September 2020

Twitter and Zoom spotted for racial bias in the visual algorithms

Twitter and Zoom were spotted to have a racial bias in their visual algorithms. This sensational note was announced through some tweets claiming on the racial bias that has got exhibited through popular platforms like these. With the virtual background, Zoom appeared to be removing the head of people with a darker skin pigmentation whereas the same is not applied to people having a lighter skin pigmentation. In the tweet reported the issue, this gesture of Zoom was shown in favor of a white person over a black one. Twitter has responded to the outrage that emerged, saying it was clear it had more work to do.
Initially, Zoom was developing issues or malfunctions with its virtual background algorithms that could manifest as racial bias. The popular Market Researcher Colin Madland, on his post, explained via Twitter that the issue with the face-detection algorithm that allegedly erases black faces when applying a virtual background on the video conferencing app.
In response to the media queries, Zoom had given clarification on the algorithm and also announced that it was investigating the issue. The company claimed that with direct approaches with customers they are into investigate this issue and also shared thoughts on their commitment to providing a platform that is inclusive for all users.
In response to the same thread of Madland, he has added Twitter’s image thumbnail cropping algorithm that seemed to be favoring Madland over his black colleague. In response to this Twitter Chief Design Officer Dantley Davis commented that “It’s 100 percent our fault. No one should say otherwise. Now the next step is fixing it.”
The apparent bias also got highlighted on the microblogging platform by many Twitter users, which also got an immediate response from the Twitter CTO Parag Aggarwal. Another note on this came from cryptographic engineer Tony Arcieri, who on Sunday tweeted the mugshots of former US President Barack Obama and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell to understand whether the platform’s algorithm would highlight the former or latter. He has used different patterns of putting the mugshots in the images, but in all cases, Twitter showed McConnell over Obama, which in turn again highlighted the bias well.
However, once the engineer inverted the colors of the mugshots, Obama’s image showed up on the cropped view, and the producer Kim Sherrell also found that the algorithm tweaks the preference once the image of Obama is changed with a higher contrast smile. In addition to this, some users also found that the algorithm appears to give focus to brighter complexions even in the case of cartoons and animals. Different Twitter clients like Tweet deck and Twit terrific, as well as a mobile, app, and desktop views, showed different priorities for image cropping.
Twitter spokesperson Liz Kelley responded to all the tweets raising racial bias allegations against the platform and said, “We tested for bias before shipping the model and didn’t find evidence of racial or gender bias in our test, but it’s clear that we’ve got more analysis to do.” She added saying, “We’ll open source our work so others can review and replicate.” Twitter engineer Zehan Wang also tweeted that the team conducted some bias studies before releasing the new algorithm and at that time found that there was “no significant bias between ethnicities or genders. He also added that the company would appreciate the review given by the Twitter users and recommend it for further study.

Businesses say goodbye to physical cash- Digital payment conquers the Market

With the greater technological reformation happening across the globe, cash, the medium of business is acquiring digital avenues to be in pace with the growing requirements. The countable change in preferences of the customers paved a steady surge in the popularity among the traders. Today, physical cash payment is substituted by Digital payment mode, and from retailers to every sector, this trend brought noticeable changes that are advantageous to both the payee and receiver as well. DigiPay 2020- The Future of Digital Payments Summit, organized by a
leading Arab media, highlighted the acceptance and application of the modern mode of payments across various sectors of business.

Ali Allawala, head of Retail Islamic Banking at Standard Chartered Bank, commented that the need for consumers to carry physical cash has been steadily declining over the past few years. “The need to carry cash is going down because a lot of transactions in certain sectors don’t require physical cash anymore,”. Today, booking a hotel or buying an airline ticket, doesn’t require the physical presence or efforts as the opportunities to pay online with debit or credit card exist. With any types of payments and transactions, many banks are issuing multi-currency cards, provided that the customers need not carry or transfer the physical cash to the local currency of that particular country. Instead, the bank will serve them with the local currency of their demand and in parallel deducts the amount from the respective account.

Dr. Tamer Eltoni, the chief commercial officer of Digital Finance Services at Etisalat, added that “the world is changing, and customer behavior is changing.” With the growing preferences to use digital wallets over physical cash, customers also seek flexibility on different forms of digital payments. As UAE is blessed with an amazing infrastructure, opportunities for digital payments are growing here”.

