Retailers use Bolt's lightning-fast, one-click checkout to convert, retain, and delight more shoppers. Learn how it works here: https://www.bolt.com/how-it-works/ Read about what working at Bolt is like here: https://www.glassdoor.com/Overview/Working-at-Bolt-EI_IE1181527.11,15.htm Apply to join us here: https://www.bolt.com/careers/

Bolt

Today we will be creating a SlackBot that reacts to every message sent by a specific user. Useful, right? 😄 Creating a New Slack App The first thing we have to do is create a new app. We do this by navigating to and navigating to . Slack api.slack.com Your Apps -> Create New App We’ll call our app . Next up, we have to set up , a , and . reacting-bot event subscriptions bot user permissions Socket Mode The first thing we have to do is enable Socket Mode. Turning on Socket Mode will route your app’s interactions and events over a WebSockets connection instead of sending these payloads to different Request URLs. To enable Socket Mode, navigate to and hit . You will be prompted to add scopes and generate an app-level token. Give the token a name, e.g., “token”, and add the following scopes: Settings -> Socket Mode Enable Socket Mode & connections:write authorizations:read As the names suggest, these will give our app permission to read and write messages. Event Subscriptions Next up, we need to enable Event Subscriptions, which can be found beneath in the left-side menu. After enabling Event Subscriptions, you will need to add the following Event Subscriptions. Features Subscribe to bot events: message.groups Subscribe to event on behalf of users: message.channels Bot User If a Bot User has not yet been created, it can be set up on the tab. Here we can set a display name and its username. App Home Permissions Lastly, we need to ensure that the SlackBot has all the correct permissions needed. Head over to and add the permission to the . OAuth & Permissions reactions.write Bot Token Scopes We have now set up the SlackBot, and we are ready to start coding! Writing The Bot We will be using the library as an interface to the Slack API. It comes with many useful features that make creating SlackBots a breeze. bolt-js While in a new directory , we can initialize the project using . This will create a file that looks like the following: reacting-bot npm init -y package.json {
  "name": "reacting-bot",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
  },
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC"
} For this project, we are going to need two packages. and . is an interface that we use to communicate with the Slack API, and is used to access environment variables. We can install the packages with the following command: @slack/bolt dotenv Bolt dotenv npm install @slack/bolt dotenv Next up, we need to create the file which should store our environment variables for when we are running this project locally. The file should contain the following: .env SIGNING_SECRET=5c24e...
TOKEN=xoxb-...
APP_TOKEN=xapp-...
USER_ID=UCF8... can be found on the page SIGNING_SECRET Basic Information (xoxb) can be found on the page TOKEN OAuth & Permissions (xapp) can be found on the page under APP_TOKEN Basic Information App-level tokens can be found when viewing a slack profile under USER_ID More In , we start by importing and , and we initialize a bolt application in socket mode in the constant : index.js @slack/bolt dotenv app const { App } = require("@slack/bolt");
require("dotenv").config();

const app = new App({
  signingSecret: process.env.SIGNING_SECRET,
  token: process.env.TOKEN,
  socketMode: true,
  appToken: process.env.APP_TOKEN,
}); We then write the logic that uses the method to attach a listener for messages. message() app.message(async ({ message, context }) => {
  if (message.user === process.env.USER_ID) {
    try {
      const result = await app.client.reactions.add({
        token: context.botToken,
        name: "heavy_plus_sign",
        channel: message.channel,
        timestamp: message.ts,
      });
    } catch (error) {
      console.error(error);
    }
  }
}); We check any given message is sent by the user with the . If we find a match, we use the function to add a reaction to the message. ID USER_ID app.client.reactions.add() Lastly, we add a function that runs when the application starts. This function will start up the Slack App: (async () => {
  const port = process.env.PORT || 3000;
  await app.start(port);
  console.log(`⚡️ reacting-bot is running on port ${port}`);
})(); And that’s it! You can now run the app using the command, and the bot will start reacting to messages once it has been added to the correct channels. npm start This is what the final code looks like: const { App } = require("@slack/bolt");
require("dotenv").config();

const app = new App({
  signingSecret: process.env.SIGNING_SECRET,
  token: process.env.TOKEN,
  socketMode: true,
  appToken: process.env.APP_TOKEN,
});

app.message(async ({ message, context }) => {
  if (message.user === process.env.USER_ID) {
    try {
      const result = await app.client.reactions.add({
        token: context.botToken,
        name: "heavy_plus_sign",
        channel: message.channel,
        timestamp: message.ts,
      });
    } catch (error) {
      console.error(error);
    }
  }
});

(async () => {
  const port = process.env.PORT || 3000;

  await app.start(port);

  console.log(`⚡️ reacting-app is running on port ${port}`);
})(); Thanks for checking out this guide! You can view the code for this project on my . GitHub Also published here.

