Innovation and technology in the news

• Facial recognition gets some more bad press. Amazon has taken a proactive step to shift focus onto the use/user of the tech rather than the tech itself. I guess the argument is the tech isn’t bad, it’s what you do with it that matters. Link to the Amazon day one blog post here.
• Netapp extends it’s Cloud portfolio with the acquisition of spot (fka Spotinst), a CloudOps platform which optimizes your cloud spend. (And where I first learned of the term spot instance!)  
• Snapchat launches payment feature (not with Libra). There didn’t seem to be much fanfare here. How significant is this?  Link.

Articles & Reading

• a16z posted some interesting content on their Fintech newsletter recently about decentralising self-driving money. Bear with me if you’re not a fintech expert (i’m certainly not), but the concept of self-driving money is essentially how we can engage with multiple different vendors to manage a slice of our finances. There are a couple of different models in play, and it remains to be seen which may prevail.
• Digiday talks to Jason Harrison, CEO of North America for WPP’s Essence about the use of AI in media buying hasn’t lived up to the dream – yet.

Tech spotlight – interesting and disruptive startups on my radar

Ambient.AI is a SaaS platform that monitors video (CCTV) feeds, using AI to analyse activity in real-time. Don’t be put off by recent news about governance and ethical use of facial recognition – their value proposition is contextually processing events in real-time, and they don’t offer facial recognition services. There are dozens of patterns they can monitor for, including safety use-cases such as fall or accident detection, plus security use-cases such as entry gate tailgating, unauthorised object removal, attempted door entry, and so on. Why is this interesting? Well, currently building managers or CCTV and security service providers can only monitor so much in real-time – most is a reactive or posthumous investigation. This tech offers serious enhancements and efficiencies on manual monitoring services, so it could lead to significant new and improved use cases being developed, or disruption to service providers through insourcing or competition on the market.

If you are interested in any of these vendors or disruptive technology please contact us to discuss our personalised horizon scanning and disruptive tech radar service.