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Jaguar’s turn to Virtual Reality: Increased Car Sales

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Jaguar says VR is helping it sell an ‘incredible amount of cars’ as it launches Andy Murray experience

Having signed up Andy Murray for a new virtual reality experience, Jaguar has insisted the technology isn’t a gimmick and is resulting in improved car sales.

The #FeelWimbledon VR campaign is part of Jaguar’s sponsorship of the iconic tennis tournament and places users onto Centre Court to experience the atmosphere while hitting the winning shot as Andy Murray.

The virtual reality experience will debut at Goodwood Festival of Speed before being placed at London Waterloo station for the duration of the tournament. It will also be distributed throughout Jaguar’s car dealerships via 20,000 Google Cardboards.

With virtual reality (VR) set to become a $1bn (£710m) industry by the end of 2016, marketers are seeking to tap into the platform’s storytelling power to set the agenda for VR excellence.

Jaguar Land Rover, in particular, first launched a VR experience (in partnership with IBM) back in September 2014. The VR experience allows an in-store consumer who is wearing a headset to choose the model, make, colour and features of a car. The experience also allows consumers to get into the car to check out interior features with a 360-degree view, and to make real-time changes.

And Robert Herd, head of communications at Jaguar Land Rover UK, said VR is having a major impact on the brand.

“We felt there was a perfect opportunity to build something cutting edge for Wimbledon and we want the public to experience hitting the winning smash and how that feeling of joy has similarities to driving one of our cars,” he told Marketing Week.

“Jaguar now designs its cars in a VR environment and sells its cars in a VR environment; it is incredibly successful for driving purchases.

“Yes, initially consumers think it is gimmick but they quickly convert and it is driving a lot of additional car sales for us.”

Robert Herd, head of communications at Jaguar Land Rover UK

Herd said there is now a “lack of fear” among consumers to try VR experiences – with Jaguar having previewed models including the F Type, F Face and Discovery Sport through the technology – and that the car brand will continue to “evolve” its role within the retail experience.

Standing out at Wimbledon

In a recent interview, Alexandra Willis, head of comms, content and digital at the All English Lawn Tennis Club, advised sponsors: “Fans are so discerning now they can spot immediately if someone is trying to pigeon hole themselves into speaking in a millennial way. You have to be authentic to your brand and its ties to Wimbledon. Don’t just do Facebook Live as everyone else is.”

Yet, despite the warning, Jaguar’s Herd is confident it can stand out.

The luxury car brand will launch a series of films celebrating the ‘four emotions of Jaguar’ to fit around the tournament and has also created reactive videos so its activity can change based around the event. The latter will include a film that shows the Jaguar F-Pace roof opening and closing should it rain during play and the roof is required to close on Centre Court.

Herd says the key to sponsor success at Wimbledon is being reactive and brands that just sit back after creating an above the line campaign will do more damage than good.

He concluded: “We can change our messaging or video campaigns based on the results. As a sponsor, you’ll fail if your campaign can’t adapt in real-time.”

– Thomas Hobbs

Microsoft Ahead in Cloud Computing for the Enterprise

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Microsoft leads the way in Cloud Computing for the Enterprise

Almost three quarters (74%) of global organizations across a range of industries are planning to move even more of their systems to the public cloud, according to new studies. Public cloud refers to cloud computing that allows companies to build, operate, and store software and data in off-site, third-party data centers.

The study, which included survey responses from mostly decision makers, found that a plurality of businesses are looking at employing Microsoft Azure rather than going with public cloud market leader, AWS.

  • 34% of respondents indicated that they would employ Microsoft Azure for their cloud solutions.
  • 24% of respondents noted their intention to use VMware.
  • 22% of respondents said their company would pursue AWS for their cloud operations.

Microsoft Azure’s popularity is likely due to Microsoft’s brand recognition as an enterprise software company, as well as its more robust hybrid cloud offerings.

  • Microsoft is one of the only cloud vendors that offers true, end-to-end, hybrid cloud options, managing both public and private cloud aspects, notes Tech Republic. And while both Google and AWS offer hybrid cloud solutions, they often outsource their private cloud segment to third parties.
  • Microsoft is well known among businesses as a software provider due to the substantial adoption of its suite of productivity offerings, such as Office 365. As the use of cloud becomes normalized, this exposure within the enterprise is likely to help it close the gap with AWS within the broader market.