Sanjay Malhotra, the chief digital officer at Dubai Islamic Bank, commented that the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital payments. With the pandemic era, a surge in consumers preferring digital payment have been observed, and later it has become the necessity of time. The incorporation of AI technology in digital payments made the concept a wise choice for every sector. As per the latest research done by the bank, 58 percent of consumers were preferring digital payments. Today many industries are adopting AI technology and this new trend or evolution had made many of the sector highly productive as well. evolution in the industry. Attaining efficiency overpayments, support, and serves everyone, not only the business or consumers. Digital services are transforming the banking sector from its traditional tedious transactions and deals with easy digital services. Even though people prefer digital banking services, the lack of technological knowledge makes them reluctant to adopt these advancements.

Mosam Gadia, senior vice president – Payments, at noon.com, added that today most of the customers seek businesses with digital payment options.” Even the cash won’t be eliminated, but it will see a massively decline. Compared to the expenses incurred for cash transactions, digital transactions are inexpensive. Today consumers prefer businesses providing choices overpayment mode. Still with the majority of customers who lack awareness or don’t get exposure to the benefit and security that digital payment platform offers, has to be worked out. Consumers
should learn what opportunities they have got in the trending market.

Chatbots- Tech-arm to add outstanding count on customers

Being in a market, where internet penetration is 95%; strengthening digital presence is inevitable for businesses. To get attention from a market where more than 60 % of web traffic is accounted to smartphones, businesses should transform to the next level, where strong and sound digital support that can responsively pick up customer needs.

Chatbot is a trend to pave greater avenues for businesses. With an effective and efficient response system, these tech arm reveals the contributions of artificial intelligence(AI) in the areas of Business. AI-powered chatbots are being used by major Mashreq Bank and Emirates NBD since 2016. Today, the middle east has seen the boom of technological interventions and the adoption of the best tech-practices across every sector. Serving customers in no time is what every business looking for and more businesses are entering chatbots, to get along with the trend of delivering a personalized content experience, shorten response times, streamlined purchase, excellent customer service, etc. Chatbots play an integral role in delivering exceptional business services, hence more sectors are experimenting with the new trend of digital business.

Instant Response

To operate within a market, where customers preferring instant response is a greater challenge for today’s business. Chatbot serves the customers with AI capabilities and assists them quickly in finding answers to typical queries instantly. Chatbots for customer support help the business with minimal investments in time and resources, where organizations need to invest in repetitive tasks.

Chatbots built with robust natural language processing (NLP) and self-learning capabilities offer a sustained conversational experience by gathering huge volumes of customer data across channels and translating it into useful business insights.

Personalized interaction

Chatbot is built with functions to observe, analyze, and transform that could help them to evaluate buyer behavior through collated inputs from earlier interactions. Chatbots thus evaluate the purchase patterns and understand the preferences of the customers and prepare themselves for all required services.

With a strong database, they also show response accuracy, that could improve the effectiveness of an organization’s ‘conversational’ marketing. Providing individual attention to customers of a market, where the majority go behind personal preferences, Chatbots support business by informing and updating individual buyers. This is particularly critical for businesses in the UAE, where 65 percent of customers expect brands to grasp their personal preferences. Via dispensing situation-appropriate responses that motivate a purchase, Chatbots give individual attention with their AI-powered ability and develop well-informed buyer personas.

Timely push

Chatbots AI-powered functions can push out ads, discounts, deals, and purchase reminders to regain the prospect’s attention and get them to take action. The special predictive capacity of Chatbots supports them to precisely turn a prospective customer to a buyer. With automatic sales push strategies following the conversations, Chatbots also convert prospective buyers as customers. With timely alerts on just-released product features, maintenance updates, or hotfixes, they also handle existing customers well.

Chatbot’s ability to pick on the right people at right time, always adds competitiveness to the businesses. With intelligent monitoring of conversations, they promptly notify agents when it’s time for them to take over the conversation. This sort of timely communication is a powerful tool that helps businesses reach and retain customers.

Automate routine

With automated workflows, employees get out of the tedious tasks and these savings can be productively utilized for other developmental interventions of the firm. With a variety of business processes across departments and teams, Chatbots extend greater support and assistance, reducing the effort and time spent in each.

Chatbot is open for all businesses

Today, in the era of technology, Chatbots may sound experimental. But with the seamless integration over marketing and sales, companies like Du have excelled with the best of AI-powered Chatbot in the industry. Getting on with the latest trend, always add modernized business experiences to customers. Investing with the Chatbot can always promise a bright and loyal customer strength to the business.

Digital Marketing Clasped Economy amid Pandemic

In the confinement era of 2020, businesses were revolving around technology. The physical store shutdowns and the lockdowns around the world suspended walk-in purchases across the globe. Before 2020, businesses were utilizing digital platforms to cast what they are special, whereas How digital marketing will change in 2020 is what the market is witnessing.

