Now is the time of the year when every marketer should well reflect on the achievements of 2016 and holistically examine what the New Year is going to mean for marketing, branding, and business. With this article I proceed with a good tradition by following-up on my previous and related articles for 2016, 2015, and 2014. As we all know, paying attention to what's on the horizon does offer valuable insights. Knowing the below-listed 16 marketing trends which I consider as highly relevant for 2017, should help you to build, expand, and keep strong brands. Although this should have been ingrained in every marketer s DNA for years, however, with all the data, tech, and buzzwords flying around, one of the biggest marketing challenges of 2017 will be to stay calm, focused, and to be obsessed with the only one that matters: Your customer! How to identify her, to reach her, to engage her, to make her purchase, to have her stay loyal, to make her to recommend you, and to have her even re-purchase more of your products in the future? There is a certain risk that (marketing) managers – more than ever – get confused and fall into the trap of mixing up data-driven insights with a real customer-centric business philosophy. Therefore successful companies and brands don t worship the data gods for the sake of it; instead they have a comprehensive and deeply rooted digital transformation strategy in place which is flanked by a crystal clear marketing action plan. Enhanced and lived by every employee of the organization and not only by a chief digital officer who very often is floating around the company in search for a home base.

We've all been warned about the upcoming machine takeover in the world of work. Studies have shown that 47 percent of jobs in the United States are expected to be replaced by smart machines and other forms of automated systems in the next decade or so. In Southeast Asia, about 137 million workers are bound to lose their jobs to automation in the next 20 years. In fact, it's already happening for some companies including Walmart, Barclays, and a life insurance firm in Japan -- not to mention Amazon Go, the retail store of the future. Automation is going to be a problem as far as employment is concerned.

Many current fears around AI and automation center around the idea that superintelligence could somehow "take over," turning streets around the globe into scenes from The Terminator. While there is much to be gained from discussing the safe development of AI, there's another more imminent danger: Autonomous weapons. On Friday, after three years of negotiations, the UN unanimously agreed to take action. At the Fifth Review Conference of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, countries around the world agreed to begin formal discussions--which will take place for two weeks at the 2017 UN convention in Geneva--on a possible ban of lethal, autonomous weapons. Talks will begin in April or August, and 88 countries have agreed to attend.

Clarifai: graphic design: 0.99% no person: 0.98% isolated: 0.97% symbol: 0.97% stripe: 0.95% Our Image Recognition API can block all images that have no relation with real estate. With restb's solution, all images containing spam, unrelated or restricted content are immediately blocked and tagged as non_related. Meanwhile the other solutions on the market will just keep giving you tags describing what's inside each image. Another big problem that property portals have is related with the publication of logos and watermarks in the images. Watermarks from your competitors or real estate agencies reduce the quality of the listings and the search experience overall. We have developed a solution that identifies all logos and watermarks that appear within an image and return the position of each one.

Most online daters prefer to contact people with the same level of education as them, but a new study suggests that as people grow older they become less picky about it. Researchers based at Queensland's University of Technology, Australia, analyzed the online dating behaviors of 41,000 Australians aged between 18 and 80. The researchers said that humans usually look for similar characteristics and traits in a partner in areas such as age, attractiveness and culture, however, the internet has changed this process. Researchers based at Queensland's University of Technology, Australia, analyzed the online dating behaviors of 41,000 Australians aged between 18 and 80 The researchers analyzed the behaviors of people using the online dating website'RSVP' during a four month period in 2016. Mr Stephen Whyte, a behavioural economist and co-author of the study, said: 'Selecting a mate can be one of the largest psychological and economic decisions a person can make and has long been the subject of social science research across a range of disciplines.

Researchers have identified the brain region that controls hunting, and have found a way to switch it on and off. Ivan de Araujo at Yale University and his team have discovered that two sets of neurons in the mouse brain underpin the instinct to kill. One coordinates the pursuit of prey, while the other controls the neck and jaw muscles used for biting. Both are in the amygdala – the part of the brain involved in motivation, emotion and fear. By modifying these neurons so they could be activated by laser light, a technique called optogenetics, the team were able to switch these circuits on whenever they wanted.

One of the newer technologies getting buzz these days is the voice-enabled digital assistant – and new data from Accenture [pdf] suggests that it's not all hype. In fact, the use of embedded voice-enabled digital assistants in smartphones and PC/laptops has reached the mainstream among 14-17-year-olds, per Accenture's survey of almost 26,000 consumers across 26 countries. The results indicate that 31% of 14-17-year-olds regularly use voice-enabled digital assistants, with another 20% just getting started using them. Adoption – not surprisingly – declines with age, but still remains above one-third (38%) of Millennials (18-34) and higher than one-quarter (27%) of Gen Xers (35-54). Although only 15% of Boomers (55) are currently using voice-enabled digital assistants, another 35% are interested in doing so.

Google owner Alphabet's subsidiary research company, X, has shut down its project aimed at building a solar-powered drone intended to bring internet access to remote areas. The project, which stemmed from an acquisition Google made in April 2014 of New Mexico-based Titan Aerospace, was deemed by X to be less promising than a competing attempt to use lightweight weather balloons for the same purpose. "The team from Titan was brought into X in late-2015. We ended our exploration of high-altitude UAVs for internet access shortly after," an X spokesperson said. "By comparison, at this stage the economics and technical feasibility of Project Loon [its high-altitude balloon project] present a much more promising way to connect rural and remote parts of the world. Many people from the Titan team are now using their expertise as part of other high-flying projects at X, including Loon and Project Wing."

It's not always easy to know when you're under attack, or when your security has already been breached. If you're capable of detecting a breach, you might find it in as few as 10 days, but survey after survey finds that breaches that are detected by someone outside the business typically take over 100 days to find. For one thing, between ecommerce, company websites, email, mobile users and overseas divisions, your company is doing business 24/7; however, your IT security team probably works business hours. That's one way 60 percent of attackers are able to compromise an organization in minutes, according to Verizon's 2015 Data Breach Investigations Report. But only a third of businesses can detect a breach within a few days.

Google's secretive X R&D lab, a division of Google's parent company Alphabet, has pulled the plug on its drone project that would bring internet access to millions of people – Project Titan. It has been confirmed by Alphabet that engineers were told to look for other positions within the Alphabet/Google community. Although the project has been killed, the mission is still alive – the firm will continue to use Project Loon as a way to connect rural and remote areas of the world. X, a division of Google's parent company Alphabet, has pulled the plug on its project that would bring internet access to millions of people – Titan. The news was first reported by 9To5Mac, which received a statement from an X spokesperson.