other . So why weren't those pages removed? What made other pages different? articles with much the same keywords were untouched The Differences Between The Censored Page, and Pages Google Did NOT Remove Pages that remained on Google are mostly from "over the top" conspiracy theorists. These are the kind of pages and "conspiracy theorists" that my article warned readers about. Some of their unsubstantiated theories are actually harmful. These pages makes these mistakes: uncensored . This is a big problem because if you focus on the negativity, you neglect action that makes positive change. They focus is on what "conspirators" are doing (such as the so-called "illuminati"), instead of what YOU can do to make the world better . This is related to the previous point. I don't want to sound like a hippie, but focusing on hatred and negativity only brings more of the same. They promote hatred and negativity . I'm not criticizing religion here. I'm saying if you're going to make a case, don't make it about religion. Make it about what we all know for a fact exists. You wont get through to people if you make it about your personal beliefs. They often focus on religion, which makes they look more like religious nuts, rather than level-headed people with important and unbiased information to share So basically the very articles I warned people about were the ones left behind. These are the dangerous articles that potentially do more harm than good. The Two Main Possibilities If Google's filter was 100% automated, it would have removed countless other pages with similar keywords. This just hasn't happened. So I believe it was MANUALLY reviewed by real people, then intentionally removed. If this was the case, it's a bigger problem because then why would the pages from "hard core conspiracy nuts" remain, but my page be censored? I can't help but think it's because the real truth hurts. Blaming others for problems instead of ourselves and doing nothing but complaining, doesn't solve problems. Focusing on how we contribute to problems, and how we can fix them ourselves, does solve problems. Of course, the censorship could have just been from Google staff who didn't bother to properly understand my article. Although, then why were harmful pages untouched? We'll probably never know the answer. Is Google and Youtube's Censorship Going Too Far? Forget about my article for a minute. I know very well the Internet is full of junk and harmful conspiracy theories. That's exactly why I wrote my article. If I were in charge of Google, I would feel partly responsible by allowing harmful conspiracy theories to be in search results. I wouldn't want my search engine to contribute to harm. But I would very, very carefully find the balance between censorship of genuinely harmful material, and the need for free speech. Free speech is critical, because what if there really were conspiracies? The truth would need to be known. Truth is not subjective. There is only one truth. But who gets to decide if something is true or false? I'll get to that later. Free Speech Vs Censorship, and Similarities To Gun Rights The issue of free speech vs censorship actually has similarities to "gun rights" issues. On one hand, citizens should have the right to arm themselves, because of the possibility of a tyrannical government. Hitler and the Nazis disarmed the German population as a means to control the population. Stalin did the same. We should never just assume our government can't possibly become tyrannical. History has shown many times that . This means if anyone has complete control, it's an invitation for complete tyranny. And guns are control by force. So I understand the arguments for "gun-rights". And I understand why it's part of the constitution. absolute power corrupts absolutely However, it should be practically impossible for a teenager or some deranged individual to get hold of an assault rifle to murder innocent people in schools. Do we really want to make senseless murder easier? So where's the middle ground? Which is the lesser of two evils? Except the possibility of type of potential harm is different. This is the same dilemma of censorship vs free speech. I believe that . . . With an open flow of information, there will be an inevitable war between truth and bullshit. But truth always, always wins. Eventually. But it's not so simple, because we naturally want to prevent harm. Although we may prevent some harm, we cause worse damage. For example, let's say someone deliberately published "fake news" that an alien spaceship was coming to collect souls to take them to heaven, and that we had to commit suicide to join the incoming spaceship. The people left alive on Earth would go to hell forever and ever. I'm sure some people would actually believe it, and commit suicide. In fact, something similar was done before in a cult. So this kind of "fake news" can cause real harm. But what if this crazy claim was actually true? Censoring the news would be the real harm. Google is not just a company or search engine. It is used as the global source of information. It has responsibilities far greater than any normal company. So it should be heavily regulated, as should any media. But regulated to allow a balance of information, free of bias. The real problems here are: Who decides what should be censored? How can the censors determine if information is true, false or harmful? How I Personally Approach Conspiracy Theory Proof Nobody can realistically say they unequivocally know that something is a fact, except for what they "believe". For example, I don't at all believe Earth is flat, because all the evidence I've considered indicates that Earth is a globe. And all the "best proof" from "Flat Earthers" is a mess of poor understanding. However, I have not flown into space and looked at Earth out the window to see Earth is a globe. So to be scientific about it, I'll say I have no reason to think Earth is flat. But if any "Flat-Earther" has any additional proof that Earth is flat, I'll consider it. It is important I maintain an open mind, or I'd be "self-censoring" new information. If I ignored new information, I could miss critical evidence that would improve my knowledge of reality. But if I paid attention to every piece of rubbish, the worst that could happen is I waste my time. So when it comes to Flat Earth theories, I maintain an open mind, but will only spend time verifying new information if the following criteria are met: CRITERIA 1. The source appears balanced and credible, and has not already wasted my time presenting unsubstantiated or incorrect theories. I don't expect everyone to be correct 100% of the time. Nobody ever is. But if I'm going to listen to someone, they can't just be some anonymous person