How to Create a Slackbot With JavaScript Bolt

The Nuts and Bolts of Crafting Quality Content

Photo by on Christopher Campbell Unsplash Hey Hackers! I’m and I’m the Mike Todd CEO and Founder of . Near-Life First of all, I’d like to say a huge thank you to the community for recognizing as the winner of: HackerNoon us The Top Startup in Bolton Reporter: What does it mean for you to win this title? HackerNoon There’s been huge development and development and change in the Greater Manchester region over the last two decades - but Bolton, specifically, has faced its own set of challenges. This town has a history of creativity and innovation that we’re proud to be part of and we want to play our part in the revitalization of the area. How do you or your company intend to embrace the responsibility of this title in 2022? Continuing to do what we’re doing. We want to push on with the work we’ve started to make a leading player in the world of interactive and immersive content. We stand by our founding ambition to be the first interactive video and VR authoring tool for everyone. Near-Life What are some of the goals you’re looking forward to accomplishing in 2022 (whether it be through company initiatives or your personal journey)? We’re looking to raise investment this year to take us to the next level of our journey. We have already have users all over the world but we want more people to understand who we are and how we can improve the way content is created and shared. We are still only at the foothills of what interactive video and interactive VR can offer. After participating in this journey, is there anything that you would like the team to know? HackerNoon Being an entrepreneur isn’t easy. You’re constantly trying to communicate your belief to others. Not everything is plain sailing. But it is a rewarding struggle to try and create and build something that you feel can make a difference in the world. What is something special about you or your company that you’ve rarely had the chance to properly share but really wanted to? (Give this one a proper think, I’ll know if you didn’t!) We’re very much rooted in the idea of democratising creativity - empowering our users on their own journey of innovation and creativity. We came from a creative content background and were always inspired by the idea that creativity is part of the human condition, something that we all benefit from. We think our interactive authoring tool has the potential to make the world better at communicating. Ambitious, I know. What are some concepts you wish people knew more about? Interactive video and immersive content is still an emergent space. We spend a lot of time trying to share an understanding of the value it can bring. If people already knew more about that, we’d spend less time making the case of the concept - and be able to fast forward to helping explain why our solution is the best and how it can save time, money, effort - and improve results! Is there anything else you’d like me to know? It can be anything. If you, or anyone, is interested to find out more about what we do at Near-Life…you can sign up for a at any time! demo or free trial For more information: Read the FAQs about or . To see all of the winners you may visit , pick any city and view the name that appears at the top. Or follow for posts with the list of names released over the course of the week of February 14, 2022. Startups here here this site this account Thank you to all of our sponsors! We truly appreciate your contribution to the tech world and thus the future! : Startups , , , , , , , , , , Blockster Brex FreeCodeCamp LaunchDarkly Coil Udacity Udemy Vercel Asia Pacific Transgender Network Bybit Everscale Network

