These are the things our readers went nuts for last month. If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY's newsroom and any business incentives. When the dog days of summer arrive and the temperature rises, prices across a ton of retailers tend to drop. There's also Prime Day of course, one of the biggest shopping holidays of the year, when Amazon slashes their prices across the board in an attempt to compete with Black Friday sales. Nordstrom happens to use a similar technique to get ahead of the end-of-summer sales curve with their massive Nordstrom Anniversary sale, which features discounts on a ton of fashion, beauty, and home products.

For years, the Sonos Wi-Fi speakers have been beloved by music fans for the ease of listening to streaming music at home with great sound. Also, add the ability to add multiple speakers for even better sound without having to resort to stringing speaker wire all over. The one drawback: Sonos speakers can be pricey, topping off at $499 per speaker and even higher for the $699 TV Playbar. So good news consumers: The most affordable way to get into the Sonos system goes on sale Thursday. But you won't find the speakers at Best Buy, Amazon or any of the other retailers which usually stock Sonos products.

Machine learning uses data to help predict outcomes presenting usable analytics that help prime marketers to succeed. That is the simplest way to explain it. For marketers, this is the main driving force behind things such as Facebook newsfeed ads and chatbots. It has already made an impact on how data is used to effectively improve the customer experience. This means businesses can find deeper knowledge from consumer data to greatly improve marketing processes.

Amazon.com Inc. sold more than 175 million products across the globe during its 48-hour Prime Day sales event a few weeks ago -- more than Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. More than 10 million items qualified for next-day delivery. Making that happen depends on robots. "Speed is the name of the game right now," said Aaron Meyers, senior operations manager at Amazon's four-story fulfillment center in Shakopee, during a recent tour. "The technology allows us to be a lot more safe and efficient, and to get product to our customers much faster."

An astonishing machine learning book: intuitive, full of examples, fun to read but still comprehensive, strong and deep! A great starting point for any university student―and a must have for anybody in the field. Kevin Murphy excels at unraveling the complexities of machine learning methods while motivating the reader with a stream of illustrated examples and real world case studies. The accompanying software package includes source code for many of the figures, making it both easy and very tempting to dive in and explore these methods for yourself. A must-buy for anyone interested in machine learning or curious about how to extract useful knowledge from big data.

The authors study and analyze methods using the sparsity property of some statistical models in order to recover the underlying signal in a dataset. They focus on the Lasso technique as an alternative to the standard least-squares method.

"The book contains a massive amount of useful results related to the world of linear models. This is a very useful book and the authors earn congratulations." "The book gives an up-to-date and comprehensive account of the theory and applications of linear models along with a number of new results. Throughout its ten chapters as well as its appendices, it covers theoretical issues and practical applications that make it suitable and useful not only to students but also to researchers and consultants in statistics." "This book has two laudable strengths.

Sonos and Ikea are kicking off what has the makings of a long-term partnership in August. Next month, you'll be able to purchase the Symfonisk table lamp speaker ($179) or Symfonisk bookshelf speaker ($99) from your local Ikea or from the home furnishing store's website; these devices won't be available from third-party retailers like Best Buy or even directly from Sonos. They look Ikea on the outside, but both are very much Sonos speakers on the inside and seamlessly integrate with other products in the company's lineup like the Sonos One, Beam, Play:5, Play:1, and more. The goal of the Symfonisk series is to put speakers in places (such as the bedroom) where you might not ordinarily want something that screams gadget. If you've got a partner who prefers to keep tech -- even speakers -- out of there, they might be more amenable to the idea of an Ikea-designed lamp that also happens to pull double duty as a great-sounding speaker.

The retail industry underwent several transformations over the past years and continues evolving. Led by technological advancement and rapid E-commerce growth, the industry is continuously looking for process automation to cater to the growing needs of customers. In 2019, emerging technologies are likely to define the retail market as well as how the companies make use of upcoming technology, such as Virtual Assistant to reach their customers. Let's have a look at the latest retail trend for the year 2019. E-commerce continues its march towards rapid growth with more than a billion dollar sales happening on online outlets.

Global supply chains are the order of the day in the auto industry, pharmaceuticals and consumer electronics to name a few. A single product could have hundreds of thousands of suppliers. Delays can result in shortages, overstocking and poor customer experiences. To procure raw materials, manage trading partners, plan sequences and execute tasks while processing huge volumes of data, is a large task, fit for data analytics using AI. AI has been used since the early 2000s to forecast demand using historical shipping daa, according to an account in DisCo (short for Disruptive Competition Project).