on the Internet. And if they are, they need to back up claims. CRITERIA 2: There is at least some way to verify the claims as true (i.e. not just theory) Unsubstantiated theories without verifiable proof are as solid as opinions. We all have opinions based on our knowledge. But some people's knowledge is incredibly poor; hence their unsubstantiated theories. So my two criteria are CREDIBILITY AND VALIDITY. Otherwise, rejecting information may harm my own knowledge and understanding. This is how I personally consider any new information. Google and any media company should follow similar principles. The Only Fair Censorship It is not realistically possibly to accurately censor information with algorithms. Such an approach will inevitably censor accurate information too. Likewise, it is not possible for real humans to know the difference between unsubstantiated theory and likely fact - unless they have very broad knowledge. Google staff censor material with their own best judgement. That's all they can do. But the problem is they aren't experts in the matters they censor. So they can too easily make mistakes. Arguably, Google could hire experts in matters, to determine what should be censored. But then who decides who the experts are? I've concluded . the only fair and balanced way to censor material is to use crowd wisdom, AND be fully transparent about the consensus mechanisms (like a blockchain) Certainly though, crowds can be dumb and misinformed. But there is no solution for that, except: 1. It being the responsibility of each individual to do their own due diligence, and 2. The purveyors of information (including Google and Youtube) to allow the free flow of uncensored information, and 3. Using the "open source consensus" of to determine what is or isn't harmful, and what should or shouldn't be censored. real people I'll use one example of what I believe should clearly be censored: child pornography. But certainly there are people who would prefer it be available in Google search - they would be the minority. And overwhelmingly most people would be against it. I'm sure you'd find . This is an example of where crowd-wisdom overwhelmingly supports censorship. 99% of people would support censorship of child pornography But what about Flat Earth theory? Should it be censored? Based on my own research from a poll I conducted: 14% of people want Flat Earth talk censored, because they believe it is harmful. OPINION 1. 1% of people do not want it censored, because they actually believe Earth is flat. OPINION 2. 84% of people don't want it censored, despite believing Flat Earth is garbage, and potentially harmful. OPINION 3. In this case, there is NOT an overwhelming majority of people demanding censorship, so there should NOT be censorship. This balances the need for censorship of harmful information (decided by the overwhelming majority of people), and open flow of information. Effectively, this allows "we the people" to be the censors of our own society. A technical challenge though is ? Polls alone are not reliable, because even proxies can be used. Perhaps this is a problem blockchain could solve. how do we know the opinions provided are from real people, and not bots BUT, what about cases where fake news may cause serious physical harm? so let's use another example. Something random, like perhaps . . . the claim that COVID-19 doesn't exist, and is just from 5G radiation. If the theory is false, then people would be less likely to practice social distancing. This would kill people. Bad idea. But if the theory was true, then the truth needs to be told (not censored), and properly validated with further research. So we're in a bit of a pickle here. Should these claims be censored? Which is the lesser of two evils? I personally do NOT believe COVID-19 is fake. But I do believe it is being over-hyped because: 1. Death rates are being exaggerated by . So even if you died of a heart attack, it could be blamed on COVID-19. official government policies requiring hospitals to list COVID-19 as the cause of death, even if it was a contributing factor potentially 2. The COVID-19 tests are not entirely accurate. Previously it was reported that . So are we to understand from 1,000,000 positive results, 800,000 people aren't actually infected? tests produced 80% false positives Put these two points together, and you don't need to be a statistician to see a potential problem. It's a big tangled web going on here. Some big problems and big questions. It is overall my personal belief that we must practice social distancing. But we must also question what's going on. These questions must be asked without censorship, but while practicing social distancing. 5G for now should be deactivated, until further studies are done. The existing phone networks are coping just fine. And besides, 5G is a very short-range technology. I understand that if the negative claims about 5G are purely unfounded, that it would likely worsen the problem because infections would become more widespread. But people who ignore the restrictions will be fined or apprehended, and not to mention perhaps infected. So it is primarily at their peril. It's a very touchy dilemma, because these matters affect us all. It isn't all just about what we do privately in our own homes. Everyone's decisions have the capability to affect everyone. But still should any of the 5G claims be censored? No, I don't believe so. Remember that if anyone ignores the restrictions, they are the minority, and it is primarily to their detriment. If the virus is indeed real, and you practice social distancing, but others don't, you'll still be safe. Yes I understand a few can affect the many, but that's no different to a teenager who doesn't care about the laws and will visit their friends at the park. There will always, always be the minority. Should My Article Have Been Censored? My article didn't even mention COVID-19. See it for yourself. It was balanced and reasonable. Still it was censored, whereas hard-core "conspiracy theory" pages remained on Google. Why, is a good question. On this note, if it was censored because "the truth hurts", it might be a good idea to share it via Facebook . If it goes viral, it would be interesting to see what Facebook's censors do. I believe censorship should be reserved only for extreme cases, like child pornography. Other than that, if Google is a company that's responsible, with the world's population in mind, they should only of information - not be a tyrannical censor. protect the balance It is the responsibility of companies like Google and Facebook to allow open and balanced flow of information, and trust that all truth comes out, eventually. And it is our responsibility to do our own due diligence.