An explosive transition of modern marketing is telecasting from the presence of a business to the conduct of business digitally. The trends and necessities get perfectly aligned in this era. To be different from competitors and to provide exceptional customer experiences, businesses focus on the new avenues of Digital Marketing.  From banners to efficient and accurate digital campaigns and strategies, Digital marketing is growing across the globe.

In 2020 Digital Marketing is showing how important it is for the business by giving seamless opportunities to get connected with the audience. From the setup of the business, digital marketing is helping to build on brands and grow on needs. With abundant opportunities out of modern technology, this year digital marketing may revolve around artificial intelligence, programmatic advertising, and data-driven marketing, which can never be left by a business looking to get flourished. To conclude on how digital marketing will change in 2020, marketers could land on Green pressure, Brand Avatars, Metamorphic Designs, Civil media, and more. With new normal, Digital marketing experts says, “targeting as per lifestyle and behavior habits is the vision to adopt new means of digital marketing this year!!”.

Retailers to E-commerce Arena!

If you are a small business owner in 2020, Why you need your e-commerce website is not a question, instead answer for survival. The new E-commerce Arena had shown how important it is for the business to trade online. With abundant opportunities, the virtual business is getting to a new level of business culture, where nothing is compromised. With a full-fledged virtual store that ahead of everything that a physical store could provide, businesses of every kind are now testing the new trend and necessity of the time. E-commerce websites open avenues to grow brands and earn loyal customers.  With greater insights and innovative digital business tactics, e-commerce websites open a diverse platform for businesses across the world.

The popularity of the internet and advancement in technology paved quicker and easier means of life to people around the globe. With the best utilization of technology, businesses developed a culture of distance trading through online. With the pandemic era, this revolution had a transition to an inevitable change for them. In a time, where people spend more time online and stay in front of laptops or mobile phones, businesses explore a platform where they can sell their products and customers can purchase online in the comfort of home.

Entering E-commerce opens a wide platform for business. To get around customers across the world is easy with a virtual store. With the best of social media and search engine marketing, e-commerce could explore more opportunities to broaden the brand as well as to gain higher user conversion. A business with fewer overheads and less risk with minimal investment- The E-commerce arena is getting glorified amid the pandemic crisis too. Why should business take the risk of setting a physical store, when all that you need with a business is served well and give a great competitive advantage over the competitors. In a time where customers seeking the quickest and easiest way of purchase, why you need your e-commerce website? – the question stays invalid!!

Why Mobile App Development is Important? Pandemic showed, how technology has come to the Rescue!!

Covid-19 has brought a new normal to every sector of the business. With the continual growth among smartphone users, the necessity of the pandemic era has cultivated the best platform for mobile app development. In response to ‘stay away to be safe’, a distance practice of human interaction became vital. Businesses in health, entertainment, education and more industries witnessed a revolutionary change in their operations; which was inevitable for existence amid the pandemic. In a matter of a few weeks, the digital world witnessed why mobile app development is important

To keep the people under the track of safety, government and health authorities also realized the fact of the importance of mobile app development. Countries all over the world relied on mobile applications to process with COVID control and management. These apps were widely used to track infected people and to communicate with citizens in a way to ease and simplify the efforts of authorities. Alhosn, the contact tracing mobile app developed by the UAE government as a tool of technology to beat the battle of COVID in UAE. Similarly, TraceTogether, CovidWatch, HaMagen, Arogya Setu, Corona Data Spende, COVID symptom tracker, etc. are the popular mobile applications developed to be a weapon to beat the COVID.

For the businesses, who were isolated from the customers to physical stores, mobile app development was a key tool. To keep their storefront active among customers who never walk-in to the store, was a matter of existence. From groceries to retail outlets of all kinds, followed mobile app development and begin with their virtual store to beat the crisis. The pandemic era leads the business to a transition from traditional to modern virtual practice. With more customers using, mobile devices, most of the businesses preferring mobile applications also highlighted why mobile app development is important during these pandemic times.

Service sectors including Health and Education were vital sectors, requiring daily operations. To get in touch with clients of all these service providers, modern mobile application technology is used at best. The convenience in getting with customers and ease of handling them over an app in their mobile devices went well during pandemic days. Educational institutes and organizations are serving most of the dependents through mobile users.

In the journey with COVID Battle, the Economy got stressed, however, the fuel up from the technology has saved many sectors to be in operation during the new normal of life. Apart from the featured advantages of mobile applications, Pandemic proved why mobile app development is important today.