Still, for many larger legacy companies, the public cloud is still relatively new territory. Concern over data security, largely wrought from a lack of information, means that many organizations are employing hybrid cloud strategies, rather than moving all of their data across to the public cloud. 93% of respondents said that if security were better they would invest even more in cloud solutions.

-BI Intelligence

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Incredible Badminton-Playing Robot

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A fully automated Robot capable of playing Badminton

Students and professors at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China have developed a robot that can play badminton as well any amateur. The robot uses a combination of cameras, motion sensors, and a unique navigation system to sweep through Chinese robotics competitions while racking up the wins.

The Robomintoner, as its inventors call it, was fittingly created through the spirit of competition. The UESTC team was tasked with creating a badminton-playing bot for the Asia-Pacific Robocon 2015, where robots would face off against each other in doubles matches. “We were the only team who made this robot fully-automated. We are in the business of making clever devices. We might as well make it fully intelligent,” said Huang Xi, student from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, at the time.

The robot has become something of celebrity in China, an occurrence known to happen from time to time.  It has played ceremonial matches against Dong Jiong, an Olympic medal winning badminton player. Recently, it took on table tennis champion Wang Liqin. Although out of his comfort zone, Liqin said he was “amazed” at the robot’s speed and ability.

With two high-definition cameras acting as its eyes, the Robomintoner tracks the shuttlecock—the badminton equivalent of a ball. It projects a trajectory and then sends that information to a mobile platform through Bluetooth, which then guides the robot’s physical motion. This is crucial because, as mechatronics professor from UETSC Luo Deyuan notes, “currently there’s no perfect system in the world for a robot to locate itself indoors.”

Robots that can win at chess and Go often win the big headlines with their dynamic ability to learn, while the jock robots playing sports might seem like more like one-trick ponies. But speaking about the robot after seeing it at work, table tennis player Liqin remarked that it might not be long before robots start replacing practice partners for elite-level athletes. Considering how the UETSC teams plans on marketing and selling Robomintoners as soon as possible, the jock bots could quickly become the practice norm.

– Gizmodo

Will Virtual Reality Arcades change gaming?

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Games enthusiasts of a certain age can often be found reminiscing about a legendary golden era – the age of arcade gaming.

 

It spanned a decade or so, starting in the mid-to-late 70s, a period which launched the infamous title Space Invaders and also brought us games like Asteroids, Lunar Lander and – of course – Pacman.

The necessity of games arcades was due to the sophisticated technology on offer. Dedicated cabinets had computers set up to play that game and that game alone. Home gaming, in the very early days of Space Invaders, was simply too expensive for most.

As time went on, technology got better. And cheaper. Suddenly, games arcades were losing their purpose in life. If a PlayStation gave you as good an experience in your bedroom, why go to a building and spend your spare change to play for just a few minutes at a time?

And the social scene of arcades – where many a young romance blossomed – drifted away too. Through the 90s, and into the noughties, games arcades all but disappeared.

But in the halls of E3 this week, a show where attendees are looking years into the future of the multi-billion dollar industry, there’s talk of “Arcade 2.0”. A rebirth.

Why? Virtual reality. For the first time since the Golden Age, the public is showing interest in gaming technology they can’t yet afford. And, even if they could, it’s not something that most homes could accommodate to its full potential.

Warehouse scale

That’s why virtual reality arcades are popping up all over the globe. Some are small projects, a good-sized room with the latest kit. Others are big budget smashes, like Hub Zero. Nestled in Dubai, Hub Zero is an “indoor video game park”.

The attractions include an installation by VRcade, a company that has created a totally tether-free VR system – one that allows for multiple players in the same game simultaneously.

The Seattle-based firm’s typical customers include shopping centres or cinemas – in other words, anywhere where there’s available space. I suggested, quite smartly I thought, to approach any pub that had an ageing bucking bronco in the corner.

VRcade differs from its competition by aiming to produce customised VR experiences that make use of the real physical location. Motion sensors are placed around the area to monitor the movement of the player, as well as any in-game peripherals. It means all movements are tracked, whether you’re jumping or ducking or rolling.