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Google Censored My New World Order Article: WTF Happened To Free Speech?

Businesses around the world have never been so vulnerable to cyber attacks associated with a pandemic. As spreads around the world, companies adapt their model of "business in the usual way" under the new realities in order to minimize the health risks resulting from close contact between employees and customers. COVID-19 As part of the adaptation process, millions of people have moved to . As a result, the interaction between customers and companies began to occur online. Such changes entail additional risks in the field of information security related to ensuring the confidentiality, integrity and accessibility of key information systems. remote work The popularization of the remote work format increases risks As information technology (IT) specialists try to create the necessary infrastructure for remote work, the need to ensure their effective response to the increased volume of requests from the business can lead to the fact that some IT departments and users will bypass the best practices in the field information security. Here are the problems you have to face: Users who are dissatisfied or unfamiliar with approved solutions for remote work can install their own or configure “shadow IT solutions” - in other words, use unmanaged software and assets without the use of corporate information protection and confidentiality mechanisms. IT departments can delay installing patches for critical systems to ensure network stability and availability. The increased load on resources that provide remote work can limit the allowable downtime for patching. Enabling connectivity between enterprise-wide resources may involve circumventing segmentation (and “flattening the network”), which typically hinders or detects an attacker trying to gain access to the network to access critical IT assets without multiple security levels. The distribution of actions and processes previously carried out with one's own hands is the task of the enterprise, which requires the adaptation of business processes and the provision of flexibility for conducting business in the usual way. Enterprises that monitor or restrict certain actions (such as creating high-confidentiality accounts, deleting them, and changing security settings) with local systems are forced to adapt the procedures used to new realities and carry out remote administration. New remote traffic is changing the basic level of the network and requires the configuration of advanced security analytics platforms that monitor remote traffic. As new benchmarks are established, will require regular monitoring and adjustment to identify non-standard, possibly malicious network traffic. analytical tools The expansion of the scope of remote work increases the load on the technical support units, as users “on the remote” constantly contact the support service, forcing IT professionals to skip authentication or authorization steps to cope with the increased number of calls. In addition, the requirements for the physical presence of IT service providers are becoming impossible; therefore, services such as installing updates on laptops, issuing certificates, or repairing equipment should be postponed. In addition to employees and customers facing similar problems, the additional risks outlined above are created by third-party suppliers or contractors. Attackers take advantage of the uncertainty and hype surrounding the spread of the pandemic Criminal groups exploit fear, uncertainty, and a pandemic of the public’s curiosity to clarify threat directions, tactics, and target strategies. From several sources, it became known about the increase in the number of phishing, malicious sites and attempts to break into business email related to the pandemic. Malicious content may appear in fraudulent news bulletins and in safety instructions, on virus distribution cards, in laboratory tests, or in employer memos. Attackers who steal data for the purpose of extortion, trying to spoil the business reputation of a company, aimed at those organizations whose security was in jeopardy due to a pandemic.  In addition, actions or statements of the company that are considered inappropriate can cause “hacktivistic” and internal threats, leading to disruptions in the IT business, theft and disclosure of information. The motivation, tools and goals of the attackers remain unchanged, but now they are accompanied by an additional advantage in the face of users who are looking for information about the pandemic and in some cases tend to ignore or bypass training materials and refuse to use technical means of monitoring information. Judging by numerous sources, experienced groups of professional cybercriminals and novice cybercriminal gangs use pandemic information to force users to download their malicious tools.  These tools include downloaders, keyboard input interceptors, phishing sites, ransomware viruses, and remote access tools. The goals of these groups remain the same: to request personal medical information, information that allows you to establish an identity, account details, donations, as well as extort a ransom. Groups of government-affiliated cybercriminals use pandemic information to attack organizations with their own malicious tools. In addition to the standard goals of continuous espionage, senior patrons of these groups instruct their members to collect health information, ostensibly to optimize national health programs. Businesses must take comprehensive risk mitigation measures: Provide centralized management and offer reliable solutions for remote work to expand the capabilities of employees, customers and third parties. Use identification and access control solutions, as well as analytical tools and controls based on roles rather than location. Use two-factor authentication for previously personalized processes, such as manual phone calls, a shared secret system, or other authentication controls related to similar processes. Provide links to official resources that contain pandemic information to prevent misinformation from spreading throughout your organization. Create formal and transparent corporate messaging channels to inform employees of the company's efforts to tackle this pandemic.

