Brands will shift to using innately intelligent marketing technology

As customers become more discerning and data-savvy, their expectations around how and when retail brands communicate with them will continue to rise. This will push more brands to take a more sophisticated approach to marketing tech, adding extra layers of innate intelligence through machine learning and A.I. into their marketing stack and freeing up human marketers to do what they do best--create. We will see a broader shift from rule-based marketing--where the marketer defines all the logic--to innately intelligent marketing, where the marketer only sets the framework, and the A.I. takes it from there.

As marketers, when we build campaigns, we’re always looking for good conversation starters. But campaign volume and variety are very much limited to the worker’s capacity, and this hands-on work is tiresome. Some have more data than others, in all of them you’ll find automation, and in many, the concept of connectivity. But the intelligence – the essence – is left to the human user who needs to define the rules and flows. One other thing to take under consideration is that in most marketing plans, there’s significant crossfire.

Customers receive multiple messages from different campaigns and it’s almost impossible to manage priority and exclusion. You don’t really leverage the benefits of machine learning and your use of the human intelligence is limited. Most systems include these three components. If you define a journey and aim to start five additional conversations with customers, you must either build a new journey or find the splits in the existing journey. At a certain point, your hands are tied – too much data, the guy who built the journey moved to another company – and you find yourself in a deadlock.

New crystal allows divers to stay underwater for hours

Scientists at the University of Southern Denmark have developed a crystalline substance that can bind and store oxygen in high concentrations according to Mic. Apart from the possibility from breathing underwater, these crystals can also be used in lieu of oxygen tanks for people, industries, and even vehicles as a source of fuel. These crystals act as both a sensor and a container for oxygen molecules; they bind, store, and transport the oxygen within their structure.

The crystals function through their unique molecular and electronic structure. Cobalt is used in the material and the resulting molecular and electronic structure gives it an affinity to oxygen which allows it to be readily absorbed and bonded with the crystal. Christine McKenzie, researcher from the University of Southern Denmark describes it as  solid artificial hemoglobin. Approximately 10 litres of the crystals can absorb an entire room’s worth of oxygen. The oxygen can then be released by gently heating them or by introducing them to a low oxygen environment, and can be done so without the use of pumps or high-pressure equipment. 

These crystals can continually store and release oxygen without degrading. The rate which the crystals absorb oxygen depends on the oxygen content in the air, and the pressure and temperature of the environment they are in. Different types of crystals can be made to store and release oxygen at different rates and under different circumstances. New research is being done to see if light could also be used as a release mechanism.

The future of military cloaking devices

A cloaking device is a hypothetical or fictional stealth technology that can cause objects, such as spaceships or individuals, to be partially or wholly invisible to parts of the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum. However, over the entire spectrum, a cloaked object scatters more than an uncloaked object. This potential cloaking device would stop shock waves through a wall of heated, ionized air. This heated, ionized air would safeguard the solider by forming a protective barrier around them. The protective barrier does not directly protect them from the shock-wave. Instead, it causes the shock wave to bend around them.

Shock waves that occur from explosions go right through peoples’ bodies and cause severe head trauma. This cloaking device would help solve the other half of the problem. Even if the shrapnel is nowhere near them, the force incurred by the shock wave is enough to create serious injury. A detector spots an explosion right before the shock wave follows. A curved shape generator, connected to a large power source, produces electricity like a lightning bolt. The curved shaped generator heats up the particles in the air, thereby effectively changing the speed of the shock waves.

The bending occurs when the particles of the shock wave changes speed. Curved shaped generators aren’t the only way to protect against shock waves. Lasers, as well as a strip of metal placed along a truck, are capable of offering this protection. Both of these things produce the same ionizing effect and bend the shock wave as it changes speed. The only issue with this is the amount of power that it would require. Reducing the amount of power needed would make this cloaking device a reality.