With its cutting-edge innovations, fintech has completely changed the financial environment and put traditional banking to the test. Fintech’s influence is extensive, ranging from the convenience of mobile banking to open finance efforts, digital payments, and equitable wealth management. This paper examines its transformative power and highlights the necessity for a well-balanced regulatory framework to maintain its beneficial effects and manage this dynamic financial force as it continues to evolve.

People now utilize their phones for convenient banking, the ease of use is a standout feature, allowing users to manage various financial tasks with just a few taps on their phones.

Also, the ideas behind open banking are moving very quickly. Open finance uses open data to make it safe for different banks to share customer data. All of these changes are making the money system better for everyone. These changes have greatly affected how financial services are offered and used, giving users and businesses new opportunities.

Fintech’s Disruption of Traditional Banking

Since fintech changes how banks work, it’s one of the main reasons for its growth. It was hard for standard banks to keep up with the fast changes’ customers wanted because they used old methods and had difficult structures. The new problems that fintech companies didn’t have to deal with meant they could move quickly and use cutting-edge technologies to create quick solutions focused on the customer.

Online banking, a key aspect of fintech, has revolutionized personal finance management. With user-friendly planning apps and seamless fund transfers, individuals now have enhanced control over their finances. In response to fintech’s focus on improving customer experience, traditional banks have adapted their services and systems. This shift has resulted in robust competition, ultimately benefiting customers in the long run.

The Rise of Digital Payments

It’s clear that fintech is on the rise since there are more ways to pay online. Increasingly, individuals do not require cash. This can be because of apps, electronic installments, and peer-to-peer installment frameworks. With a tap on their phones, individuals presently anticipate purchases to be fast, secure, and straightforward.

Cryptocurrencies are another portion of fintech. It takes off the typical managing an account framework open to assault. Individuals think that cryptocurrencies will be the next enormous thing since they are an alternative to standard fiat monetary forms that are free and open.

It’s exciting to note that these developments affect a number of businesses, including the gaming and gambling industry. Advanced security measures have been established by platforms such as VegasSlotsOnline to protect user data and financial activities. These platforms accept cryptocurrency payments, enabling gamers to remain anonymous. Players can now enjoy the safety of playing online casino games, and the site offers thousands of free online slots with diverse themes and variations for those who prefer not to gamble with real money.

As fintech continues to shape the financial landscape, these developments are fundamentally changing how transactions are conducted and experienced.

Fintech in Wealth Management

It has also changed because of fintech in wealth management. These platforms make it easier for everyone to get access to wealth management services. They also make financial techniques that were once only available to wealthy people available to everyone.

Fintech has also helped crowdfunding and peer-to-peer loan platforms grow, which give people and companies access to capital that isn’t available through traditional banks. This change has given freelancers and small companies more power by letting them skip the lengthy loan approval processes that traditional banks have.

Financial Inclusion through Fintech

The growth of fintech isn’t just changing how financial services are given; it’s also a big part of making sure everyone can get money. Having bad credit, living in certain places, or not making enough money are just some of the reasons why many people can’t use standard banks. It’s easier for people who don’t have bank accounts or enough money in their accounts to use financial services with fintech choices like mobile banking and digital wallets.

Financial technology has grown in importance in emerging nations that don’t have easy access to regular banking systems. People can use their phones to make deals, get loans, and become financially stable with mobile money systems. It changes lots of things and gives people and groups the tools they need to work in the business and make their lives better.

Conclusion

The rise of fintech is a turning point in the history of the financial business. Fintech has changed every part of the financial ecosystem, from standard banks to helping more people get access to money. Its constant search for new ideas and dedication to user-centered design have led the industry into a new era of ease of use and speed. As fintech changes how we handle, trade, and deal with our money, it becomes more and more important to have a balanced regulatory system. Finding the right mix will make sure that the fintech revolution stays a force for good, giving people and companies around the world new ways to do things and new chances to grow. Fintech is becoming a more important part of modern finance, but the trip is far from over. The journey is ongoing, promising even more revolutionary changes as fintech cements its role as an integral part of modern finance.

The post A New Era in Financial Technology: Fintech’s Ascent appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post from Dr. Mona Yousry, Chief Data Scientist, Sabio Mobile.

The amount of data that people generate simply by living their lives can be used to tell stories filled with context and insights. This information, combined with digital data, enriches our understanding of consumers and, by extension, the physical world. Big data, mobile phones, social media and behavior analytics each play a vital role in teasing out this understanding; as a result, they allow companies to gain a competitive edge, and are the future of business intelligence.

