International e-commerce has become more pervasive and sophisticated in recent years. In 2017, 1.66 billion people worldwide purchased goods online. During the same year, global e-retail sales amounted to $2.3 trillion, and projections indicate that figure will grow to $4.48 trillion by 2021. With data verifying that international e-commerce has been growing, combined with the increase in localized requirements, e-commerce providers must continue to innovate to ensure they take full advantage of opportunities outside their home market. [More...]

Several years ago, my wife and I invested in a project called "Sanctuary Belize" and, like many of the investors, we were incredibly excited about the prospect of retiring in paradise. After a time, things just weren't adding up. The company supposedly put controls in place to reverse course, but we exited the project. As it turned out, those controls either were not put in place or failed. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission last week announced that it had shut the thing down, and highlighted it as one of the largest scams in its history. [More...]

The LF Deep Learning Foundation has announced the availability of the first software from the Acumos AI Project. Dubbed "Athena," it supports open source innovation in artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning. The goal is to make critical new technologies available to developers and data scientists everywhere. Launched earlier this year, Acumos is part of a Linux Foundation umbrella organization, the LF Deep Learning Foundation, that supports and sustains open source innovation in AI, ML and DL. [More...]

How do they really know? That's the question that immediately comes to mind in reviewing the top-level data from Voxpro's recent survey of customers and their relationship with chatbots. The data show that 68 percent of consumers haven't used chatbots to contact a brand. About 1,000 people answered the survey. How reliable is that number, though? I'm not disrespecting Voxpro here -- just the opposite. Isn't it at least possible that some consumers have interacted with bots without realizing it? [More...]