The nature of financial service companies is to wait and see. Most of the technological innovation is adopted after it has already'gone mainstream'. This is a safe approach and is adopted across the industry. But what if one of the participants really committed to implementing the new big thing before everyone else, for example, Artificial Intelligence. Could that shift the balance of power within the industry?

"AI is the new electricity," said Andrew Ng, Associate Professor of AI at Stanford University, at MIT's EmTech Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AI is the new electricity? One could argue that electricity is one of humanity's greatest inventions. It ranks right up there with the wheel, the printing press, the combustion engine, and the telephone. The use of electricity has changed our lives to such an extent that life without it would be almost unthinkable.

Danaher/Institute for Ethics and Emerging TechnologiesAlgorithms are everywhere, and in most ways they make our lives better. In the simplest terms, algorithms are procedures or formulas aimed at solving problems. Implemented on computers, they sift through big databases to reveal compatible lovers, products that please, faster commutes, news of interest, stocks to buy, and answers to queries. Dud dates or boring book recommendations are no big deal. But John Danaher, a lecturer in the law school at the National University of Ireland, warns that algorithmic decision-making takes on a very different character when it guides government monitoring and enforcement efforts.

A Chinese automotive startup is raising money with the stated aim of launching its first electric self-driving car by 2020, company executives told news outlets Tuesday, and the first round of funding is expected to be completed by September. Future Mobility Corp. is one of several Chinese startups in the electric vehicles industry, and is backed by heavyweight investors, including internet giant Tencent Holdings, electronics manufacturer Foxconn and car dealership group China Harmony New Energy Auto Holding. In March this year, it poached its leadership team from BMW's electric vehicle line, and in May, at least two executives from Tesla Motors came on board as well. CEO Carsten Breitfeld, who was project manager for the BMW i8 plug-in hybrid sports car before moving to Future Mobility, told Reuters that unlike Tesla, the company will not focus on only one model at a time or have limited production of its models. "Right from the beginning we define the platform, right from the beginning we define the production process to be mass production and right from the beginning we think of more than one model, a family of models, defined from this platform," he said.

You can find many additional references here (Python, Excel, Spark, R, Deep Learning, AI, SQL, NoSQL, Graph Databses, Visualization, etc.) as well as here, here, and here.

Customer attrition, also known as customer churn, customer turnover, or customer defection, is the loss of clients or customers. Banks, telephone service companies, Internet service providers, pay TV companies, insurance firms, and alarm monitoring services, often use customer attrition analysis and customer attrition rates as one of their key business metrics (along with cash flow, EBITDA, etc.) because the cost of retaining an existing customer is far less than acquiring a new one. Companies from these sectors often have customer service branches which attempt to win back defecting clients, because recovered long-term customers can be worth much more to a company than newly recruited clients. Churn prediction is one of the most popular Big Data use cases in business. It consists of detecting customers who are likely to cancel a subscription to a service.

Most major technology companies are knee-deep in machine learning these days. Alphabet's (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google, Amazon, and Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) are just a few. Machine learning allows the tech companies' computers to learn information on their own that they weren't programmed to know. For example, Google uses its own TensorFlow machine learning systems for its Google Translate speech recognition app, Google Photos, Gmail, and its Web searches. And as these companies dive further into machine learning, they're building their own complex computers using graphics processing units (GPUs) to power them -- and that could be particularly beneficial for NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA).

A recent release out of the company reports, "AU10TIX, the forerunner of 2nd generation ID authentication and fast-track onboarding is already serving many global major players in a range of financial services and other verticals. The newly announced patented algorithms increase the capability and performance gap between 1st and 2nd generation'ID authentication' technologies. While 1st generation solutions rely primarily on MRZ or barcodes for document recognition and focus mainly on data based forgery detection, 2nd generation technology can carry out forensic level image manipulation and synthetic forgery checks, and can handle sub-optimal image qualities at far better speed and accuracy, at 100% data-entry-free automation."

The release goes on, "Under a scientific plan endorsed by 35 of the world's leading vaccine scientists, the Project aims to apply recent advances in machine learning and data science to speed vaccine development. 'Applying machine learning should accelerate the development of new vaccines and therapies for a wide range of pressing diseases,' said UC San Diego computer scientist and physicist Larry Smarr, director of Calit2. 'In addition to machine learning, experts in Big Data analytics, pattern recognition, genomics and bioinformatics can also help us understand the fundamental principles of effective human immunity, and enable the design of highly-targeted vaccines'."

Are you on to the next big thing? Does your product have the potential to change lives everywhere? If your software startup is working on an innovation or a brilliant idea, then this might be your first, big opportunity to connect with IDG Ventures India, a leading Indian, early-stage, venture capital firm. IDG Ventures India has launched the Software Innovators' 2016 programme to provide assistance to startups across the software products space. Sudhir Sethi, Founder Chairman, IDG Ventures India, says, "The Software Innovators Program looks to discover disruptive software product companies from India, with a potential to build a global foot print in the machine learning, artificial intelligence, SaaS, fintech and security areas amongst others. This program follows our successful software investments, including, Manthan, Newgen, Fintellix, Unbxd, and Uniphore."