COVID-19: Five Steps to Protect Against Possible Cyber ​​Attacks

If it is not going to be used by a smart contract, dump it in an event Anyone that is coding smart contracts as database tables is getting it wrong. That was me as well, until very recently. Developing blockchain solutions requires you to think differently about data, about control and about privacy. Some of the details are easy to grasp, such as currency being little more than a table of balances and a few methods to operate on them. Some details are more complicated, such as the fact that you are building a solution that you might barely control. One detail that eluded me until recently is what does exactly mean that data in a public blockchain is, well, public. Looking for a mechanism to easily report on transaction history I stumbled on a very elegant way of providing exactly that while making painfully clear how careful one has to be with data privacy. On the Ethereum blockchain, you store in state variables only the data that smart contracts are going to use. Any data that you want to archive, you dump it as an event. In this article, I’ll mix a bit of low-level Ethereum architecture, a couple of development principles for the blockchain and a bit of code. With those tools, I’ll show you how to track and report on blockchain state changes, how to make your smart contracts simpler, and where you might be making data public without noticing. There must be a better way to trace data We needed to provide a complete history of transactions in a decentralized finance platform. Regulations like MiFID II require that all financial transactions must be reported to regulators on request. That means not only token transfers, but any other actions taken by users that change the state of the blockchain. My initial research took me to think: “Every state change is recorded in the blockchain, so there must be some way of ”. That sounded like a more elegant approach than storing data about all transactions in data structures inside a smart contract. I’ve learnt to do as little as possible with smart contracts, and as much as possible with external tools. going through the blocks and retrieving the transaction history A database built on transaction history could be rebuilt as many times as needed in as many places as needed, since the source of truth would always be the blockchain. Our smart contracts would not need to store data that is there only as an archive. I asked my good friend to please find me some tool to build such a transaction history database. He knows who is doing what and usually comes up with something we can use. Bernardo Vieira I was not even thinking about events until Bernardo came back and said: “What about recording the events that were emitted in a blockchain, does this solve your problem?” It did. It also opened my mind. Working with events Until that time I hadn’t thought much about Ethereum events. I knew that you are supposed to emit an event instead of returning a value when you change state in the blockchain. I also had learned to capture those events from the frontend to retrieve the result and made peace with the resulting boilerplate. I had no idea what events actually did. When you emit an event from a smart contract in a semi-structured format. A few fields of the event are always the same, and the variables that you define for the event in the smart contract get appended as additional fields. An event is one of the cheapest operations that you can do in Ethereum in terms of gas. At 4000 gas it is indeed cheap. it gets recorded in the blockchain Our earliest explorations included setting up , which does precisely what we wanted. It captures events from the blockchain and provides a GraphQL interface to query them. It would eventually be too complex for our use case, but just a couple of queries made me understand that the events in the blockchain really become a write-only database. Some columns are common to all events, and you get a few custom columns if you want to define them. TheGraph How we develop software now Understanding events sounds simple, but it had profound implications on how we coded our solutions from that time onwards. The first change was to adopt a development principle that now we understood: All state changes must produce an event By ensuring that all state changes produce an event we don’t need to worry about transaction traceability. All state changes will be dumped as events and we will just have the frontend extract information in whichever way it is required. But what about privacy? Should I be concerned that I’m putting out all the data that is sent to me? Well, the data is recoverable from the transaction data anyway, I’m just making it easier to consume. All data in a public blockchain is public, remember. If you have read my other articles, you will have noticed that I always look for the simplest way of accomplishing something. Until now I was happy with this code for a simple document registry: pragma solidity ^ ;