But what does data intelligence really mean? To put it simply, data intelligence is the ability to identify and analyze relationships, and to visualize the data associated with them. That is to say, business intelligence unifies sources of unstructured data together with up-to-date visualizations in order to access information on trends and experiences quickly.

Most people will already be familiar with the term “big data”. But what many people don’t realize is that the number of data sources that big data can draw from is increasing at a rapid clip, which in turn affects the quality of the insights that business applications will be able to generate. Having more – and better – data also allows for better AI, because the more high-quality data you have to train your systems, the better your AI algorithms will be.

Data opportunities and challenges

Implementing big data successfully is often a challenge for businesses, in part because of the oft-cited “Vs” of big data. Gartner’s 3Vs, variety, velocity, and volume, have traditionally been the way that most practitioners understand big data.

However, in some ways, the traditional way of thinking about big data ignores the larger picture – that is to say, how to interpret such massive amounts of data. As a result, we need to look beyond the original Vs, to what I call the 6V Wheel. In addition to variety, velocity, and volume, organizations also need to be thinking about validity, verification, and visualization.

Let’s start with the traditional Vs. Variety refers to the fact that not all data is created equally. No longer is it a set of observations and measurements that we can apply regression or time series to; instead, we think of data as a set of patterns that can drive amazing insights, particularly when made up of information from multiple sources. In the near past, a retailer might have relied on information drawn from e-commerce sites and social media – but now, with advances in location technology, one can look at data gathered from physical retail locations and points of sale, and subsequently gain more insight into shopping trends and behaviors. As mobile apps and devices have become smarter and more responsive to their environments, the variety of data available has exponentially increased. Most of this information is already in the hands of organizations, yet few are using it to drive value.

Velocity is a characteristic of data, frequently equated to real-time analytics. It is the rate of changes – about linking data sets that are coming with different speeds and bursts of activities. When the spatio-temporal relationship between two or more data sets changes, then everything else changes, even the definition of a “data event.”

Volume refers simply to the amount of data. Keep in mind that simply having more information than your competitor is not a guarantor of success; rather, it comes down to how effectively that information is being used to drive business performance.

Now for the three new Vs:

Validity refers to a question that our AI and machine learning intelligence is continuously addressing: how effective are these methods? For us, it is the accuracy and  how pervasive is our model. We look at many combinations to relate interactions, habits and behaviors, as only then can we start to understand audience needs (with their privacy still intact). For businesses, the power  is in the insights that allow them to measure performance, create value, drive awareness for new offerings, improve loyalty, increase sales, and countless other actions that are beneficial for their organizations. All of this is a validation of big data.

Verification is the process of establishing the accuracy of something; in other words, the establishment by empirical means of the validity of a proposition. Can a business verify that a customer responds well to a specific notification? How do you know if a particular ad was the reason someone visited a store? How good are your campaigns at driving attribution? How relevant are your ads to people? With AI, and the new types of data that are being collected, all of these questions can now be answered.

Finally, Visualization refers to how we dynamically see the data – and the intelligent decisions we make as a result of understanding those insights. Understanding data can be a complicated matter, and it needs to be easily digestible so that marketers and management can quickly assess what is and isn’t working, and make the right decisions.

While Gartner’s 3Vs provide a good baseline, this new 6Vs Vision creates a more holistic and comprehensive way to view data. This is especially vital as the importance of app science, geolocation, and mobile continue to grow exponentially, and as big data continues to create value for organizations.

The post 3Vs are Good, But 6Vs Are Better: A New Way of Understanding Big Data appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post by Pat McCormack, Vice President, Publisher Sales Americas – Oath

True in-app header bidding is finally here. This is the year that developers finally begin to bring the benefits of header bidding — a way to have a unified, simultaneous auction from all of the advertisers bidding on in-app inventory — into the monetization stack for their apps.

 Over the last several years, the mobile app ecosystem has had a front row seat to header bidding’s impact and evolution across desktop and mobile web. They saw  savvy publishers achieve a greater level of control and efficiency from their ad stack by pulling demand partners out of the waterfall and calling all of them at the same time. They saw the market respond with off-the-shelf  “wrappers” to get rid of the added latency from having so much additional partner code on the page. And, most recently, they saw header bidding evolve server-side.

 This perspective has helped developers learn how to be successful and start with a more advanced solution on day one. And for developers considering header bidding “container” solutions, which manage all header bidding partners a developer wants to use, their decisions need to be built around a few guiding principles. Here are three of the most critical.