Near-Life is Bolton's Top Startup of 2021

The rise of the internet and social media created a significant impact on our purchasing behavior. A found that there has been a shift in the effectiveness of advertisements in the favor of peer recommendations. Nielsen survey The survey shows that the trust customers place in conventional ads has been on a steady decline. At the time the study was published, only 33 percent of people trusted general advertisements while 90 percent have faith in ‘earned’ advertisements such as peer recommendations, such as . influencer marketing Keeping in mind the study was published in 2011, those numbers may be even more inflated at this point. The initial release of Instagram for iOS happened in 2010, with the Android release following two years later. Seeing how Instagram changed the way online marketing has evolved, it’s currently a no-brainer for companies to use this effective and targeted marketing strategy. Instagram influencers offer access to a huge pool of potential customers. Because every influencer has a certain audience, it makes it cheaper to advertise effectively to your target group. In this article, we’ll discuss tips to find reliable and good influencers that will give you the highest return of investment. Now, how can you start getting a piece of the action? Types of Influencers Celebrities Macro influencers Micro influencers We will mainly focus on the second and third categories. The choice between them depends mostly on the budget. The first category, celebrities, are not a good choice as an effective marketing strategy. A concluded that celebrities are not a good choice as only 3 percent of buyers are influenced by celebrity endorsements. 2016 Collective Bias survey Further, you may be wondering where the difference between macro and micro influencers lies. The difference is based on the following they have: A ‘Macro’ influencer is someone who has managed to build up a following of more than 10,000 followers A ‘Micro’ influencer is someone who has built up a more modest, but still significant number of followers (1000 - 10,000) (Source: Screenshot from SocialBakers about types of influencers) The reason why your business should focus on micro influencers and macro influencers is because the 2016 study we mentioned above demonstrates that 30 percent of customers were more likely to purchase a product by a non-celebrity influencer. A brings forth another important aspect to keep in mind. We are talking about the balance of engagement and reach. Macro influencers may have a greater reach, but micro influencers have much greater engagement from their nice audience. survey by Markerley Macro influencers may have a greater reach, but micro influencers have much greater engagement. If you are selling a specialized product, it may prove to be more effective to opt for a greater number of different micro influencers instead of one single macro influencer. On the other hand, it takes more time to find the different micro influencers in the required niche. But the engagement of the audience of micro influencers means more people will actively come into contact with your product. Another factor that adds to the advantages micro influencers have over celebrities or even macro influencers is their authenticity. Often micro influencers have a narrow scope, but you can be sure they are effectively involved in their niche. This brings authenticity to the table, which is arguably one of the most important aspects of marketing. However, many companies face a challenge when trying to find authentic influencers with an engaged audience. How to Identify the Right Influencers? Picking the wrong influencers can be a costly mistake. Determining whether an influencer is a fit choice for your campaign takes time. There are several metrics to keep in mind when you are targeting influencers. The of their audience: This is probably the most important metric for a business trying to sell a product. Try to aim for influencers who have an for their posts. By engaging we mean, liking, commenting and sharing. engagement engagement rate of at least 2-4% Another important metric is the of the influencer. The overlap between their niche and the as possible. niche niche of your business should be as big The is also an important metric. Does the part of the audience that actively engages with the posts reflect the target audience you are going for? follower quality This is also a metric that shouldn’t be overlooked. If the cost is too high in relation to the possible reach it’ll get, you should probably look further. Post costs. To make your search easier it’s a good idea to use different tools to find suitable influencers. You could use tools like an Instagram influencer platform to quickly search through lists of influencers. A lot of platforms display useful information about the influencers and often offer the possibility to directly reach out to them. Next read? 14 Advanced Techniques for Getting More Instagram Followers Pro Tip: Use an Instagram Audit Tool to Avoid Fake Influencers (Source: Unsplash by Carlos Muza ) Another tool to ease your search for a fitting influencer is an . Using such a tool allows for quickly scanning accounts, discovering the hashtags they focus on, quickly calculating engagement rates across multiple posts. This saves you a lot of time reviewing each account manually. An audit tool can quickly give you a list of the most promising influencers you should further investigate and perhaps contact. Instagram Audit tool An audit tool can quickly give you a list of the most promising influencers you should further investigate. Furthermore, fake Instagram influencers are on the rise. An audit tool can quickly tell you if the engagement rate is normal or whether it is subpar. An account with a lot of fake followers will often have very low engagement. Real Instagram users tend to be able to evaluate accurately which accounts seem not genuine or have a lot of fake followers. Real users will unfollow, leaving the account behind with a majority of fake followers. Another way an Instagram Audit tool can detect fake influencers is by looking at the followers liking and commenting on the posts. If the influencer has an engagement rate of 2-4%, but has a low variety in the followers who comment and like posts, it may be a fake influencer. If it’s always the same people commenting, chances are they’re actually bots. Which Type of Influencer Campaign Should You Choose? There are several types of influencer campaigns you could choose from. Your type of campaign depends on your goals: brand awareness, promote a product, or gain more Instagram followers? Below we’ll discuss several campaigns you could choose from and which benefits they offer. Sponsored Posts This one is probably the most widespread due to its simplicity. The influencer creates a post highlighting your product and you pay them for it. Contests A contest is also a really good idea because it immediately ensures followers are engaged with the post because they can win a product. Branded Content Branded content means the influencer uses your product in an informative way that is engaging to their followers. Branded content is great because it allows the influencer the freedom to be authentic while displaying your product. Reviews Reviews are an optimal choice if you’re bringing a new product to the market. The influencer can then do an in-depth review demonstrating the advantages your product has. Brand Representative Program Sending your product to an influencer is also a great idea because it shows you are confident about your product. It may also be a relatively cheap option because you can use your own product. Influencer Takeover This is when an influencer takes over your Instagram page for a day. This is great when there is a significant overlap between your niche and the niche of the influencer. It can result in a mutual increase in followers. Track the Success of Your Instagram Influencer Campaign Depending on your campaign type, you can monitor different metrics to keep track of the performance of your campaign. For example, when you want to increase your follower count, you can simply track your daily follower growth starting on the day of your campaign. However, if you want to track more advanced metrics such as engagement levels or branded hashtag usage, you should consider using an Instagram analytics tool. Many Instagram analytics tools allow you to track your engagement levels. This correlates directly with the Instagram algorithm and is therefore important to track. If you’ve used branded content, you can also track your brand awareness. Has there been an increase in the number of times your branded hashtags have been used on Instagram since the start of the campaign? The key takeaways of this post include using influencers to do the heavy lifting of your marketing campaign. Finding the best influencers for your business or product can be made easier by using an Instagram influencer platform. And, an Instagram audit tool can help you predict the success of your campaign because it helps you weed out fake influencers. Good luck with your Instagram influencer journey!

