2016: An Exciting Year Ahead for the Visual Search Industry
Happy New Year! We hope you enjoyed excellent holidays. The Slyce team is gearing up for what promises to be a very exciting year for the visual search industry. This season?s holiday shopping stats are now emerging and demonstrate that consumers are increasingly comfortable making purchases from their mobile devices, rather than restricting use of mobile search primarily for conducting product research as in previous years. Walmart reported that 70% of Black Friday website sales were transacted on mobile devices, doubling its 2014 totals. As a result, technology such as visual search that promotes easy mobile purchasing was identified as a key 2016 marketing trend by numerous analysts. 2015 was an impressive year for image recognition, with the year?s highlight being the public release in December of groundbreaking artificial intelligence technology by Google, Microsoft, Facebook and IBM. Their tremendous advances in neural networks, which vastly improve computer image and voice recognition, were recognized among the greatest technology breakthroughs of 2015. The release of these technologies to the public will undoubtedly foster further innovation and widespread deployment of augmented-reality applications such as visual search for consumers.
Slyce secured two new high-profile Fortune 500 clients last month ? Nordstrom and Amazon?s Zappos. In addition, many of our existing clients, as well our standalone apps SnipSnap and Craves, generated excellent media coverage. Neiman Marcus, Target, ToysRUs and Home Depot were lauded as brands successfully embracing technology to streamline the consumer purchasing experience. Home Depot won top spot for its mobile shopping experience, according to Episerver's Mobile Commerce Report 2015. Snipsnap was named by ABC7 and FoxNews as an important holiday shopping app, and Craves was named as a top fashion app of the year. Positioned at the ?forefront of a technological revolution in retail? by the Toronto Star, Slyce was also profiled as a ?company to watch? by Small Cap Power.
2015 Image Recognition Milestones 2015 Image Recognition Milestones 12/22/2015 With widespread application across medical, military, science, automotive, and consumer industries, image recognition is no longer a technology of the future. Most advances in image recognition take place through mobile, allowing our interaction with the world to be more tailored to individual needs. Image recognition is expected to be a key tactic to help prevent online shoppers from abandoning their carts. Important 2015 image-recognition milestones include home appliances that can ?see?, long-distance iris scanning technology, crop-monitoring tools that reduce the need for pesticides, improvements to the performance of self-driving cars, computer image recognition trials that proved 5% more accurate than humans, Google?s and Facebook?s releases of image recognition apps to assist users in managing photos, and software that alerts brands to when untagged relevant images are posted to social media. The Customer Journey to Online Purchase ? 10 Predictions for 2016 The Customer Journey to Online Purchase ? 10 Predictions for 2016 12/18/2015 Speed and convenience are the biggest drivers of conversions in the online purchase journey, with mobile search expected to trigger follow up actions ? such as purchasing, sharing or reviewing ? more frequently. Mobile visual search is predicted to have a ?massive impact? on the online purchasing journey, including reducing the lapsed time from inspiration to purchase, interactive images and ads that allow real-world search and give a true feeling for how products actually look and work, and other conveniences that provide personalized, concierge-style experiences. Why 2015 Was A Breakthrough Year in Artificial Intelligence Why 2015 Was A Breakthrough Year in Artificial Intelligence 12/8/2015 2015 was a landmark year for artificial intelligence (AI), thanks to the vastly more powerful and affordable cloud networking hardware upon which AI neural network technology relies. The tech industry?s largest companies, such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and IBM, each operate leading-edge AI labs that conduct and publish important research, allowing third parties to build freely upon this knowledge. Since the advent of ?deep learning? systems in 2012, computer error rates in image recognition challenges have fallen from 25% to less than 4%. ?Computers used to not be able to see very well,? says Jeff Dean, a senior research fellow at Google, ?but now they are opening their eyes.? .
Slyce - Between the Code Newsletter Minority Report Made Real: Slyce?s Visual Search is Like Something Out of A Sci-Fi Movie 12/29/2015 ?Slyce?s technology doesn?t just fit into a sci-fi movie; it surpasses it,? writes Equities.com, with visual search acknowledged as a technology that is shaping the future of customer engagement, internet use and commerce. Slyce?s Universal Scanner app is praised for bringing the future of commerce to consumers today via a seamless shopping experience that allows shoppers to photograph anything around them and receive exact or similar matches available for instant purchase. Slyce is recognized as a leader in the visual search industry, with major brands having taken notice as the company continues to secure ?landmark partnerships.? Visual search is described as one of the factors that will ?produce record revenues.? Top Mobile Coupon-Enabled Campaigns of 2015 12/11/2015 Consumers are increasingly turning to mobile for smart ways to save and shop. Accordingly, several major retailers stepped up their mobile efforts in 2015, with good results. Mobile couponing is the strategy that resonates most positively with consumers. Two Slyce clients, Target and ToysRUs, are named in this top 10 mobile-coupon-enabled list of brand campaigns. Target?s mobile coupon functionality is applauded for its ability to easily scan and organize paper coupons with a smartphone. ToysRUs is acknowledged for integrating paper coupons into its mobile app to create a new omni-channel experience.
SnipSnap Wants To Be The Price-Match Ruler of the Rules 12/17/2015 Slyce?s standalone mobile couponing app, SnipSnap, and its new virtual savings assistant feature, Scout, received excellent exposure in December from populist news sources like ABC7 and Fox News, as well as numerous 5-star user reviews. ComputerWorld, a prominent technology journal, commends SnipSnap for making it easy for consumers to navigate complex retailer price-matching rules, thus completely taking the hassle out of the difficult process of price-matching.
Our Favorite Fashion Apps of 2015 12/30/2015 Slyce?s standalone fashion app, Craves, enables a user to snap a photo of any ad, billboard, picture, or real-world outfit or accessory and receive one-tap purchase results for identical or similar matches. Craves is named on this list of apps that ?made the most impact on the fashion tech scene this year.? Craves is praised for its thorough search results and text-free ease-of-use. ?Just what we like to see when we?re looking for good fashion apps,? writes FashInvest.com.
Please watch for our next newsletter, in the first week of February. We'll be featuring more exciting developments and trends within the realm of visual search and mobile commerce. Here?s to a year of health, happiness and prosperity to you and your families.
Kind regards, Roy Roman
§Slyce
ROY ROMAN
P. +1 (647) 464-6200 ROY@SLYCE.IT
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