Middleman for the Tech, ONLY

On a basic level, the role of the container is to help developers run a more efficient ads business. The container is a framework. It’s responsible for paving a road between demand partner and publisher.  But publishers should be able to have direct commercial relationships with the SSPs and ad networks they choose to sell to without the container taking a cut of it — unless there is value being added to the request (for example in the form of data). Otherwise, the road shouldn’t carry a fee. Think of a freeway rather than a tollway. Further, the container should not impede how the developer sells their data. Want some of your partners to be able to store/decision upon your data for 180 days? As the technology pipes, the container should let developers have freedom to do the deals they want. Too many solutions don’t do this.

Connect to Everyone

In pursuing the goal of making it easier for a developer to run their ad business, the container should focus on maximizing the channels that the inventory can be sold through. This means a commitment to building connections to the SSPs and ad networks that a publisher chooses to work with. When choosing the right container partner, it’s in the developer’s best interest to consider not just the connections the container has built today, but also those that may need to be built in the future. Given how quickly new players in the space can pop up and make an impact, there will almost certainly be a need to add a connection down the road. On average, the 500 largest publishers in the U.S. use about six vendors to sell their inventory. I encourage all developers to dig a level deeper in their diligence on prospective container partners and understand HOW the downstream connections are made from the container to the other SSPs/ad networks. This way, when the day comes that the developer wants to do a deal with a hot new ad network, they know the work will be minimal and can start working with them ASAP.

Transparency is the Default

There is a level of trust inherent to any strategic partnership. In this case, the developer is trusting that the container will be conducting the unified auction in the developer’s best interest. Now, I believe you should trust — but you should also verify. Does your container partner have ways for you to audit the auctions? How do you confirm that the impression is always going to the highest bidder? Or that the container is not advantaging their own demand, which happens too frequently? Asking these questions and understanding how the container is thinking about them can provide valuable insight into the philosophy guiding their product and should be part of the overall diligence. More transparency is always be better — and those vendors willing to be open about their practices are always the better option.

App developers are ready and excited to capitalize on the yield-maximizing benefits of a unified auction the way desktop publishers already have. Having seen the evolution of header bidding, app developers are now armed with information on exactly what to look for as they evaluate potential partners. The future here is bright.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Pat McCormack is Vice President, Publisher Sales Americas, at Oath, a Verizon subsidiary and the parent company of Yahoo, AOL, HuffPost, and other dynamic brands that serve a combined billion global consumers. Prior, Pat was Vice President of Publisher Sales for ONE by AOL: Publishers, at AOL Platforms, the advertising technology division of AOL. Before AOL, Pat was Vice President of Publisher Sales at Millennial Media, which AOL acquired in 2015. He held the same role at Nexage, which Millennial Media acquired a year earlier. Pat has also driven mobile ad sales strategies in senior roles at The Weather Channel and National Football League.

The post Mobile Developers: 3 Keys to Picking the Best Header Bidding Partner appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Available for public comment through May 3, 2018, the technical guidelines provide instructions on best practices for delivering targeted ads, as well as controlling ad frequency and rotation across a wide variety of disparate smart TVs, connected devices, and other OTT systems.

In order to be compliant with these guidelines, devices and apps must store and send the following parameters as part of any ad request:

• An identifier for advertising (IFA) – required, unless the user has opted in to limit ad tracking, an IFA must be a unique value that is completely disconnected from a hardware ID, MAC address, IMEI, or IP address
• An associated IFA type – identifying the source of the IFA, whether device-generated, publisher-provided, or temporary
• Limit ad tracking (LAT) – an opt-out mechanism to respect the user’s privacy choices

The guidelines also feature specific advice and intelligence for consumer electronics manufacturers, OTT app publishers, and ad/measurement platforms to address the needs of each of these stakeholder groups.

“After linear TV, more Americans watch video content on OTT than on VOD or DVR, and the medium is skyrocketing,” said Dennis Buchheim, Senior Vice President and General Manager, IAB Tech Lab. “The traditional semi-persistent cookie we are accustomed to using as an identifier on browsers isn’t at play across OTT systems, so we need to deploy other types of identifiers to ensure that ad experiences are optimal for consumers. These guidelines will direct stakeholders down the path of best practices to allow OTT to grow and evolve as a significant advertising platform.”

“Between smart TVs, connected devices, and other OTT systems out in the marketplace—all with varied approaches to identification—we’re looking at a ‘Tower of Babel’ challenge,” said J. Allen Dove, CTO, SpotX, and member of the IAB Tech Lab OTT Technical Working Group. “The new IAB Tech Lab guidelines solve these challenges and improve overall user experience. We are hoping that others in the industry also contribute their input to make these recommendations even more effective.”