“Right now this is room scale,” explained Ivan Blaustein, VRcade’s director of product integration, as he gave me a demonstration.

“We want warehouse scale.”

It’s an experience most could never replicate at home.

Bring your mates

The major players in virtual reality are HTC, PlayStation and Oculus.

“I personally love arcades,” said Joel Braten, HTC’s global head of content for the Vive headset.

“I grew up in them. Based on the conversations we’re having, this is about ready to take off really in a big way.”

HTC’s biggest weakness, and one that prevents it being able to offer the same kind of carefree multiplayer offered by VRcade, is the headset’s tether – a cable that runs down your back and is consequently always at the back of your mind, quite literally, as you work your way around virtual worlds.

But if VR raises the potential for arcades to return, fans of the classic games scene doubt it will carry the same charm.

“We traditionally have arcade games from a specific era where it wasn’t just about money,” said Scott Davids, a collector who runs EightyTwo, a Los Angeles bar he’s filled with old arcade machines.

“I wonder if that’s what VR is going to be about – you pay $10 and get a five minute game.”

He attributed the fall of the games arcade not to the rise of high-powered consoles, but instead to what he said were overly strict regulations on businesses running arcades.

And games makers became greedy, he said – increasingly demanding players to continually pump money in to keep on playing.

If virtual reality does bring about a surge in games arcades, it may be fleeting. PlayStation VR, which will be launched in October this year, will cost just $399, and will work on the current PlayStation 4.

But then again, unlike other gaming technologies – that have been miniaturised from arcade cabinet to console and more recently to smartphone – those enjoying VR will always want space to enjoy it to the fullest.

It may not be the golden age of button bashing and coin inserting – but it is a welcome development if, like Mr Davids, you believe gaming is an activity best enjoyed in the company of other people.

– Dave Lee

Microsoft to buy LinkedIn for $26bn

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Microsoft is buying the professional networking website LinkedIn for just over $26bn (£18bn) in cash.

The software giant will pay $196 a share – a premium of almost 50% to Friday’s closing share price.

The deal will help Microsoft boost sales of its business and email software.

Microsoft said that LinkedIn would retain its “distinct brand, culture and independence”.

Ben Wood, head of research at CCS Insight, said the deal would give Microsoft access to the world’s biggest professional social network with more than 430 million members worldwide.

“That’s a valuable asset that can be deeply integrated with a number of Microsoft assets such as Office 365, Exchange and Outlook. That said, Microsoft has stated that the company will continue to operate as an independent business, so we’ll have to see how deeply the integration occurs,” Mr Wood said.

Analysis: Rory Cellan-Jones, technology correspondent

Ever had one of those annoying LinkedIn emails inviting you to “endorse” a contact for some skill or another? Perhaps LinkedIn chief executive Jeff Weiner and its founder Reid Hoffman deserve to be endorsed for salesmanship after today’s deal.

After a tricky period in which the shares have fallen amid widening losses, they have persuaded Microsoft to make its biggest deal. The software giant is paying a 50% premium on Friday’s closing share price to buy LinkedIn, a price which amounts to $250 (£170) for every active user. To put that into context, that’s about the market value of Sky, or eight times as much as Daily Mail owner DMGT – and they are both profitable.

But this deal is about more than money: it is meant as a powerful signal of where Satya Nadella is now taking Microsoft. He sees its future as a cloud computing business providing all sorts of professional services to clients – including a social network to connect them to each other.

“We are trying to ride the wave of the new technologies,” Mr Nadella told me from Seattle. “It’s about AI, it’s about mobile, it’s about cloud and we’re trying to bring those things together.”

However, the deal to buy Nokia’s mobile phones division had a similar logic – and the entire value of that purchase was written off just a year later. So Microsoft’s investors may look at that $26bn price tag nervously, while anyone with a few LinkedIn shares may be using the network to send a message of congratulations to their board.

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said he had long admired LinkedIn: “I have been thinking about this for a long time.”

The deal was “key to our bold ambition to reinvent productivity and business processes”, he added.

The company planned a different approach to integrating LinkedIn to preserve its culture and brand, Mr Nadella said: “That’s what’s going to be very very different about this.”