Instagram Influencer Marketing: The Nuts and Bolts Of It

The Lightning Network was built around the idea of financial inclusivity. Anyone can make a purchase and should be able to do so pseudonymously. What if conferences and hackathons were structured around these same core principles? As the world’s first online Lightning Network conference and hackathon, that’s exactly what the was designed to be. By hosting the event online, Bolt-A-Thon reaches a world-wide community, sets incredibly affordable ticket prices, and process all payments into Lightning Bitcoin. Bolt-A-Thon Hackathon The first part of the Bolt-A-Thon is for our hackers. They hackathon will start on April 5 with the kick off at 6pm PST and runs through April 7 at 2pm PST. Hackers will be provided a suggested theme and will have two and a half days to build their projects to then present in front of their peers and our judges. First, second, and third place winners will receive respectively. Blockstack PBC will also be offering an additional bounty of for the best project built with Blockstack. 0.3 BTC, 0.2 BTC, and 0.1 BTC $1000 Conference www.boltathon.com The second part of the Bolt-A-Thon is the conference. Our fantastic lineup includes representatives from all three major Lightning Network implementations: from Blockstream, from Lightning Labs, and Fabrice Drouin from ACINQ. This ensures diverse client coverage that will be available for current and future developers. Rusty Russell Conner Fromknecht Not a coder? Not to worry. The Bolt-A-Thon also offers alternative topics such as the Node Launching session with , Lightning Network games with , and even a sobering talk about the limitations of the Lightning Network with . Pierre Rochard Lightning Koala Alex Bosworth Voting One of the unique features of our website is that it allows people to submit posts to become a potential speaker for the Bolt-A-Thon. It also allows people from the community to vote on their favorite topic proposal with satoshis. The top posts will earn a spot to speak at the conference. Ticket Prices So join the Lightning revolution that is taking Bitcoin by storm. are (~$10) per session and to register for the hackathon. And if you don’t have a Lightning wallet, you can always pay on-chain with Bitcoin or Litecoin through submarine swaps. Tickets 250,000 satoshis 100 satoshis Buy Your Tickets Today!

