Summary:
This week we have seen a major milestone in Artificial Intelligence (think moon landing milestone), where DeepMind (Google owned) developed software AlphaGo is currently winning 2-0 against 9th Dan Go champion Lee Sedol (apparently the Messi & Nadal of GO).
Videos
We wont go into details on why GO is deemed the hardest game for a computer to beat (it can’t be brute forced). Instead we’d recommend a great intro to DeepMind in this video presentation from co-founder Demis Hassabis explaining his theory of everything.
However, we’d say forget GO, the pinnacle of games as far as we are concerned is SuperMario! This brilliant video shows how this programmer trained a computer to beat SuperMario.
Impact on Gambling Industry
Most obvious impact is that AI is being used more and more by Google who have publicly announced that they are using AI in a system called RankBrain to help with search engine queries. SEO impact right now is unknown (with the usual amount of wild speculation), but definitely a trend to monitor.
Links:
RankBrain FAQ
Bloomberg Article
Ad-blocking and Not Serving Ads
Quick Summary
The IAB tech lab have listed the options for publishers on how to deal with ad-blocking and Facebook have announced they are pulling the plug on the Atlas Demand Side Platform (DSP) which we guess is the other way to block ads.
Our View
IAB report is all pretty straightforward and nothing new mentioned. Facebook pulling the DSP is interesting, being cynical we believe they are trying to put a spin on the fact they could not make a DSP work and emphasis the Native and Video ads which they have plenty of on Facebook.
Impact on Gambling Industry
Nothing of interest from the IAB and using Atlas as a measurement pixel for cross-device tracking (people are logged into Facebook everywhere) is definitely worth investigating.
Twitter Supports Accelerated Mobile Pages
Quick Summary
We discussed two weeks Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) from Google and impact on mobile search engine rankings. Twitter have now confirmed they will also support AMP.
Impact
The trend is escalating quickly and your CMS now needs to be able to handle AMP and Facebook Instant Articles publishing.
Link:
Twitter Supports AMP
VR vs Smart Watches
What Have We Learned
We mentioned at the beginning of the year that we see VR and specifically the Oculus Rift as a three year trend due to the high cost of the hardware and the PC required to run it. This is being backed up by Oculus Co-Founder Palmer Luckey who says that there is no Mac on the market good enough to run Oculus Rift.
In the meantime it turns out more Smart Watches shipped in Q4 2015 than Swiss Watches, which we believe shows that the smart watch trend is accelerating quickly and will become the norm.
Impact on Gambling Industry
Keep focusing on smart watch development and postpone VR
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