Microsoft had a long record of successfully integrating acquisitions, he explained, citing Minecraft – the video game whose maker it bought in 2014 for $2.5bn – as well as its very first purchase: the presentation software PowerPoint for $14m in 1987.

LinkedIn shares soared 47%, or $61.50, to $192.60 in New York following the announcement of the deal.

Shares in the company, which floated in May 2011, have fallen by more than 40% this year.

The stock plunged by a quarter in February after the company issued a profit warning for the first quarter and reported an annual loss of $166m.

Ivan Feinseth, analyst at Tigress Financial Partners, said that LinkedIn was a great business “even though the company stubbed their toe back in February. It’s a premium company and it deserves a premium valuation.”

Shares in Microsoft fell 2.6% to $50.16, bringing the decline this year to almost 10%.

‘Incredible opportunity’

Jeff Weiner will remain chief executive, reporting to Mr Nadella. He and Reid Hoffman – the chairman, co-founder and controlling shareholder of LinkedIn – both backed the deal.

“Today is a re-founding moment for LinkedIn,” said Mr Hoffman. “I see incredible opportunity for our members and customers and look forward to supporting this new and combined business.”

LinkedIn has been trying to expand by offering users more messaging options, mobile apps and a revamped “newsfeed” to help boost engagement.

Last year, the site pledged to send less frequent and “more relevant” messages after numerous user complaints.

The takeover is by far the biggest acquisition made by Microsoft, which paid $8.5bn for Skype in 2011 and bought Nokia’s mobile phone business for $7.2bn in 2013.

The LinkedIn acquisition also eclipses the $19bn that Facebook paid for WhatsApp in 2014.

Despite having a cash pile of about $92bn, Microsoft said it would pay for LinkedIn mostly by issuing new debt.

It expects the deal, which must be approved by regulators in the US, EU, Canada and Brazil, to generate annual savings of $150m by 2018.

– Chris Johnston

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IBM Watson: How it can be Implemented into Business

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IBM Watson and how it can be Implemented into Business

IBM is promoting its Watson natural language processing analytics technology as it tries to move its core business beyond technologies that it pioneered, but which have become commoditised. Will it fly?

In 2011, IBM’s Watson computer beat two of the most successful human contestants on the long-running US game showJeopardy!, which requires participants to provide a question in response to general knowledge clues. In the event, Watson marked a breakthrough in artificial intelligence with its understanding of natural language and ability to make sense of vast amounts of written human knowledge.

Since then, IBM has been preparing Watson for work in business, research and medicine, aiming to help organisations find answers to the questions they often ask, faster and at lower cost.

Businesses can select from a set of 28 application programming interfaces (APIs) with which they can build Watson applications, or integrate Watson’s capabilities within systems they are developing. The APIs can help analyse the tone of text, build a list of contextually related terms, script conversations and classify natural language, and are all available from IBM’s cloud platform Bluemix.

Application of these technologies is spreading. In May 2016, IBM announced a new breakthrough macromolecule that could help prevent deadly virus infections, such as Zika or Ebola, with the aid of Watson technologies. Meanwhile,global law firm Baker & Hostetler has built a ‘robot lawyer’ on Watson.

But businesses cannot simply plug in and go. Any application must first learn the ontology – the language and definitions – particular to a domain in which it operates, a process IBM will help with. From there, developers train Watson in the knowledge that makes up a particular domain, with the help of human experts in the field.

Once experts are confident in their Watson application’s ability, they can let users loose to ask it questions in natural language.

Volume, a UK-based marketing, training and technology company, has been using Watson to develop applications to help its clients in technology sales.

Chris Sykes, chief executive officer, says: “We developed bespoke software applications for enterprise clients. The idea is to create ‘cognitive consultants’ who provide accurate answers to questions from the sales teams. They are able to query in natural language in real time, making a sales person ready from day one.

“During the normal sales process, a sales person can only go so far before they need to bring in a technical expert. But if that expert is not available, it extends the sales cycle.

“With our application, the sales team have the technical knowledge they need at their fingertips. They can query the system before a meeting or while they are with the customer. Information comes back to them in natural, accurate language.