contract DocumentRegistry {
  event Registered(uint256 hash);
  mapping ( uint256) documents; {
    documents[hash] = msg.sender;
    emit Registered(hash);
  } { documents[hash];
  }
} 0.5 .10 => uint256 ( ) function register uint256 hash public ( ) ( ) function verify uint256 hash public view returns uint256 return Simple enough, but it could be simpler and more efficient. pragma solidity ^ ;

contract DocumentRegistry {
  event Registered(uint256 hash, address sender); {
    emit Registered(hash, msg.sender);
  }
} 0.5 .10 ( ) function register uint256 hash public Note that this second contract doesn’t explicitly store anything, and doesn’t have a function to retrieve data. Yet it works . and does the same job We tend to think of events as transitory things, but everything is permanent in the blockchain, including events. If you want to know whether a document is genuine, you just need to compute the hash and run a query on the cache. The only catch is that you need to keep an external infrastructure to track the events and mimic the blockchain state off-chain. That is not only relatively easy, but it is probably best in terms of performance anyway. In you can find a . Please keep an eye on it, because this is a tool that now we use in all projects and should improve rapidly. starter-kit sample event cache Conclusion The change in mentality is profound, suddenly there is a clear split between information that you need to keep in a structure in a smart contract, and information that you should just emit and forget. Store data in a state variable only if a smart contract is going to need it, otherwise it goes away in an event. I used to say that in any blockchain solution only a 10% of the code is smart contracts. Doing traceability right it is even less. The result is much cleaner code. In the following months we will continue coding smart contracts, using the principles shown in this article and refining the tools we use. Please keep an eye on for improvements on contracts and tools. this repo And as always, if you have any feedback, please ! drop me a line

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Nominated for 2022 - HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - Smart Contracts

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Smart Contracts are NOT Databases

