Fifteen years after being founded in Mark Zuckerberg's college room, Facebook has become a world power with unprecedented opportunities to reach out to its users in a targeted manner - be it advertising or opinion-making.

Last year has been a turbulent year for social media in many ways. To protect their privacy, Penny Wilson, CMO at Hootsuite explained, many social media users now use more often closed channels such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and WeChat. This gives companies the opportunity to build a new kind of customer relationship, especially with many customers using instant messaging for interactions such as support requests.

Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science, information engineering, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages, in particular how to program computers to process and analyze large amounts of natural language data. In a nutshell, NLP gives machines the ability to read and understand human language. A sufficiently powerful natural language processing system manages to enable natural-language user interfaces and the acquisition of knowledge directly from human-written sources, such as newswire texts. Some straightforward applications of natural language processing include information retrieval, text mining, question answering and machine translation. 

From the live black-and-white broadcast of Neil Armstrong’s first step on the Moon to the World Cup Final in ultra-high definition, television has stood the test of time often co-opting inventions that threatened disruption such as VHS, cable networks and the Internet.

Zendesk, Inc. released The Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2019, showing that companies of all sizes across industries and geographies lack the capabilities needed to keep up with ever-increasing customer expectations.

Today, companies are more worried than ever about how they can reliably secure their entire organization against cyber-attacks. Their main focus is on ensuring to put holistically secure products on the market, as well as to protect expertise stored in databases and private data of employees, suppliers and customers.

According to a survey of the market research firm eMarketer, global spending for online advertising will reach nearly 427 billion US dollars in 2020. But how can advertisers use their media budget effectively and to the greatest success for their campaigns?

Thirty years ago, the physicist Tim Berners-Lee proposed a network of computers for the nuclear research institute CERN, thus laying the foundation for the World Wide Web (WWW). Today, after 30 years, he warns in a letter against data abuse, disinformation, hate speech and censorship, calling on the world to counteract intentionally disseminated malicious content with laws and computer codes. Business models that promote the dissemination of misinformation could be prevented, he believes, and is campaigning with his "Web Foundation" for companies, governments and civil society to sign a contract for a better web.

In terms of search engine advertising (SEA), Google already offers many features that include automation and machine learning, and the potentials of AI are stunning. But how much is AI really changing marketing and does it make human marketers obsolete?

Thailand’s National Legislative Assembly (NLA) passed recently its cybersecurity bill that gives authorities the right to bypass court orders in "critical" situations, just like Singapore a year earlier. In fact, many jurisdictions in the region started to develop their own cybersecurity legislation to impose requirements on certain businesses to implement protections against cybersecurity risks into their computer systems.

A ‘logic bomb’ is a piece of code intentionally inserted into a software system that will set off a malicious function when specified conditions are met.

Looking at the Swiss full-service digital agency Namics’ predictions, we feel that we are on the right track with many of the trends we forecasted to gain momentum in 2019, including the following:

Modern digital assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana, are constantly evolving, but let’s be honest, nevertheless it’s still in its infancy and quite limited. Basically, these systems can only respond to previously learned commands and use technology that's been around in cars for a dozen years.

The idea of sitting down at the desk and powering up a PC to log-in to the Internet already seems a thing of the past nowadays, although Apple launched the first iPhone just 10 years ago, ushering in the age of the mobile Internet.