Zoho today unveiled Zia, the new Zoho CRM intelligent sales assistant, powered by AI, that detects anomalies, suggests workflows and macros, and advises salespeople the best time to contact a prospect. Zoho also launched Blueprint, a Zoho CRM tool for building and implementing business processes. In addition, the company has included a host of new features in its award-winning customer relationship management software, Zoho CRM, such as scoring rules and the SalesSignals platform, to help boost sales productivity. "Salespeople put work into their CRM. But does the CRM work in return to make it easy for salespeople?"

HELSINKI, Finland -- February 23, 2017 -- Comptel Corporation (OMX Helsinki: CTL1V) announced today that it's Fastermind has gained significant momentum since its launch at Nexterday North in November 2016. Fastermind provides artificial intelligence capabilities to digital service providers, enabling them to recommend, predict and automate real-time decisions, particularly supporting customer engagement automation. According to new research conducted by Comptel, today's mobile customers want to be treated as individuals by their service provider. Surveying 2,000 mobile data users in the US and the UK, the research found that while more than half of mobile data customers (55 percent) are eager to receive more proactive, personalised messages and services, fewer than one in seven (13 percent) have ever actually received this kind of communication from their carrier. Operators can respond to this demand for personalisation by using Fastermind to reach their customers at the right time, with the right messages, through automated marketing offers and service notifications.

China set a record high in terms of venture capital (VC) investments in 2016, despite a global slowdown. The strong performance is expected to continue with artificial intelligence (AI) an additional focus for investors, finds latest KPMG analysis. Investment by VCs in China increased 19 percent year on year to USD31 billion in 2016, although deal volumes declined 42 percent to 300 from 513 a year earlier, according to Venture Pulse, KPMG's quarterly global report on VC trends. The strong performance is attributed to a number of mega-deals recorded early in the year. The report highlights that artificial intelligence and cognitive learning are poised to transform almost every aspect of people's lives.

Google announced today that Google Assistant will start rolling out to devices running Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) and 7.0 (Nougat) later this week. Previously, the Assistant was only available on Google's Pixel phones, Home personal assistant, Allo messaging app and Android wear devices. Google is at the forefront of machine and deep-learning based natural language processing which they have used to power their vaunted speech recognition system. Google Assistant leverages this research to enable two-way, context-sensitive, conversational interactions between the user and the device. The Assistant syncs across devices and apps like Allo and Google Calendar and it allows voice-control of enabled smart-home devices.

Reaching a new milestone in its quest to achieve speed and scalability in indexing and exploiting vast amounts of video, IDENTV announced today the beta release of Neural Upscaling, its proprietary solution for dramatically enhancing image quality, allowing for significantly greater accuracy in object and facial recognition. "This capability automates the process of enhancing quality of a degraded image and amplifies the original with 400% more detail thus enabling rapid detection and matching of objects and faces that was previously not possible at speed and scale," explained Mohamad Shihadah, founder and CEO of IDENTV. Neural Upscaling is an integral part of IDENTV's pioneering Intelligent Video-fingerprinting Platform (IVP), a technology that combines artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computer vision in a highly integrated fashion to deliver high-speed visual content recognition and indexing. Neural Upscaling has broad applications across commercial and national security applications and solves a critical limitation on video, faces, or objects that are degraded. IDENTV was recently selected as one of the Top 5 Artificial Intelligence companies in the DC area.

Police and prosecutors face a daunting task of identifying, managing and reviewing a veritable tsunami of digital evidence generated daily by officer bodycams, jail house calls, interrogation videos, dispatch calls and closed caption television, which stretches staffing capabilities and resources. Today, Vū Digital for Law Enforcement's A.I. capabilities deliver a robust and dynamic evidence management solution for law enforcement agencies worldwide. The layer recognizes and identifies events, keywords and sequences of words generated by Vū's automated tagging engine to tag and identify instances of significance, including confessions, identification of personal information and references to certain "trigger" words. "Data can exist without A.I., but not vice versa," said Wade Smith, vice president of operations for Vū Digital. "First, we create data where it otherwise didn't exist, then we apply an artificial intelligence layer to identify relevant events from the digital evidence. In the end, artificial intelligence is only as powerful as the data it considers."

Sarasota, Florida-based Revcontent, the fastest growing native ad network, has announced that it has acquired a machine learning company called Rover. Rover is known for developing advanced personalization and recommendation technology that will complement Revcontent's massive ad network. After the acquisition closes, Rover's offices in Sunnyvale, California will be turned into Revcontent's Silicon Valley headquarters. The terms of the acquisition were undisclosed, but the deal was reportedly valued at more than $30 million. Rover was founded by Jonathan Siddharth and Vijay Krishnan while the two of them were attending graduate school at Stanford University.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, today announced the launch of its latest premium application processor (AP), the Exynos 9 Series 8895. This is Samsung's first processor chipset to take advantage of the most advanced and industry leading 10-nanometer (nm) FinFET process technology with improved 3D transistor structure, which allows up to 27% higher performance while consuming 40% less power when compared to 14nm technology. The new Exynos 9 Series 8895 is the first processor of its kind to embed a gigabit LTE modem that supports five carrier aggregation, or 5CA. It delivers fast and stable data throughput at max.1Gbps (Cat.16) The Exynos 8895 is an octa-core processor, comprising of four of Samsung's 2nd generation custom designed CPU cores for improved performance and power efficiency in addition to four Cortex -A53 cores.

Feedzai's technology is built using machine learning and artificial intelligence that adapts with the detection of new malicious threats at scale, helping business customers make data-backed decisions and de-risk commerce transactions in real-time. The Whitebox Explanations is a human-friendly semantic layer that helps analyst make informed decisions confidently. Feedzai is a data science company that offers software, which uses big data analysis and machine-based learning to prevent fraud in commerce. For more information about Feedzai, please check out a detailed profile of this company in our dedicated, industry-specific online company database. The MRC is a global trade association providing a platform for ecommerce fraud and payments professionals to come together and share information.

Amazon apparently won't be the only company offering drone delivery service: The United Postal Service could follow suit. UPS announced Tuesday it had successfully tested out a drone for residential delivery, a press release said. The company worked with Workhorse Group, a manufacturing company that created both the drone and the electric UPS car used to test the flight. The test drone successfully flew to its designated location, dropped off the package and then proceeded on its delivery route. The drone tested could carry up to 10 pounds.