Neural networks are often generated to be larger than is strictly necessary for initialization and then pruned after training to a core group of nodes. Today, machine learning is now considered to be one of the biggest innovations used in a wide range of applications. Over the last few years, India has emerged as among the top countries in Asia to contribute a number of research work in the field of AI, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. The big buzzwords are artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning – and for good reason. Perhaps one of the most well-known examples of machine learning in action is the that powers Facebook’s News Feed. recommendation engine Staying top on , Machine learning is the ability of a machine to improve its performance based on previous results. Its method enables computers to learn without being explicitly programmed, wherefore, the process to teach a computer system how to make accurate predictions when fed data. software innovation Comparing AI to Machine learning might give a closet, but they both function in different nature of technology development. Machine Learning is a current application of artificial intelligence-based around the idea that it should really just be able to give machines access to data and let them learn for themselves. AI just makes the broader concept of machines being able to carry out tasks in a way that we would be considered smart. In the business world, machine learning gives business scalability and improving business operations for companies across the globe. Average business person and CEO increasingly find it difficult to parse out the technical difference which distinguishes these capabilities. But how does it work and what benefit comes out of machine learning in business? 1. Machine Learning Detect Fraud Do you know that of business owners have faced financial fraud in the past 24 months and criminals successfully stole up to through fraud? In fact, most fraudulent attempts occur in the USA, and the well-known cheating methods – fraudsters. 47 percent £1.2 billion still work Of course, all business ventures have a financial department. However, fighting financial fraud is a never-ending war game. Technology is progressing and getting smarter just as with the scammers who are not ready to stop rotating innovation to get around companies’ protection systems. And if we recall the case when fraudsters faked the voice of the head of the company using AI and gave the order to transfer a large amount of money , then it’s becoming obvious at the moment, the magic pill does not exist, likewise, the old fashioned way to fight scammers hardly work. close to $243,000 At the moment, it is really impossible to guarantee 100 percent financial security, but it is possible to implement such systems of protection against financial fraud that will significantly lower the current figures. Machine learning, of course, is not a 100 percent cure for financial fraud, but the key features of this technology make it possible to prevent, detect and fight fraud more effectively. So how does machine learning help your business financial institution? In its turn, machine learning can perform preventive function due to the possibility of predictive analytics, recognition of intentions, and the identification of a typical pattern of behavior. While machine learning guarantees maximum accuracy, even when working with huge flows and volumes of data, the system gains a new level of confidence in the legitimacy of behavior, eliminating the need for a user to prove his identity, the rightfulness of holding a card or completing a certain transaction. 2. In Cybersecurity, Machine Learning Boost Big Data, Intelligence, and Analytic Spending The ever-changing data landscape in the modern digital world has resulted in newer ways of data processing frameworks in order to get meaningful insights that are unprecedented. Big data is transforming intelligence into many aspects of our social, political, economical and majorly business lives. Various scientific fields are no exceptions. state ‘growth’ as the key source of value from analytics but only 60 percent of these leaders have predictive analytics capabilities. 75 percent of Business leaders So what’s preventing the businesses from achieving these capabilities? Using a machine-learning algorithm, businesses can optimize and uncover new statistical patterns that form the backbone of predictive analytics. Cyber-threat is an ever-present danger to global economies and is projected to surpass the trillion-dollar mark in damages within the next year. In a time of ‘transformation and automation’ where robots could take our jobs, there is still room for the human to keep the robots sane, said John Chen. BlackBerry CEO focused on the growth of cybercrime and claimed that the cost of attacks will have an increase from the 2016 numbers of $400 billion, to ; while the cybersecurity spends will increase from , citing research by Cybersecurity Ventures. John Chen $6 trillion by 2021 $80 billion to $1 trillion As a result, the cybersecurity industry is investing heavily in machine learning to provide a more dynamic deterrent. 3. Machine Learning Helps In Up-Scaling To Better Career Opportunities Investors today stay singled and avoid to collaborate with industry lacking a protective solution. Machine learning is not a security, but a way forward solution to enhance security. Machine learning can help business owners target the right markets. Facebook, Google, and Twitter all use ad platforms, which businesses use to extrapolate valuable, relevant look-alike audiences from seed audiences. machine-learning-infused Finding a market is only step one; the next step is actually reaching it. Again, machine learning can help. Companies such as Octane AI use it to power their chatbots. Of course, finding a market is only step one; the next step is actually reaching it. Again, machine learning can help. Companies such as Octane AI use it to power their chatbots. 4. Machine Learning Helps In Predicting outcomes to increase lead generation Modern-day marketing has changed drastically over the past decade. Back in the day, when companies wanted to tweak their advertising, they would have to sift through their sales data, click-throughs and general behavior of their audience. A full pipeline isn’t useful if the leads aren’t relevant or qualified. Many companies today use a variety of people and tools to do basic data entry before these leads are delivered to a salesperson. Even then, they’re only guessing which leads will be interested. Marketing is by nature a very competitive and data-driven endeavor, especially at the enterprise level. Every facet of global, cross-channel marketing relies heavily on a competent knowledge economy comprised of data inputs (and proactive recommendations) gathered at every touchpoint with visitors, leads, and customers. In the business development world, machine learning tools sort through leads and pull a wide range of data together about your prospect list. The tedious work of organizing contact information or researching prospect demographics can be handed to bots and allow your sales team to focus on the right lead to generate. 5. Machine learning is lightening the workload Machine learning can relieve human workers from time-consuming tasks in many fields, and business leaders clearly recognize this potential. In healthcare, for instance, AI is improving efficiency and accuracy in a number of areas, from managing medical records to analyzing X-rays. Partners HealthCare, which includes the two biggest hospitals in Boston, is working with GE Healthcare to into every aspect of patient care, using machine learning applications that assist with treatment strategies, increase the number of times clinicians spend with patients and more. incorporate AI Also, Legal firms have turned to machine learning to help process large data sets. , for example, uses an intelligent software program to review documents and past legal cases; a task that would take human workers takes the program only a matter of seconds. J.P. Morgan more than 300,000 hours These Machine learning capabilities don’t mean that robots will replace lawyers or healthcare employees. Instead, this tech is only easing the strain on human workers

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You Need To Introduce Machine Learning to Your Business, Period.