Bolt-A-Thon: World’s First Online Lightning Network Conference and Hackathon

The internet is filled with tutorials to get started with Deep Learning. You can choose to get started with the superb Stanford courses or , or Deep Learning AI if you are an absolute beginner. All except Deep Learning AI are free and accessible from the comfort of your home. All you need is a good computer (preferably with a Nvidia GPU) and you are good to take your first steps into Deep Learning. CS221 CS224 Fast AI courses courses This blog is however not addressing the absolute beginner. Once you have a bit of intuition about how Deep Learning algorithms work, you might want to understand how things work below the hood. While most work in Deep Learning (the 10% apart from Data Munging viz 90% of total work) is adding layers like Conv2d, changing hyperparameters in different types of optimization strategies like ADAM or using batchnorm and other techniques just by writing one line commands in Python (thanks to the awesome frameworks available), a lot of the people might feel a deep desire to know what happens behind the scenes. This is the list of resources which might help you get to know what happens inside the hood when you (say) put a conv2d layer or call T.grad in Theano. General Treatise Deep Learning Book is of course the most famous and well-known . Other good resources are Professor Charniak’s and which is a technical introduction to Deep Learning. There are other resources too which you might want to take up if you want to understand things from a particular perspective. For example, the was written from point of applied mathematicians and if you just want to start coding without going into any theory then read . One more recommended resource is Deep Learning course in PyTorch . This course talks about things bottom up and help you grab a bigger perspective. resource course paper tutorial here here Issues about Backpropogation There are many a time, when people are not sure about “how is gradient descent and backpropogation the same thing ?” or “what exactly is the chain rule and backpropogation?”. To understand the basics, we might choose to read the original paper by Rumelhart, Hinton, and Williams where it all started. The paper is located and is a very simple to understand document. here Some other very useful resources one can read on top of this are Karpathy’s blog on backward and explaining backprop’s derivation. prop derivation this video Linear Algebra and other Maths Anyone would redirect someone aspiring to learn Linear Algebra to goto Prof. Strang’s . This is probably the best resource on Linear Algebra on the planet. Similar is the case with Optimization course of Prof. Boyd or Calculus on Manifolds book for vector calculus (You can find a pdf when you Google “Calculus on Manifolds”). However, one doesn’t need to go through the depth at which these resources look at their subjects to jump into Deep learning. A very quick way to get started is to take the quick refresher on all prerequisite Calculus for Deep Learning which is available . There is also this very good set of to just look at convex optimization used in Deep Learning. Another good resource is Sebastian Reuder’s paper . I also like these lecture notes to understand derivatives on . course here here lecture notes here tensors Automatic Differentiation and Deep learning libraries Automatic Differentiation isn’t something that you absolutely need to know when you are doing Deep Learning. Most frameworks like Torch, Theano or tensorflow do it for you automatically. In most cases, you don’t even have to know how the differentiation is being done. That said, if you are determined to understand how Deep Learning frameworks work, you might want to understand how automatic differentiation works . Other good resources to understand how Deep Learning libraries function are can be found in this and . here blog video Convolutional Neural Networks: The most useful things you might need after you have done some courses which enable you to use basic convents is to understand how convolutions work on images. “What is output shape after you apply a certain type of convolutions on an input ?” , “How does stride affect convolutions ?”, “What is Batch Normalization ?” and stuff like that. The two best resources I have seen for these type of applied questions are the tutorial and Ian Goodfellow’s talk . A more thorough on Convnets is here if you want to get an idea. This is a very good resource in the topic. here here review review on object detection Deep Learning in NLP The Stanford 224 course I pointed out earlier in the blog is a very good starting point and you should be good enough for almost everything. There is also a course on youtube by Graham Neubig (which uses dynet) . There is also an by Yoav Goldberg which you might like. (Newer) advances of NLP after this book was written are reviewed . There is also a very common question about whether to use convnets or RNNs (LSTMs/GRUs) on text. A good overview is . here NLP book here here Reinforcement Learning Sutton and Barto is the bible to get started with these methods. The book is free and is available . A very good review of recent Deep Reinforcement Learning methods is available . There is this very interesting tutorial on Reinforcement Learning . here here here A good review of Monte Carlo Tree Search (which is a part of AlphaGo algorithm by Deepmind apart from Deep Reinforcement Learning techniques) is . I, however, used quick tutorial to learn about them. here this Some other good reviews/tutorials A good tutorial about GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) and generative models in general is what Goodfellow gave in ICLR 2016. It can be found . Neural Networks have been used to transfer art (for example in Prisma app), a detailed survey of methods to do that can be found . Another good survey on Multi Task Learning (combining multiple tasks by same neural network) by Reuder is here here here . Criticisms Although Deep Learning works amazingly well on multiple problems, we know there will always be some places where they have not reached yet. Some good criticisms to read are Failures of gradient-based learning by , this talk by Hinton which lists some difficulties for and how convnets cannot decipher negatives of images . Another criticism here went viral/controversial few days back is . There is also on the malicious use of Deep Learning. Shalev-Shwartz et al. convnets they train on this this extensive report Adversarial Examples This is a huge field of making artificial/real data points that can fool Convnets. I could have put it in in criticism sections but didn’t as they are not a technical challenge for all applications and I am not very well read on them. One very cool case to get started and interested is where they generate “adversarial objects” to fool neural networks. here You can also read about Machine Learning algorithms you should know to become a Data Scientist . here We hope you liked the article. Please for a free ParallelDots account to start your AI journey. You can also check demo’s of PrallelDots AI APIs . Sign Up here You can read the original article . here _Read writing about Deep Learning in Hacker Noon. how hackers start their afternoons._hackernoon.com Deep Learning - Hacker Noon

