Adobe has chosen Microsoft Azure as its preferred cloud platform for the Adobe Marketing Cloud

ATLANTA — Sept. 26, 2016 — Monday at Microsoft Ignite, Adobe and Microsoft Corp. announced plans for a strategic partnership to help enterprise companies embrace digital transformation and deliver compelling, personalized experiences through every phase of their customer relationships. Together, the two companies will enable businesses to dramatically strengthen their brands through solutions with Microsoft Azure, Adobe Marketing Cloud and Microsoft Dynamics 365. “Business leaders in every industry are focused on how to better engage their digital customers, wherever they are,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. “Together, Adobe and Microsoft are bringing the most advanced marketing capabilities on the most powerful and intelligent cloud to help companies digitally transform and engage customers in new ways.” “Customers today expect a well-designed, personalized and consistent experience every time they engage with a brand,” said Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO of Adobe. “Adobe and Microsoft will bring together the cloud horsepower and end-to-end capabilities brands need to design and deliver great digital experiences.” With this partnership, Adobe will make Microsoft Azure its preferred cloud platform for the Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Document Cloud. Azure provides Adobe with a trusted, global cloud and a powerful data platform for intelligent services, including comprehensive machine learning and cognitive capabilities in Microsoft Cortana Intelligence Suite and SQL Server. Microsoft will make Adobe Marketing Cloud its preferred marketing service for Dynamics 365 Enterprise edition, giving customers a powerful, comprehensive marketing service for Microsoft’s next generation of intelligent business applications. The two companies are collaborating to create standardized data models for their marketing and business applications — leveraging artificial intelligence, machine learning and advance analytics — that customers can use to create new data-driven sales and marketing capabilities. Adobe and Microsoft intend to make the data models extensible to enterprise customers, as well as third-party developers and partners, in order to foster innovation and development. Adobe and Microsoft will jointly work with leading companies to help them envision and implement the integrated solutions. As a result, the companies’ mutual customers will be able to harness their data for critical insights and predictions, connect customer touchpoints across their business, bolster relationships, and drive brand loyalty and growth. Source >>

IBM Watson Care Manager is in Harrow Council United Kingdom

IBM Watson Health and Harrow Council announced a 10-year agreement to use cognitive technologies to help people with personalised social care needs choose the best services. The commercial agreement signed on 08 Sep 2016 is the first of its kind with a UK local authority, and marks the first implementation of Watson Care Manager outside of the USA. Using Harrow Council's expertise and innovations in adult social care, IBM will enhance Watson Care Manager to enable individuals and caregivers to quickly and easily select the most appropriate provider that can deliver the services they need, using their allocated personal budget. Many social and health programmes globally require personal budgets, and Watson Care Manager's new functionality could simplify that process for individuals beyond Harrow and the UK. Harrow Council CEO, Michael Lockwood, said: "This is the technology that every organisation is looking for as use of personal health and social care budgets increases. It will help us deliver better services with better outcomes, all for less cost. It will save money, reduce waste in the system and give people more control and flexibility over what care and health services they and their loved ones receive." IBM Director of Social Programs, Martin Duggan, said: "Tailoring Watson Care Manager to the needs of the UK will result in new choices being available to other local authorities and Clinical Commissioning Groups across the country. Harrow have consistently taken an innovative approach to delivering services, which makes Watson Care Manager a natural fit in advancing greater personalisation and data-driven efficiency."

Einstein is reborn with Salesforce

Einstein is reborn with Salesforce. Salesforce's next big product will be called 'Einstein'. At Dreamforce Conference which will take place in early October, CEO of Salesforce Marc Benioff, will officially announce the new Artificial Intelligence product called "Einstein" to World. Although the details of the product are kept secret and unknown, it seems that in this new AI Einstein platform, Salesforce will make an another great leap forward into the cloud computing market. As Benioff tweeted, Einstein will be the "first comprehensive AI platform for CRM." Apparantly this new product is to become a part of Sales Cloud. Benioff is known as a strong believer in Artificial Intelligence, has involved in buying several Artificial Intelligence startups companies in the past like RelateIQ, MetaMind,PredictionIO,Tempo AI. In order to achieve his dreams, Benioff has employed hundreds of data scientist for achieving Artificial Intelligence product. When explaining fiscal second quarter 2017 results, Marc Benioff addressed the listeners as follows:  "Salesforce continues to be the fastest growing top ten software company in the world and last week Forbes ranked us as one of the most innovative companies in the world for the sixth year in a row and has named Salesforce 'the innovator of the decade'. Thank you, Forbes. And that’s a great tribute to our amazing employees, especially our technology and product teams. Dreamforce is coming up and you are going to see an incredible level of new innovation when we introduce Salesforce Einstein, the world's first comprehensive artificial intelligence platform for CRM."

An attempt to bring a volcano online to compile big data - Masaya

Zip-lining into a volcano sounds like something for adventure tourism, but for these researchers it’s all part of a day’s work. A motley conglomeration of explorers, volcanologists, GE, and the Nicaraguan government have banded together to bring the  Masaya volcano in Nicaragua into the 21st century, by installing sensors that can compile huge amounts of data and make it available not only to volcanologists, but also to policy makers and the public. There are many volcanos that have been laden with seismic sensors to measure ground shaking (a sign that magma is moving under the surface) or to measure the gasses that come out of a volcano, but there are few places in the world that have the resources to install the valuable sensors in one of the most volatile environments on Earth, much less the labor and expertise to continuously monitor the incoming information. But researchers want to be able to monitor volcanos because of their destructive potential. Being able to disseminate information about the status of a volcano before an eruption occurs could save countless lives. One of the reasons this volcano was chosen for monitoring is its proximity of Managua—everyone would prefer that the capital city of Nicaragua remained the capital city, and not a modern-day Pompeii. The last eruption of that magnitude happened 1,800 years ago, and some scientists worry that it could happen again relatively soon. Currently, a team of people are in Nicaragua, installing over 80 sensors along the side of the volcano. “The main sensors we are connecting will be gas sensors and also atmospheric sensors,” says Guillermo Caravantes, a volcanologist on the project. The gas sensors will be looking at hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide being emitted from the volcano, which can tell geologists more about the composition of the lava. Other sensors will measure atmospheric pressure, humidity, and temperature, and the movement of the magma inside the volcano. Seismometers that measure movement and gravity data will be enclosed in an airtight box the size of alunchbox. There is a long way to go before the collected data can be turned into the kind of in depth early warning system that countries have in place for tsunamis or tornados, but in the mean time researchers are gathering all the information they can from an unusual number of sources. The researchers are also using drones to take measurements in the volcano — which is becoming a popular way to look inside a volcano without risking human health — and to take air samples inside the volcano. Also, in the sky above Masaya is a helicopter provided by the Nicaraguan government. It will still be up to local officials and the government of Nicaragua to issue warnings and interpret the data that comes in, in the event that an eruption is imminent. Of course, being able to predict eruptions definitively is still a goal that remains out of reach for volcanologists.  Volcanoes all have different compositions, and many have different kinds of eruptive patterns. There is no one-size-fits-all red flag for volcanoes around the world. But sensor systems like this can help gather more information, and potentially help scientists look for patterns that could one day help us decode this explosive part of life on our planet.   SOURCE: This Is What It Takes To Connect A Volcano To The Internet | Popular Science