All images have different sizes. But most of the time we want to place an image and define dimensions by ourselves. By default, the whole image squeezed according to the given width and height. For instance, if you want to place an image with a width of 400px and a height of 500px the image will look like this: The discrepancy between the original and the defined image sizes leads us to the issue. It is eye-catching at first glance and disrupts the UI. To fix the squeezing, CSS has a convenient property called with value. What does it do? object-fit cover When we apply it will crop the sides of an image and maintain its aspect ratio. Now we have de-squeezed image alongside with squeezed one. "object-fit: cover" Conclusion: With images in your project will look well sized. object-fit cover

How to De-Squeeze an Image Using CSS

With more than one million small businesses currently using Shopify (the after Amazon and eBay) there’s another growth happening right now. third-largest online retailer in the U.S. We’ve already seen a massive and for many it’s a foreign world requiring a new skill set. increase in the number of brick and mortar stores who have had to move their business online To assist with so many new businesses or those who have had to put additional emphasis into their e-commerce efforts, companies are stepping up to the plate to assist. For Shopify merchants, in particular, there’s an entire Shopify App Store that allows them to customize the experience for their customers, optimize their stores and a massive amount of tools and resources they can use to promote and share stores. It’s easy to get lost when everything is so new and you are unclear of direction. To start, it’s essential to build out your store according to and then share it with the world. Customers can’t visit what they don’t know exists. Shopify best practices Sharing is where it’s at and you have a combination of options for both earned and organic and paid. But the most compelling type of share? Hands down, it’s video. recently launched a new video marketing tool with Shopify that is free for all Shopify merchants. The is now the top pick recommended on the Shopify App Store. The new app allows Shopify merchants to quickly and easily turn product images into engaging marketing videos used to target customers and grow sales. Promo.com Promo.com Video Maker app “We’re committed to giving our brands everything they need to maintain and grow their business, especially during such a worldwide crisis that has an unprecedented impact on all businesses.” Said Brian Peters, Strategic Partnerships Lead, Shopify. “In this video-first era of online and social marketing, adding a creative partner like Promo.com to our App Store will definitely help our merchants keep their business present, stand out, compete with the big brands and grow their business.” The new app is easy to use and only requires that you have a Shopify store. HOW TO USE Select video type within ShopifyVideo Maker app pulls existing footage and imagesDelivers an optimized video based on ad goalsMerchant publishes on Shopify product pages, websites, or Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter accounts. ( ) See how it works here Furthermore, integrating video marketing efforts with Shopify leads to an increase in sales, as shown in a recent test run by Promo.com and RetargetApp, a web app that automatically optimizes effective ads for Shopify shops. In a Facebook test, Shopify store YesCustom, saw a 50% decrease in their cost-per-purchase and seven times higher return on ad spend (ROAS) when using Promo.com videos. This is good news for SMBs as they continue to function in a socially-distanced world and reach their customers who aren’t gone, just online.

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Shopify Video Apps Lead Online Retail Sales Growth for SMBs