Best (and Free!!) Resources to understand Nuts and Bolts of Deep learning

A look at 3rd-party AI tools and services, uncovering easy wins, and where to invest in an automated world Artificial Intelligence has become a bit of a divisive topic. While some industries have oriented their entire business around the technology, others are struggling to develop a strategy. The good news is that adopting AI doesn’t need to be this . dramatic An entire ecosystem of applications and services have cropped up to bridge the gap between the business processes of today and the intelligent ones of tomorrow. Adopting AI-enabled solutions can help companies streamline operations and eliminate repetitive tasks. From growing sales with intelligent customer engagement to reducing opex with automated IT operations, there are new tools available to support every department within a business. Here are some tools you can integrate today, at whatever stage or opinion you have on AI. Cross-Functional Solutions Where there is data, there is an opportunity for intelligent systems (AI) — to do something. A number of companies have built cross-functional solutions to meet the data opportunity across the board. The drawback is that these solutions do require collaboration (not plug and play) to develop models that are best suited for your use case, but the impact can be dramatic. : API for human automation. Apres : Builds augmented intelligence software for healthcare, commerce and financial markets. CognitiveScale : Cloud software that transforms handwritten paper forms into digital data. Captricity : Simplifies and accelerates your ability to use AI to unlock the value in your data. Machinify Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology for Splunk enables you to ask “plain English” queries of your machine data. Insight Engines : Maximizing the impact of data through advanced natural language generation (Advanced NLG) for the enterprise. Narrative Science : Human Resources HR is operationally intensive, rigidly structured and often slow to adopt new technologies. Recruiters alone spend over 60% of their time reading through resumes — time better spent with candidates. HR presents a clear opportunity for AI to improve the efficiency of the role: Actively pursue all credible candidates in the market at any given time, all the time — matched against fit criteria tailored toward your business. Optimized Recruiting: The opportunity to deal with employees as people, rather than functions and creating tailored milestones and objectives. Personalized Career Development: The ability to analyze messaging, both in the market and internally, and adjusting accordingly. Employee Sentiment Analysis: Packages tailored to the implicit needs of your employees, such as fitness trackers and programs for health insurance. Tailored Benefits: Uses machine learning to help organizations hire smarter by analyzing a person’s publicly available online presence. FAMA : Your team’s A.I. recruiter. Mya : AI-based anonymous career development platform allowing users to both know their worth and get concrete offers in real time (previously Workey). Gloat : AI powered employee retention tool. UnderstandBetter : Reduce corporate travel spend by rewarding employees for saving. Rocketrip : Cloud HR service that provides an integrated and video enabled digital platform for all recruitment needs. Peoplise : Talent Relationship Marketing (TRM) cloud platform connecting people to their ideal job. Phenom People : Predictive hiring platform that informs you who to hire before you meet them Koru : Helps businesses better understand their employees. Humanyze : Customer Service Advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have created new opportunities for companies to engage with customers. From chatbots to voice assistants, AI can now simulate human interaction, triage the required service and route the solution accordingly. This has streamlined customer service centers to personalize customer service and enable more efficient interactions between vendors and consumers. Service personalized to the tune of all available data on the client and intelligent virtual assistants as an interface layer. Differentiated customer experience: Streamline inquiry capture and resolution process, proactive support, and account/client management. Smarter operations: Data analysis on a continuous basis — uncovering new revenue streams and decrease churn. Intelligent insights: Brings practical applications of deep learning & artificial intelligence to customer service operations of large companies. Digital Genius : Supplies artificial intelligence to augment and replace live chat customer support agents at eCommerce companies. Eloquent Labs : Automates customer care conversations. Kylie.ai : Virtual assistant solutions. Interactions : Offers artificial intelligence powered customer service. AlphaBlues : utomated customer support. True AI : A Advanced AI customer service across multiple channels including chat, email, SMS, Facebook Messenger and Twitter. Hello Vera : AI for customer service. HelpScout : Social media customer service. Sparkcentral : AI voice platform for connected devices. Snips : Sales & Marketing SAAS has entrenched the value of sales and marketing data over the last decade, making historic records commonplace and an ideal for applying AI. Conversion-focused tools promise to make a significant impact on the top and bottom line: Automated outbound strategy targeting highest value leads, and delivering qualified