Nice old skool rave tune for a Tuesday...Renegade - Terrorist

Amazon's recommendation secret

Amazon's recommendation secret Much is made of what the likes of Facebook, Google and Apple know about users. Truth is, Amazon may know more. And the massive retailer proves it every day. FORTUNE -- When Amazon recommends a product on its site, it is clearly not a coincidence. At root, the retail giant's recommendation system is based on a number of simple elements: what a user has bought in the past, which items they have in their virtual shopping cart, items they've rated and liked, and what other customers have viewed and purchased. Amazon (AMZN) calls this homegrown math "item-to-item collaborative filtering," and it's used this algorithm to heavily customize the browsing experience for returning customers. A gadget enthusiast may find Amazon web pages heavy on device suggestions, while a new mother could see those same pages offering up baby products. Judging by Amazon's success, the recommendation system works. The company reported a 29% sales increase to $12.83 billion during its second fiscal quarter, up from $9.9 billion during the same time last year. A lot of that growth arguably has to do with the way Amazon has integrated recommendations into nearly every part of the purchasing process from product discovery to checkout. Go to Amazon.com and you'll find multiple panes of product suggestions; navigate to a particular product page and you'll see areas plugging items "Frequently Bought Together" or other items customers also bought. The company remains tight-lipped about how effective recommendations are. ("Our mission is to delight our customers by allowing them to serendipitously discover great products," an Amazon spokesperson told Fortune. "We believe this happens every single day and that's our biggest metric of success.") Amazon also doles out recommendations to users via email. Whereas the web site recommendation process is more automated, there remains to this day a large manual component. According to one employee, the company provides some staffers with numerous software tools to target customers based on purchasing and browsing behavior. But the actual targeting is done by the employees and not by machine. If an employee is tasked with promoting a movie to purchase like say, Captain America, they may think up similar film titles and make sure customers who have viewed other comic book action films receive an email encouraging them to check out Captain America in the future. Amazon employees study key engagement metrics like open rate, click rate, opt-out -- all pretty standard for email marketing channels at any company -- but lesser known is the fact that the company employs a survival-of-the-fittest-type revenue and mail metric to prioritize the Amazon email ecosystem. "It's pretty cool. Basically, if a customer qualifies for both a Books mail and a Video Games mail, the email with a higher average revenue-per-mail-sent will win out," this employee told Fortune. "Now imagine that on a scale across every single product line -- customers qualifying for dozens of emails, but only the most effective one reaches their inbox." The tactic prevents email inboxes from being flooded, at least by Amazon. At the same time it maximizes the purchase opportunity. In fact, the conversion rate and efficiency of such emails are "very high," significantly more effective than on-site recommendations. According to Sucharita Mulpuru, a Forrester analyst, Amazon's conversion to sales of on-site recommendations could be as high as 60% in some cases based off the performance of other e-commerce sites. Still, although Amazon recommendations are cited by many company observers as a killer feature, analysts believe there's a lot of room for growth."There's a collective belief within the e-commerce industry that Amazon's recommendation engine is a suboptimal solution," says Mulpuru. Trisha Dill, a Well's Fargo analyst, says it's hard to fault Amazon for their recommendations, but she also says the company has a lot of work to do in offering users items more relevant to them. As an example, she points to a targeted email she received pushing a chainsaw carrying case. (She doesn't own a chainsaw.) Besides refining the accuracy of recommendations themselves, Amazon could explore more ways to reach customers. Already, the company has begun selling items previously sold in bulk that were too cost-prohibitive to ship individually like say, a deck of cards or a jar of cinnamon. Customers may buy them, but only if they have an order totaling $25 or over. But the company could actively recommend these add-on products during check-out when an order crosses that pricing threshold, much like traditional supermarkets have impulse-purchase items like gum and candy bars at the register. At that point, the Amazon customer, just as they would in the supermarket, might think, "It's just a few more bucks. Why not?"

Microsoft to take on iPad with British chips

(Telegraph.co.uk) But ARM, the Cambridge-based firm behind the silicon, says not even it knows for what will be unveiled, with the event surrounded by unusually strict secrecy for Microsoft. Warren East, ARM’s chief executive told The Telegraph he hadn’t been told what to expect from the big reveal, which will take place in Los Angeles. “We’ve heard about this event on Monday but we don’t know anything more about it,” he said. “It’s a Microsoft product and they’re responsible for development and marketing. We haven’t been involved.” Microsoft announced a new ARM-compatible version of Windows 8, dubbed Windows RT, at the Consumer Electronics Show last year. It represents a shift from x86 processor architecture and a weakening of Microsoft historic alliance with Intel, which makes most of the microchips in desktop and laptop computers. The move therefore underscores Microsoft’s desire to break the iPad’s stranglehold on the tablet market, which is encroaching on its corporate IT stronghold. ARM architecture has come to dominate mobile computing because it is designed to consume as little power as possible, extending battery life. “We obviously welcome Microsoft moving to ARM architecture,” said Mr East. “Windows will be an exciting new market for us.” Both the ARM and x86 versions of Windows 8 have been designed with Microsoft’s touchscreen-friendly “Metro” user interface, adapted from its smartphone operating system Windows Mobile 7. It does away with the familiar start button and presents information from apps in constantly-updated “tiles” on the home screen. Some reports ahead of Monday’s announcement have suggested Microsoft will introduce an own-brand tablet before licensing the software to third parties manufacturers such as HP, in an echo of the way Google makes its own “Nexus” Android smartphones. Tim Anderson, a journalist and expert on Windows, said such a move would make sense. “Microsoft wants to make a splash with Windows RT, the ARM version, and there is evidence that it is having difficulty communicating its benefits or convincing its [manufacturing] partners to get fully behind it,” he wrote. He added that Windows 8 on x86 appeared to be too expensive and too hard to use to be an iPad-beater. “Windows RT is critical to Microsoft and if it has to make its own hardware in order to market it properly, then it should do so,” Mr Anderson wrote.

First Painters May Have Been Neanderthal, Not Human

(Wired.com) European cave paintings are older than previously thought, raising the possibility that Neanderthals rather than Homo sapiens were the earliest painters. That’s not yet certain: The paintings may have been made by humans at an unexpectedly early date, which would itself raise intriguing questions, though none so tantalizing as Neanderthal painters. “It would not be surprising if the Neanderthals were indeed Europe’s first cave artists,” said João Zilhão, an archaeologist at Spain’s University of Barcelona, at a press conference on June 13. Researchers led by Zilhão and Alistair Pike of the United Kingdom’s University of Bristol measured the ages of 50 paintings in 11 Spanish caves. The art, considered evidence of sophisticated symbolic thinking, has traditionally been attributed to modern humans, who reached Europe about 40,000 years ago. Traditional methods of dating cave paintings, however, are relatively clumsy. Even the previous best technique — carbon dating, or translating amounts of carbon molecule decay into measurements of passing time — couldn’t discern differences of a few thousand years. Instead of carbon, Pike and João Zilhão’s team calibrated their molecular clocks by studying mineral deposits that form naturally on cave surfaces, including paintings. The thicker the deposits, the older the painting. And as the researchers describe in a June 14 Science paper, some of the paintings are very old indeed. Some handprint outlines are at least 37,000 years old. Several red circles are at least 41,000 years old and may be several thousand years older. That’s 10,000 years older than paintings in France, which until now were considered the oldest cave art. If H. sapiens made the Spanish paintings, they would have needed to arrive in Europe already possessing a symbolic art tradition, something for which there’s no other evidence. Alternatively, humans may have arrived in Europe and promptly learned to paint, raising the question of why such an important cultural leap occurred so suddenly, in that particular place. Maybe something about the environment, such as competition with Neanderthals, made symbolic thinking important. Or — and this is still just a hypothesis, one that needs to be tested by dating of many more paintings — the artists were not human. Maybe they were Neanderthals. If so, the paintings would be a pièce de résistance addition to a decade of Neanderthal research that’s showed how our closest evolutionary relatives, long considered less intelligent than humans, were truly sophisticated thinkers capable of symbolism, social planning and empathy. Paintings would provide the last bit of evidence needed to throw out the image of Neanderthals as archetypally dumb, Zilhao said. “What’s really exciting about this possibility,” said Pike, “is that anyone, because it’s open to the public, could walk into El Castillo cave and see a Neanderthal hand on the wall.”

Tune of the summer - thanks Zane Lowe

Wow

I'm ready

New Order - World in Motion by Tunashaker