We are a new exchange launched in 2020 worldwide offering the ability to trade stock CFDs using Bitcoin. The platform allows traders to use up to 100x leverage on all contracts. The trading interface is beginner-friendly and fairly simple to understand while being responsive. : Key Highlights * Koinpro allows users to trade cryptos and stock CFDs using Bitcoin with up to x100 leverage options * The exchange has a $100 Million Insurance on Custodial Assets * Addition of innovative contracts like the ‘Double Up Contract’. is a new exchange launched in 2020 worldwide offering the ability to trade stock CFDs using Bitcoin. The platform allows traders to use up to 100x leverage on all contracts. The trading interface is beginner-friendly and fairly simple to understand while being responsive. Koinpro Pros of KoinPro: 1) Option to trade CFDs with cryptocurrencies 2) Insurance up to $100 Million 3) Good liquidity on most trading pairs 4)Deposit Bonus Cons of KoinPro: 1) No corporate accounts for U.S. customers 2) Relatively new exchangeKoinPro Features Even though is a new exchange, it already offers a good amount of liquidity as well as a wide variety of tools and trading pairs including traditional stocks. Additionally, the platform allows users to open a free demo account from which they can trade and test all contracts and tools without any risk. Koinpro Clean And Beginner-Friendly Trading Interface One of the main features of Koinpro is how simple and clean the trading interface is. It was specifically designed to help new users by getting rid of unnecessary numbers and stats. Placing a buy or sell order is extremely simple as users only need to specify the quantity of the asset they want to buy with a fixed leverage. Traders can of course use a ‘market’ order or a ‘limit’ order to purchase an asset at a specific price. Koinpro allows new users to open a free demo account loaded with $10,000 in play money so they can test the trading interface and all the other features easily. CFDs and Innovative Contracts Another innovative feature is the ability to trade CFDs (Contract for Differences) using Bitcoin. Koinpro allows users to trade Gold, Oil, DJ30, GER30, JPN225, SP500, TECH100, UK100, EUSTX50 and the AUS200 using Bitcoin. Basically all major indexes as well as Gold, Oil, BTC perpetual contract and a BTC double-up contract. The new BTC/USD Double-UP contract is a beginner-friendly contract that allows users to trade BTC at 100x leverage. The contract will automatically settle when your position gains or loses 100% of its value. Deposits, Withdrawals, and Fees does not support any type of Fiat deposit but it also does not enforce KYC verification processes, ever. Users can deposit Bitcoin as well as a wide variety of Stablecoins that include, USDT, USDC, and PAX. Koinpro There are no deposit fees but there is a deposit bonus on both USDT and Bitcoin deposits. Users can get up to 0.2 BTC for a deposit of 1 BTC and up to 2,000 USDT for a 10,000 USDT deposit. There are no extra fees when withdrawing. When it comes to fees, Koinpro offers some of the lowest trading fees in the industry with a universal flat fee of 0.075% on the perpetual contracts and 0.05% on the Double-UP contracts. Affiliate Program Koinpro has a unique affiliate program that is highly profitable for users. The exchange tracks up to three degrees of affiliate users which allows participants to share even more profit. Basically, users will earn 30% of the fees generated by any invite but also 9% for the second-level affiliates and 2.7% for the third-level affiliates. The KOI Token Koinpro has developed a utility token called KOI to provide customers with different rewards for helping the platform to grow. Additionally, KOI holders will be able to access unique content and other special offers and perks. The KOI repurchase program was introduced to allow users to repurchase KOI tokens while protecting them from volatile price moves. All repurchased tokens are burned. Koinpro Customer Support As usual, Koinpro offers an extensive FAQ section and a wide variety of guides on how to trade, use the exchange and other relevant information. This section is still being constantly updated but if customers need help with something else, they can easily submit a request which is usually answered within a few days by the Koinpro customer support team. Additionally, users can contact Koinpro through social media channels on Twitter, Bitcointalk or Telegram. Bitmex and OKEx as Rivals KoinPro is a fairly new futures exchange which means it has a ton of competition from older and more established exchanges like BitMEX or OKEx. Even though KoinPro has a decent amount of liquidity, giants like BitMEX easily dwarf the exchange in terms of trading volume. KoinPro does, however, offer a few innovative products and services compared to OKex or BitMEX. The ability to trade CFDs using only crypto and the Double-Up contract with x100 leverage are features not offered by any other exchanges. BitMEX BitMEX is the biggest crypto derivatives exchange and was launched back in 2014. The exchange was founded by Arthur Hayes, Samuel Reed and Ben Delo and has the biggest amount of liquidity in the market. BitMEX offers the ability to trade perpetual BTC contracts as well as other coins like ADA, BCH, EOS, ETH, LTC, TRX and XRP. BitMEX, however, does not offer the ability to trade CFDs like KoinPro and only allows 100x leverage on Bitcoin. The platform only allows users to withdraw Bitcoin, once per day. One of the biggest complaints about BitMEX is the lag caused by volatile and big market movements. When it comes to safety, BitMEX is regarded as a safe exchange and offers a good amount of live channels for users to contact its customer support team. BitMEX has a pretty traditional fee schedule with 0.075% on the taker fee and a maker fee of -0.025%. KoinPro offers similar fees with a 0.075% fee on all perpetual contracts. OKEx OKEx was also founded in 2014 by Star Xu and has become one of the biggest and most popular crypto derivatives exchanges in the world. OKEx offers a wider variety of products in comparison to BitMEX and also has great liquidity. Similar to most exchanges, OKEx does not allow U.S. costumers to use its services. Again, OKEx only allows up to 100x leverage on the BTCUSD swap contract and less for the rest. KoinPro has 100x leverage on all trading pairs and it’s the only one of both exchanges that offers CFDs with cryptos. When it comes to fees, OKEx has a 0.1% fee for the maker and 0.15% for the taker which is significantly higher than 0.075% on the perpetual contracts that KoinPro is offering. OKEx allows its customers to buy cryptos with fiat currencies using a VISA or a Mastercard with a 5% fee per transaction. Generally, OKEx seems to be a safe exchange to use although there have been some rumors about the platform being hacked in the past. The customer support does receive a lot of criticism with mixed opinions on how slow the system currently is. Conclusion might be a new exchange but the team behind the platform has a lot of experience and knows how to handle the crypto market. With a wide variety of contracts and the ability to trade CFDs using Bitcoin, Koinpro is rapidly becoming a very popular and much-needed futures exchange. Koinpro

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