Lucidworks, a leading provider of machine learning-based ecommerce search and personalization technology, announced Cyber Five results from its collection of enterprise retail and direct-to-consumer brands. Over the five days spanning Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, many Lucidworks Fusion customers saw high double-digit to low triple-digit growth in ecommerce revenue tied to performance in search and browse as well as landing page sorts, typeahead, and personalized recommendations. "We're proud to be a part of our customer's holiday shopping season success," said Peter Curran, General Manager for Digital Commerce, Lucidworks. "This time of year is mission critical for enterprise retail and direct-to-consumer brands and we're elated to see this year's traffic and revenue over Cyber Five double from last year." Another insight from this year's Cyber Five was the role that Lucidworks Fusion vector search capabilities played in search processing.

One of the strongest differentiators in the future will be the ability to deliver real-time, highly personalized experiences. The inability to deliver on the'personalization promise' is a major concern for banking executives according to new research from the Digital Banking Report. Subscribe to The Financial Brand via email for FREE!It is no longer just the domain of large banks to be able to leverage considerable technological sophistication and vast data resources to give consumers specific financial solutions. The cost and access to insight and communication tools have improved so they can be used by financial services firms of all sizes to deliver the level of customization expected from today's consumer. More and more financial organizations are seeing the benefits of a personalization strategy, thanks to new digital applications and advances in predictive analytics.

Thanks to advanced technologies, we now have natural language robotics and facial recognition that can measure and match unique characteristics for the purposes of authentication and identification. With personalized assistance machines, we are more able to detect, prevent, and deal with various threats on society. In the digital world, facial biometrics have the potential to be integrated anywhere you can find a camera. This is what we can expect to have next on our mobile phones. Biometric devices with today's data storage capabilities and fantastic speed of processing give us great clarity in seconds.

Jarno M. Koponen is a designer, humanist and co-founder of media discovery startup Random. As humanity debates the threats and opportunities of advanced artificial intelligence, we are simultaneously enabling that technology through the increasing use of personalization that is understanding and anticipating our needs through sophisticated machine learning solutions. In effect, while using personalization technologies in our everyday lives, we are contributing in a real way to the development of the intelligent systems we purport to fear. Perhaps uncovering the currently inaccessible personalization systems is crucial for creating a sustainable relationship between humans and super–intelligent machines? Industry giants are currently racing to develop more intelligent and lucrative AI solutions.

The mobile Internet represents a massive opportunity for mobile operators and content providers. Today there are more than 2 billion mobile subscribers, with 3 billion predicted by the end of 2007. However, despite significant improvements in handsets, infrastructure, content, and charging models, mobile users are still struggling to access and locate relevant content and services. An important part of this so-called content-discovery problem relates to the navigation effort that users must invest in browsing and searching for mobile content. In this article we describe one successfully deployed solution, which uses personalization technology to profile subscriber interests in order to automatically adapt mobile portals to their learned preferences. We present summary results, from our deployment experiences with more than 40 mobile operators and millions of subscribers around the world, which demonstrate how this solution can have a significant impact on portal usability, subscriber usage, and mobile operator revenues.