After public comment concludes, the IAB Tech Lab OTT Technical Working Group will evaluate and incorporate the feedback received and release a final version. To review the proposed guidelines, click here.

The post First Look: IAB Tech Lab Releases ‘Guidelines for Identifier for Advertising (IFA) on OTT Platforms’ for Public Comment appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

With TeleSign’s SMS app, Dynamics 365 for Marketing users can seamlessly send SMS-based marketing campaigns including alerts, reminders and notifications to increase engagement, usage and brand awareness.

TeleSign’s SMS app allows anyone to build real-time communications into new or existing web and mobile applications, and scale their usage as needed. These messages can take the form of alerts, reminders, notifications, invites, two-way communications, promotional campaigns, and other marketing messages sent directly from TeleSign’s SMS add-on within Dynamics 365. This differentiated customer experience leads to increased user engagement, higher satisfaction rates, stronger customer lifetime values (CLV) and faster growth.

“It’s projected that 80 percent of business will be communicating with customers via cloud communications by 2020,” said Aled Miles, Chief Executive Officer at TeleSign. “Microsoft Dynamics 365 customers now have the power of TeleSign SMS to easily add messaging capabilities and connect with their customers the way they want to be engaged.”

Sona Venkat, General Manager, Microsoft Corp. added, “We’re excited to have TeleSign offer businesses the ability to provide timely, personalized information to their users via SMS, enhancing the customer journey and enabling digital transformation. We’re confident these scenarios will drive tremendous value for our mutual customers.”

With TeleSign’s SMS app, Dynamics 365 for Marketing customers can communicate more effectively with their audiences and provide a critical customer touchpoint throughout their lifecycle using SMS.

To learn more about TeleSign and its communications offerings, click here.

The post SMS Messaging Innovator Integrates with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post from Iqbal Kaur, co-founder of Zylotech.

In a highly competitive market, it is critical for a marketer to know who the right person is for sending information about their latest marketing campaign. It is not simply looking for any existing customer, but the customer who would be most likely to act on the specific offer provided.  By sending the correct message, to the correct person, at the appropriate time, a company achieves the following:

1. The best return on marketing effort,
2. Saving resources by appropriate targeting,
3. Making customers feel understood and valued.

To make a long story short, in today’s world where information is readily available, but quickly outdated, it is hyper critical to stay relevant to your customers.

How do I segment my customers?

Now that we understand the need for segmentation, let’s ask the question of how?

Before this process can begin, it’s clear that further information is needed, such as:

• What is my business objective?
• How much data do we have?
• How do we validate our results?

Once we have answers to the above, we begin to segment our customers.   There are several approaches that can be taken.  These approaches depend on the type of information you have and how it is being used.  Let’s take a look at a few:

Life Stage Segmentation

This type of segmentation that groups customers is based on where they are in the course of their lives. Are they young and single? Are they married with children?  This is done using demographic data like age, gender, marital status, number of children at home, etc. One interesting thing to note about this type of segmentation is that it lasts for quite some time–at least a few years–until the customer moves from one life stage to another.

What’s the relevance of Life Stage Segmentation?

Your customer, Sara, has recently had a baby. She makes the trips to her favorite retailer to get diapers regularly. One day Sara receives her mail and finds discount coupons for baby clothing.  Sara is delighted. How did they know? Sara feels understood, and uses the coupons to buy clothes for her baby.  This retailer has managed to personalize, stay relevant, and monetize.

Life Style Segmentation

This type of segmentation looks at what types of products customers buy the most.  Are they always buying the latest gadgets? Do they prefer branded products? Do they like buying things on sale? Here we mostly use information about the attributes of the products that customers are buying and at what price point.

What is the relevance of Life Style Segmentation?

Your customer, Kevin, loves gadgets. He’s been waiting for the launch of the next big cell phone. He does not want to miss out on information about the pre-launch offers at his favorite retailer. He waits and waits, and never gets any information.  Sara, however, does receive this promotion. Sara didn’t need a phone.  Kevin is frustrated. He decides to buy the phone from a different store. Having the insight to find your Kevins and Saras on an ongoing basis is a solid basis for promotional strategies.

RFM Segmentation

This type of segmentation is interesting, so let’s explore it in a bit more detail.   Here we are looking at a customer’s purchase behavior.

• Recency: When was their last purchase?
• Frequency: How frequently do they buy?
• Monetary Value: How many sales do we get from them?