prospects at the right time. Optimized account development: AI systems to support the salesforce with relevant insights, market movement and continuous training/coaching. Improved salesforce productivity: Personalized customer engagement, predictive marketing and messaging. Intelligent customer engagement: AI generated content and distribution, predictive marketing to increase retention, real-time competitive intelligence. Automated marketing: People-based intelligence through reorganizing the information on the web based on the people who use it. Node : AI powered sales intelligence to build relationships with your buyers and grow your sales. Nudge : AI software for marketing and sales enablement. Conversica : Records, transcribes, and analyzes sales conversations in real-time, highlighting important moments and revealing why you win and lose deals. Chorus : Provides users with a platform to maximize sales leads with analytics programs and innovative organization tools. FunnelBeam : Helps inside sales reps win more with an AI that learns from how your best reps communicate effectively with their customers. Nitrio : AI-powered analyst for marketers. Aiden : Automatically capture all sales activity to drive intelligent sales management and marketing accountability. People.ai : Predictive Marketing Platform for enterprise enables insight-driven customer engagement to win and retain customers. Mintigo : shows you the best way to communicate with any prospect, customer, or coworker based on their unique personality. Crystal : Virtual assistant that schedules your meetings. Clara : Marketing automation AI that delivers a personalized experience to each customer. Retention Science : AI generated language that resonates the most with any audience, segment or individual. Persado : AI powered marketing insights to create compelling content. Unmetric : Social strategy and analytics firm that provides Convey.AI semantic machine learning technology and Conversus App. Converseon : Legal Legal departments commit the majority of their resources to operational overhead — document parsing, research and discovery. Various AI tools have been developed to support these time-consuming tasks, often more effectively than their human counterparts. Augmenting existing legal teams with AI can provide an enormous benefit/ boost to productivity. AI assistant that provides rapid analysis and summarization of legal briefs. Legal research: AI able to identify relevant briefs and automatically generate next steps and other research tasks. Contract diligence: Documentation review and prioritization, automated story builder, instant translation. Discovery: Artificially intelligent attorney to help power through legal research. ROSS : Casetext’s CARA, automates key legal research tasks to analyze litigation documents, and uses that information to algorithmically query the law. Casetext : Platform for legal search, analytics and visualization. Ravel: Legal legal document review and discovery platform. Everlaw: Legal technology company providing research and analytics tools to turn unstructured case law into structured data. Judicata : Makes in-depth contract reviews accessible to everyone. LawGeex : IT Operations Increasingly complex IT operations are changing infrastructure attack surface area, continuously exposing organizations to new threat vectors. There is a real need for tools that offer the necessary intelligence and speed to keep up with the growing security threats companies face today. Beyond being able to take over manual tasks prone to human error, AI will be enable real-time threat detection and most importantly, prevent threats before they cause damage. Anomaly detection and prevention, real-time monitoring, autonomous remediation. Security: AI system that mimics how a user investigates, monitors, and troubleshoots events. Cognitive Insights: RPA tools to replace manual tasks and provide a real-time view of process workflows, and self-learning topology analysis. Streamlined Operations: Enable NLP bots that talk to a system to identify and resolve performance issues, monitor digital performance of IT infrastructure. Improved Customer Experience: : Root cause analysis software company acquired by Splunk. Rocana : Advanced monitoring platform for modern applications. SignalFx : Human-centered that helps people and machines work together to find clarity in chaos, and accelerate innovation. Moogsoft technology : AI-powered log analysis solution that monitors all your IT stack in real-time to predict issues before they affect the business and help you solve them faster. LoomSystems : Teaching machines to think, reason and communicate, acquired by Microsoft. Maluuba : Multi-turn, easy-to-use, and easy-to-author chatbot. Kitt.AI : AI-driven threat detection and prevention solution. Mistnet security : Enterprise immune system technology for cyber security. DarkTrace : Combines humans and machines into an AI system that detects cyber threats at scale and in real time. PatternEx Conclusion Building an AI muscle in-house is not the right strategy for every company (more here). That said, taking advantage of AI is necessary for all companies to keep up in any market. If the competition is running more efficiently, you are already a step behind. AI will affect every industry, everywhere. Whether or not you see this change happening today, it is important to start planning for it. Being ahead of the curve here is worth it. Disclosure: Juniper Networks is an investor in one of these companies.

Bolt-on AI: Is this the AI shortcut we’ve been looking for?

I should start off by saying that I am not a car guy. If you know me, you’ve probably never heard me talk about a car, and you likely will never hear me talk about one again. My dad is a car guy. He rebuilt Porches before I was born. At some point, he sort of tried to teach me how to change belts and brake pads and things that you could do on cars before they were 95% electronics, though little of that stuck. For all my car-guy pedigree, I could just never really care less about cars. In fact, I would really rather not own one at all. When we lived in Paris, we never needed one. You can walk most places and there’s public transit for the rest. We lived for a year with no car and no real need of one and it would be amazing if we could do that in America, but it’s sadly not very practical here. So, own a car we must. This post is my simple love letter to the first car I’ve ever really liked owning, the Chevy Bolt. The story starts when we bought our first house recently. When we moved into the house, we decided that we should try getting an electric car. We live in Berkeley, we now have a driveway and a place we could easily install a charger, it seemed like a good call. We owned a Tacoma, but it’s big and gas-guzzling and impossible to park in Berkeley and San Francisco, and overall just not a very good . car We researched everything out there and decided that the only two electric cars that currently get anywhere near the range we wanted were the Telsa and the Chevy Bolt. Now, I do love the . Tesla For our 14th wedding anniversary, we rented a Tesla Model S for the weekend and drove it to Napa. It’s a great car. The simplicity is amazing, it’s super safe and the acceleration is totally insane. Ludicrous, one might say. However, there are two problems with the Telsa. The first is that it’s really wide — as in, the same width as our Tacoma. The other is that it’s really expensive. Which itself presents another problem, which is that even if I wanted to spend $90k on a car, which I absolutely do not, I still don’t really want to be the guy driving around in a Tesla. With apologies to any of my Telsa owning friends, if I have any. So we took a chance on the Bolt and . It has all of the important advantages of the Tesla and none of the downsides. Let’s quickly go over the main things that are great about this car. it’s the best car I’ve ever owned There are exactly two versions of the car, one that costs $37k and slightly nicer version that costs $41k. After federal and state incentives, which I believe end up around $10k, it costs less than $30k. It’s inexpensive. Not only does it cost about the same as a Honda CRV, but it’s cheap to drive. PG&E has a EV plan where you can get cheaper electric rates after 11pm, and the Bolt has a setting where it won’t draw power until then, which means you can charge it only when your electric rate is $0.12 per kilowatt hour. This means you can drive it’s entire 240 mile range for less than $9. If your car gets 30 miles per gallon on average, that’s the equivalent of about for fuel. Put another way, for $1 in fuel costs you can drive 30 miles in this car. Unless of course you install solar panels, in which case your “gas” is essentially free for life. $1 per gallon Like nearly all electric cars, it has constant torque. Like the Tesla, when you step on the gas, all of its torque is instantly available and it accelerates linearly. It never switches gears. This little sub-$30k car goes from 0–60 in 6.3 seconds, . Faster than an ‘84 Chevy Corvette. This is not as quick as a Tesla, but it’s still amazing and really fun to experience. It’s quick. faster than a 2006 Audi TT Roadster In my opinion, it’s nicer to drive overall than the Tesla. It’s possible that nobody will agree with me on this, but there probably also aren’t that many people who have driven both. For me, the smaller size and width of the car makes it more fun to drive around town. Plus, if you’ve ever actually tried to floor a Tesla, it’s too much — I nearly made my wife throw up twice when we rented it. Flooring the Bolt off the line makes the passenger ‘oomph’, but not vomit. (It literally made me make an ‘oomph’ sound yesterday when my wife floored it without warning me) Also like most electric cars, I imagine, it makes almost no noise. This is pretty weird if you’ve never driven in a totally quiet car. There is no external sound when it turns on, no acceleration sound, no real moving parts to hear revving or grinding. It’s insanely quiet. This point cannot be stressed enough. When you drive an electric car, you do not ever spend a minute at a gas station ever again. Every night you plug in your car and every morning you have a full tank. It’s like free tiny gas fairies come and service your car every night whilst you slumber. No fucking gas stations. If you’re into it, it’s pretty cool that this thing isn’t burning gas. If you install solar panels and a wall battery, it’s possible to have an almost totally eco-friendly method of transportation. However, even if you don’t care about that stuff, you can get a white sticker in California, meaning you can drive in the carpool lanes. More importantly if you’re living in the Bay Area, you can go through the bus lane of the maze. That’s maybe worth $30k right there, environment-enschmironment. Hippie environment stuff. . It is the best designed user interface in any car I’ve ever driven. I travel a lot, I’ve rented a lot of cars and I can say without a doubt that car UX designers are maybe the dumbest people on the planet, on average. Unless of course you happen to know one, that person is probably super smart but just stuck under horrible management, it’s hard to say. The internal software UI is amazing I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found myself yelling at the center console of a car, madly trying to get something to work, in vain. They are constantly and without exception just plain thoughtless. I drove a car once where every 45 minutes or so, if you were listening to music on Bluetooth, would randomly switch to the first FM channel in it’s memory for no reason. When listening to news about Asia on NPR in our Toyota, it shows a picture of the band Asia. Have you ever used the little circle input device on an Audi to type in an address? Have you ever used any of the awful integrated GPS systems instead of just resorting to Google Maps on your iPhone? Car software is just the worst. My god. This all actually makes sense. However, every single thing I’ve tried to do in the Bolt was easy to find, straightforward to understand or simple to get working. It’s mind blowing. Like I just can’t imagine how it happened. What’s even more amazing is that the screens are better than the Tesla’s in my opinion. The Tesla screen is enormous, which is kind of cool, but ultimately not very additionally helpful, and the interface looks like it was designed by someone who made WinAmp skins in the 90s. It’s not horrible, but it’s a strange juxtaposition to the slickness of the rest of the Tesla. . This is a debatable point, but there is no self-driving stuff or auto-parking stuff. There is an amazing generated top-down view when you’re parking the car that makes it look like a crazy video game, but it doesn’t do any of the actual parking for you. I actually like this and prefer it for now over the idea of the car being partially sentient and possibly plotting my demise. The Bolt is not magic The top-down view is composited from multiple cameras, but it makes parking the car like some ridiculous video game. It’s impossible not to park perfectly between the lines. The range is essentially the same as normal car. We’ve never come close to being low on it. On a full charge, you can drive the two hours from San Francisco to Monterey, then turn around and drive all the way back without a problem and without needing to plug it in once. It drives over 230 miles on a charge. The entire car is like someone took a Tesla, removed all the insane from it, kept everything great and sold it for the price of a normal car. If you’re waiting for a Tesla 3, I think you’re better off going out and buying a Bolt right now. I’m a real picky person when it comes to user experience and there is almost nothing on this car I would improve. I just can’t imagine anything that would make the Tesla 3 better than a Bolt. My wife and I were just this week talking about getting rid of the pick-up truck we have and getting something smaller we could replace it with, and it’s hard to not land on simply getting a second Bolt. It seems weird to own two of exactly the same car, but there aren’t any really good reasons we can think of to choose something else. So, why am I writing this? I suppose that I just really appreciate good design and good product. I complain about everything, I’m easily frustrated. It’s rare that there’s a product I use, even very simple things, where I’m so impressed with the thought put into it and the execution of it that there’s nothing practical that I can think of to improve. When it happens, especially if nobody else seems to be noticing it for whatever reason, I feel like it’s important to point out. Truly amazing job, everyone who worked on the Bolt.

BOLT

bolt.com

501-1K employees

Since 2014

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BOLT

bolt.com

501-1K employees

Since 2014

COMPANY RANKING

BOLT

EVERGREEN INDEX #2250

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