The North Face wants its customers to get the perfect jacket for whatever they're doing - skiing in Vermont, ice skating in New York City or just trying to stay warm on the way home from work. So how do they give online customers that extra assistance and know-how? "The issue is that online shopping over the past two decades has been about a grid of products on a white background," said Cal Bouchard, senior director of e-commerce at The North Face. "That's how customers find their products. We've developed onsite search and navigation, but we still made the consumer do the work.

When Amazon executive Dave Limp first saw the pitch for the product that would become Echo in 2011, his main reaction was doubt. "This is going to be hard," Limp recalls thinking. But it would require a lot of inventions." The reaction was understandable given the lofty goals outlined in the Echo's original plan: it envisioned an intelligent, voice-controlled household appliance that could play music, read the news aloud and order groceries -- all by simply letting users talk to it from anywhere in the house. Since that time, the Echo has emerged as Amazon's sleeper hit, a hot-selling gadget that's being hailed as the standard-bearer for an entirely new computing paradigm in which Amazon suddenly has an edge on rivals such as Apple and Google.

I would like to add on to the post. Image processing is a field that has existed on its own longer than machine learning (ie, it predates machine learning decades before), its been taught mainly as a branch of engineering (electrical & electronics) & to some lesser degree also taught in computer science & physics' courses. Its only in the last decade or so, that image processing includes machine learning topics' for image recognition & understanding. The latest edition (3rd) has an added chapter on "Object Recognition" which wasn't available in the 1st & 2nd edition. The last time I passed through my local university bookstore (about a year ago), this textbook is stocked because its still currently a prescribed textbook for final year Electrical engineering courses.

You can use Google Cloud Platform to build a scalable, efficient, and effective service for delivering relevant product recommendations to users in an online store. Competition in online-selling sites has never been as fierce as it is now. Customers spend more money across all their providers, but they spend less per retailer. The average size of a single cart has decreased, partly due to the fact that competition is just one click away. Offering relevant recommendations to potential customers can play a central role in converting shoppers to buyers and growing average order size.

Increasingly flexible, responsive, sensing, even humanlike, robots are beginning to augment and replace labour in a wide range of industries: a megatrend that is transforming the economics of manufacturing and reshaping the business landscape. Already used to fight wars, remove dangerous land mines, and fill customer orders, robots can also clean, dance, and play the violin; assist with surgery and rehabilitation, bathe elderly patients, measure and deliver medication, and offer companionship; and provide disaster relief, report the news, and drive cars. In short, robots can perform quite a few of the jobs that humans currently do – often more efficiently and at a far lower cost. Because robots can sharply improve productivity and offset regional differences in labour costs and availability, they'll likely have a major impact on the competitiveness of companies and countries alike. For instance, countries with a greater number of robotic programmers and robotic infrastructure could become more attractive to manufacturers than countries with cheap labour.

USA TODAY's Ed Baig tests Amazon Echo's personal digital assistant. It's not an easy product to get and you have to wait for an invitation to buy the product. Find out how Alexa relates to Siri, benefits and flaws. In this March 2, 2016 photo, David Limp, Amazon Senior Vice President of Devices, center, speaks behind an Amazon Echo in San Francisco. Amazon.com is introducing two devices, the Amazon Tap and Echo Dot, that are designed to amplify the role that its voice-controlled assistant Alexa plays in people's homes and lives.

As it turns out, other techniques including website path analysis, text analysis of customer feedback, sentiment analysis of social media, and graph analysis --all distinctly different analytics techniques with each delivering insights complementing the others--revealed a fuller picture: people weren't complaining about price, preferring the cheaper item, or any of the things that the retailer expected. Instead, customers were complaining about how hard it was to find designer jeans on the website. It was a website navigation issue. And the issue was invisible until the retailer made sense of analytics from a variety of sources.

No longer the exclusive domain of data-reliant businesses like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, Machine learning has been making its way to the masses as an essential approach to data. Today, machine learning is understood and accepted by a more mainstream audience, and has become a measurable driver for big business both on and offline. There are three key reasons why machine learning has become one ofthe top 10 strategic technology trendsthat will shape digital business opportunities through 2020. First, the volume of data companies now collect is so massive that many struggle to make sense of it. Machine learning allows companies to take advantage of the information they already have.

Technology is the future of retail. A recent Sector Insights government report (PDF) said that retailers will need to embrace the latest technology trends, such as big data, and have the skills to work with digital systems if they are to be successful in the future. The retail industry is on the whole a voracious adopter of modern data-centric technology, aping the manufacturing world by using big data analytics to streamline supply chains, and using smartphone apps and wireless beacons to harvest customer data to deliver better service. However, Robert Hetu, retail research director at analyst house Gartner, noted that, despite having the technology to collect and access large amounts of digital data, retailers fail to put it to effective use. "With the rise of digital media came explosive growth in data volumes, and inexpensive storage encouraged retention of data with no present value because of the hope that it would be fruitful in the future," he said.

Earlier this week, Amazon held a secret, invitation-only event for the machine-learning and robotics community. The three-day event, at the Parker Palm Springs resort in California, had hundreds of guests from the business, entertainment, and robotics sectors. Business Insider got photos of the event from one of the attendees. Here's what it was like: