SigmaWay Blog

Today world is changing at a rapid speed. Technology is playing an important role. Agriculture technology is also advancing and promises to unleash its productivity. The combination of advanced mathematics, automation, advancements in sensor systems and next-generation plant breeding are setting the stage for the next Green Revolution, which is needed to ensure a better future. Next-generation farms are putting science and technology to work towards delivering a step change in yields and growing more from less. Here are the four most exciting developments in 2016.

1) The Mathematics revolution.

2) The Sensing Revolution.

3) Putting it together with automation.

4) Next generation plant breeding of corn.

Read more at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/gmoanswers/2016/01/26/four-technologies-that-will-usher-next-generation-farming/#3cfe147b69f5

The goal of marketing technology is to deliver "the right message to the right customer or audience at the right time," says Jake Sorofman, research vice president at Gartner. Marketing technology has evolved into a combination of complex software and data. Tools which are used today with marketing technology also create new complexities and difficulties. It can't solve the ad- waste dilemma. This means that the marketing team wastes billions of dollars on digital ads that no one sees. Marketing tech can't tell about the impact an advertisement had about the brand to the viewer. Read the complete article here: http://www.cio.com/article/3024934/marketing/how-and-why-marketing-tech-fails-to-deliver-on-its-promise.html

There is a lot of confusion building around marketing tech and ad tech. Are they same or different? There are minute differences between the two. Let's see what they are. Marketing technology comprises of tools that manage marketing processes, customer analytics, digital content and workflows. It covers all aspects of marketing, SEO, and even ad tech. It is basically the understanding the customer and optimizing data science around them. Programmatic buying and selling of advertisements are referred as ad tech. Both of these technologies also share many similarities. Read the complete article here:  http://www.itworld.com/article/3030325/marketing/what-the-hell-is-the-difference-between-ad-tech-and-marketing-tech.html

Some volunteers of a nonprofit volunteer outfit are going door to door in Odisha. They are collecting data about schools, health facilities, Panchayat, roads, etc. These data points are being analyzed by a not-for-profit development organization which will use this data and will draft a development plan for Member of Parliament. The idea is to filter the data into meaningful information which will help in reducing the gap between real needs and actions. Some big consultancies are also working together with politicians for the same purpose. Data analytics tools are used to determine demographic profiles and socioeconomic aims. Read the full article here: http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2016-02-02/news/70283182_1_data-analytics-tools-prime-minister-narendra-modi

The breakthrough in the mobile innovations that is coming into industry holds many promises for the future of mobile healthcare solutions. The power of technology to monitor patients from distance improves health care in a way that is cost effective and beneficial. To implement such systems the need is to change the thinking of both doctors and the patients. Mobile Healthcare systems keep a constant vigilance on the patient and can collect important data. The data related to the blood pressure, sugar levels and various important factors can be analyzed to make the treatment better. This gives freedom to the patients to complete their works without being tense about their healthcare system. They can remotely access the same. There are projects which are working on mobile healthcare and they have offered promising results.  Read more at: http://www.healthcare-informatics.com/article/harnessing-power-mobile

Want to make your industry more tech oriented? Follow a well-planned strategy and nicely made roadmap. The financial services and the manufacturing industry are adapting technology in their work culture. But the scenario is not the same for natural products industry. The new technical platforms are very critical to the organization's growth. But those who are still not working to make their work easy using technology are at a big loss. To blend Information technology with your work, it is important to have a strategy and a roadmap. A strategy consists of analyzing the current state, benchmarking and collecting recommendations. Then an analysis of the vision and the goals of an organization is required. To make the workforce acquainted with tech, a plan is required. Upgradation can be done only after taking the estimation of budget. Then comes the role of the consultants, they recommend which software or hardware will be most suitable and at what place. To do the same IT people recommend a plan of how and what is required to be done. Read more about it at: http://www.naturalproductsinsider.com/articles/2016/01/information-technology-strategy-and-roadmap.aspx

Enormous demand of Wi-Fi has led to transmission of billions of bytes of data every day. Researchers have predicted that by 2019 mobile devices will exchange 35 quintillion bytes of information every month. This is just for mobile devices, just consider computers, IOT devices and you can get an idea how much data will be transferred. But our traditional Wi-Fi can't handle this entire load. So scientists have discovered a new technology known as LiFi. It uses light as a means of data transmission. Using LiFi we can send 224 gigabits per second. They can be also used in healthcare facilities. The idea that light can pass through walls can increase security because one has to be physically present in the room to access the data. Read the full article here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2016/01/12/will-lifi-take-big-data-and-the-internet-of-things-to-a-new-level/#2bceb09c346f

Big data is in its adolescence. Companies have started to treat it as a corporate asset. The focus has been shifted to find those data initiatives that will have biggest and immediate effect. Companies are not looking for more data, but the right data. This helps in making better informed decisions. A correlation between good data policies and financial success is also observed. Big data is becoming less about volume and velocity, but more about value. As technology continues to improve, the "bigness" of big data is becoming a less important factor. Read the full article here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2015/11/30/big-data-now-a-top-management-issue/#29598044794d

The field of smart wears brings up wonderful innovations each day. New horizons are explored and tested. This merging of machine and man has brought many such things which we never thought of. Exoskeletons are one such example. These give superhuman abilities to human beings. Nowadays there have been issues regarding privacy. There is always a third eye around looking and collecting more and more information about you. So to protect this the stealth wear is coming. To make this work you need to find the right reflective material that can block surveillance cameras and mobile tracking devices. Smart textile and smart clothing are already very popular. These have various applications ranging from health monitoring clothes to the environmental monitoring ones.  Read more at: http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-thedownload-wearable-tech-oddities-20160209-story.html

Nowadays, data analysis and space technology are used to help live crime mapping and is known as Predictive Policing. This has been used by various police departments of the few developed countries. In India, Delhi Police is also developing this mechanism in partnership with the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). It is called The Crime Mapping, Analytics and Predictive System (CMAPS) and is used for with ensuring internal security. This will help in crime control, and law and order and security management through analysis of relevant data and patterns, leading to the optimization of available resources. Each police officials will be equipped with Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) device connected to a central processor, with the records of more than two lakh criminals. To read more about Predictive Policing, follow: http://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/delhi-police-join-hands-with-isro-will-use-space-technology-to-predict-and-stop-crime-250432.html

The Information Technology (IT) industry had changed a lot from its early years. If we see today, IT sector is changing at the rapid rate and also the problems related to it. Today IT is everywhere directly or indirectly. But if we look at the education system, it was never been easier to manage, but nowadays, it is like a choice between the difficult and the impossible. That is because of the rapid changes. So it is the reason of slowing down the pace of IT sector. The question arises as to how can we align our timelines and change our ecosystem? Top ten IT Issues gives a clear response: Divest, Reinvest, and Differentiate. The ten issues divided into these three categories are:

# Differentiate:

* Optimizing educational technology.

* Student success technologies.

* BI and analytics.

* E-learning and online education.

# Reinvest:

* Information security.

*IT Workforce Hiring and Retention.

* IT Workforce Hiring and Retention

* IT Organizational Development.

# Divest:

* Institutional data management.

* Enterprise application integration.

Read more at: http://er.educause.edu/articles/2016/1/top-10-it-issues-2016 

People are actively looking for ways to increase their online privacy and security. So here are five tools to increase that will help you achieve the same.

1. Privacy Badger: It blocks all the tricky ads. It can be used as an extra level of security over common ad block sites.

 2. HTTPS Everywhere: This makes browsing more secure by encrypting communications provided that the sites you are opening have these additional capabilities.

3. Ublock Origin: It's a free and open source extension.

4. Purify Blocker: this application is made for iOS helps in browsing websites without ads and tracking. It will also lower the data usage and will improve speed.

5. Tor: It's a service that can encrypt web traffic and sends it across a series of relays to help maintain anonymity. It can be downloaded on laptop for Windows, Mac or Linux.

Read the full article here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ygrauer/2015/10/13/five-tools-privacy-security/#5804444e537c

The term "Artificial intelligence" (AI) was first introduced by the John McCarthy for the study of intelligence which is carried out using a computer. AI is becoming reality and both fear and faith are also increasing day by day. Even many movies like the terminator, ROBOT, RA-One are based on AI and machine taking control. Similarly, the world famous physicist Stephen Hawking shows his fear on the growth of AI and IoT by saying that the full development of AI could "spell the end of the human race". It is expected that by 2020, about 80% of adults will own a smartphone. It is also changing the way people relate to one another and their surroundings. There are apps for most of things that you can think of, like fitness apps, cooking apps and much more. Today AI and IoT are allowing people to do more things on their phones and off them too. Read more at: http://www.notchcommunications.co.uk/blog/2015/03/the-dawn-of-artificial-intelligence-and-the-internet-of-things

Mention database and what all things will come to your mind? Data management, storage, tables, RDBMS… But this trend is changing. The reason for the change is big data. Data has become so big that conventional methods and tools are not enough to manage this data. So what to do? We need some database technologies which can deal with big data. Hadoop is the most popular technology which can tackle big data. It is a data-centric platform which is highly scalable and used to run applications in parallel. Another alternative to RDBMS is the use of NoSQL platforms like MongoDB. Read the full article here: http://www.infoworld.com/article/3003647/database/how-big-data-is-changing-the-database-landscape-for-good.html

90% of the world's data has been generated over the last two years, according to the reports. With this increasing amount of data it is necessary for the organizations to upgrade the data centres. In order to cope up with the emerging technologies, data modernization is very important. Those still stuck to the old ways are at a loss. Data Oganization done in a proper way gives way to crucial insights. This doesn't mean only adding more servers, but finding a solution that takes care of economic conditions, technical aspects, people and the processes involved. Cloud based platforms are of great help and with increased automation of technology, data centers can reduce the repetition of the mundane tasks. Read more at: http://www.information-age.com/technology/data-centre-and-it-infrastructure/123460849/why-all-industries-should-consider-modernising-their-data-centres

Failures in the functioning of equipment are inevitable in any kind of industry. The repair and recovery time often leads to big financial losses each year. But we have machine learning and predictive analytics as a solution. The machine learning models are trained to learn the ideal functioning of the machinery. Then this functioning is compared with how the machines are working at present. So if even a minor change occurs somewhere, it doesn't go unnoticed. Then, with the help of predictive analytics the loss that can take place in the near future is predicted. This adds to the huge advantage of the firms. Learn more about this in the article written by Mike Reed (manager of analytical services for Avantis PRiSM software) at: http://www.intelligentutility.com/article/16/02/saving-money-and-man-hours-machine-learning

Machine Learning is getting easier and accessible because of the computing power becoming affordable. Moreover, big enterprises are making their algorithm open source. This is because data is the food. More data an algorithm gets, the better it becomes. But from step 1, making algorithms, feeding data in humans play a significant role. Sometimes there are outliers which the algorithms cannot interpret. Here human intervention is necessary. They manually check such pieces. But when these are fed into algorithms, they make them robust by identifying outliers. Thus, human intervention is both necessary for accuracy and training. Read more at: http://insidebigdata.com/2016/01/11/human-in-the-loop-is-the-future-of-machine-learning/

The support for Windows server 2003 has been ceased so a shift to windows server 2012 is required. It is not only necessity, but good investment of time and finance as well. There are three main steps which are required to keep in mind to avoid any pitfalls in journey -

1.       Review and evaluate equipment: Servers running 2003 should be able to run 2012 but only if the hardware was already legacy equipped at the time of server 2003 installation. Details need to be considered in depth.

2.       Check current server and hosting environment: Apart from calculating financial benefits of the shift, one must also reassess hosting environment to determine how much server population should remain in house.

3.       Plan for migrations of workloads: The major advantage of upgrading is ability to access the enhanced features present on windows server 2012 which will help one on enabling migration, consolidation and improvement of overall server operation

Read more at: http://www.itworld.com/native?prx_t=6gACAyjwFAPUsMA

This is the era of e-commerce. Everything you desire is just a click away. People can shop, read reviews, compare prices of the products and take better-informed decisions sitting in their homes. Sounds like online shopping is a blessing. But then why retailers like Disney, Under Armour and Nike have said that they don’t focus on online sales anymore? Today, retailers are focused on creating a friendly customer experience that crosses channel borders. Leading brands understand that they need to be leaders in both online and offline means. The changes in marketing trend are due to things like artificial intelligence, 3D printing and advance analytics. Merging the two modes is the solution. So to attract more and more customers, we need their engagement in both online and offline modes which will eventually result in better sales. Read more here: http://www.computerworld.com/article/3024262/retail-it/for-retailers-e-commerce-alone-wont-make-the-sale.html

Most businesses need a combination of multiple marketing techniques to exhaust the full potential and make it more productive. Though internet usage is increasing each day, but offline marketing channels still involve lots of customers. Best marketing strategies merge both offline and online marketing. This might seem a difficult task, but machine learning models make it easier. These lessons from the data field which channel, in what way, and at what time will be most effective for the particular set of customers. This is called intelligent messaging. Thus leading to maximize success of marketing. A significant increase in the success rate has been observed in the marketing strategies using these techniques. Learn more about it in the article written by Brendan O'Kane (managing director and chief executive officer of OtherLevels) at: http://www.itproportal.com/2016/01/04/intelligent-messaging-big-data-machine-learning-a-powerful-combination-for-multi-channel-marks/