“The net benefits are higher revenue per sales person, a shorter sales cycle and higher conversion rates.”

Vast volumes of material

Applications that help businesses make sense of vast volumes of written material could benefit from using Watson, says Surya Mukherjee, senior analyst with research firm Ovum.

For example, consultancy Deloitte is working with IBM’s Watson team to offer a service that absorbs greater volumes of legal information than would be humanly possible, helping businesses save on regulatory compliance, says Mukherjee.

“Some businesses might have 20,000 pages of regulations to sift through every month to keep on top of compliance,” he says. “To understand what is relevant to them, it takes an army of lawyers. The Watson application can parse the documents, and because it knows what to look for, flag up the relevant parts.”

Crucially, Watson learns from its errors, he adds. “There are false positives and false negatives, but with heuristic algorithms and human feedback, the software learns from its mistakes over time.”

Businesses that invest in these types of application could save time and money on employing experts to analyse large volumes of text or other unstructured data – but Watson does not come cheap, says Mukherjee.

“It is not commodity technology, so it will not be commodity priced,” he says. “There will be cheques to sign.”

While users will be able to select the APIs for their applications from the cloud on a pay-as-you-go basis, they will also need to spend money to ‘train’ Watson in a particular ontology and employ human expertise to check that the applications’ output makes sense.

“You have to ask: do you have the talent to use Watson for your purpose?” says Mukherjee. “Those people are expensive, not a commodity.”

IBM is heavily promoting Watson with the term “cognitive computing”, in an attempt to move its core business beyond the technologies that it pioneered, but which have become commoditised and less profitable.

“Cognitive computing, cloud and big data are the areas where IBM is investing billions, and cognitive might just be the priority,” says Mukherjee. “In technology markets such as databases, analytics and business applications, IBM has lots of competition.

“You could say that what IBM offers, Oracle and SAP also offer. But the last frontier is cognitive, and that is IBM’s story. Tactically, it is betting the farm on Watson.”

IBM has not released pricing for Watson per se, because it will depend on the particular combination of APIs and add-on services that customers consume. It has also not announced how much it is investing in its Watson venture or discussed the computing capacity it has created to support Watson worldwide.

However, it does make strong claims about Watson’s abilities in cognitive computing.

Phil Westcott, European ecosystem leader at IBM Watson Group, says: “Watson is based on systems that learn at scale, reason with purpose and interact with humans naturally. It understands the world in the way that humans do: through senses, learning and experience.”

Elsewhere in IBM’s promotion of Watson, the company claims: “Watson and its cognitive capabilities mirror some of the key cognitive elements of human expertise: systems that reason about problems like a human does.”

Watson lacks common sense

But John Carroll, professor of computational linguistics at the University of Sussex, says that despite Watson’s impressive performance in natural language processing and question answering in Jeopardy! and elsewhere, he is sceptical about the claim that it can reason or understand the world the way humans do.

“It is different and complementary,” he says. “Humans don’t have the ability to read millions of documents an hour, so it goes beyond human ability. But, at the same time, it does not have common sense. It does not have the ability to reason inductively or understand how humans act, move and behave in the real world.

“It can do something that a human can do in same way IBM’s Deep Blue can play chess and Google AlphGo can play Go, but it is still not the answer to replicating human intelligence. It can only do the types of things it was set up to do: to get information from text and from databases and integrate them. It cannot act like a human in the real world and does not have any notion of what the real world is.”

Watson bases its responses on the expert human texts it processes, but is not able to reason much beyond this evidence, says Carroll.

“Ontologies are inconsistent and incomplete, and once you make two or three inferences, it is quite possible to go badly wrong,” he says. “The computer won’t know what is an inconsistency and what an incorrect inference is because it does not have any common sense. It can be led astray very easily. It is safer to work from documents that people have written or individual facts that people have input.”

Carroll says artificial intelligence is being applied to a range of business problems (see below) and some problems may be applicable to more specialist technologies other than Watson.

IBM has impressed businesses, academics and analysts with Watson’s performance in answering natural language questions based on vast amounts text and other unstructured data. Experts agree it has many applications that could benefit businesses and other organisations, but whether its capacity for human-like reasoning stands up to IBM’s claims remains an open question.

– Lindsay Clark

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