This is the most popular form of segmentation as it yields very useful information from basic transaction data. Let’s take a look at RFM Segmentation using five questions:

Question 1: What is my purpose?

Before we start getting into details, let’s do a small exercise. As retailer, which of the following customers is more valuable to you?

• Rony: He made 2 orders, spent $200 and came last week
• Sandra: She made 2 orders, spent $1000 and came 5 months ago

At first glance, it looks like Sandra is most valuable.  She spent big bucks, but it’s important to note that she hasn’t been to the store in quite some time.   Rony he has come in more recently, but has spent much less. How do we crack this riddle?  Let’s continue using RFM segmentation to make this question easier.  Now that we have set the context, we can move on.

Question 2: What data is required?
Interestingly, we can derive all our fields from our basic POS transaction data. We just have to get the numbers rolled up at the customer level. Let’s see how.  Recency is calculated by the last order day subtracted from the current day and, obviously, less is better.  Frequency is the total number of orders for a particular customer. Here, more is better. Monetary is the sum of the total sales from a particular customer, and more is certainly better.

Question 3: How do we create these segments?

Here is a step by step look at the model creation process:

Step 1: Data to scores.  The first step is to create our individual R, F, and M scores. Here we simply put the data in ascending order and divide the data into five equal parts (Pentiles). Each of these pentiles is then given an ordinal score of 1 to 5. Each customer receives a score for each for the 3 metrics. Now, we concatenate the 3 scores in the order of R, F and M and get a 3 digit score for every customer

Step 2: Scores to segments: Each of the possible 125 scores are then used to identify visual patterns to get a handful of manageable behavior types.  The easiest way to identify visual patterns is to put the average value for all the customers in each R, F & M table into a stacked contingency table.

Question 4: How do we get these results?

The whole segmentation is done by an unsupervised method along with a bit of human inspection. Again, this is not a predictive activity, this is a classification activity.  Keeping this in mind, we do not have any post analysis diagnostics to validate our results. The best way is to split the data into test and validation periods to see if the segments remain stable. For example, we would build the segments on 2018 data and validate on 2017. Do the segments show very similar profiles? If they do, this method is fine!

Question 5: How does the business use this information?

This information is widely used by marketing teams to identify their most valuable customers.  Perhaps the marketing team needs to understand which of their recently inactive customers should be approached with retention efforts.   It is easy to identify the best candidates by looking at their RFM segments.  Segment information can also be used to identify customers most likely to enroll into loyalty programs.  Also, if we have further information on the demographics of each segment. We see a neat profile of the typical high value customer

Closing Notes

Hopefully this article has helped you gain a better understanding of the importance of customer segmentation, and also taught you a bit about some of the most popular methods. The two most important questions you must always ask are: What is my business objective? and How do I make the segments relevant for the business and the customer?

The post Opinion: What’s the deal with Customer Segmentation? appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The investment brings Virtualitics’ total funding to in excess of $11 million in support of its mission to make big data more useful and effective for all enterprises.

Virtualitics technology has been implemented by several major global Fortune 500 businesses across multiple industry sectors, including consumer goods, healthcare, energy and finance.

Michael Amori, Virtualitics Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, commented: “With this funding, we will enter the next phase of Virtualitics’ development and continue to unlock the potential of big data through the power of virtual reality, augmented reality and artificial intelligence. We’ve started enabling some of the world’s leading companies to harness transformative insights that provide real competitive advantage for their businesses, and we will continue to onboard customers throughout the course of the year.”

Ciro Donalek, CTO and Co-Founder, added: “Turning big and complex data into useful insights requires new ways to analyze and interact with it. We’ve solved for this by coupling AI with immersive environments. Moreover, business intelligence platforms need to be 3D and collaborative by design in order to help companies gain a deeper level of understanding in the stories being told by the raw data. This is how we’re approaching big data and helping evolve the next generation of data analytics and intelligence platforms.”

For more information about the Virtualitics solutions, visit www.virtualitics.com.

The post Virtualitics Scores Millions in Funding To Unlock Big Data Insights For Global Companies appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

CB is a series of premium Blockchain events that connect ICO companies with the brightest industry minds and the latest in technological innovation. CB is the place where the future of Blockchain Industry is unboxed and brought to life. And when you consider this study by U.K. research firm Juniper Research, more than half of the world’s large corporations are looking into blockchain (distributed ledger technology), then it’s a high time you consider the blockchain technology. The research highlights that 57 percent of large corporations- defined as any company with more than 20,000 employees- were either actively considering or in the process of deploying blockchain. And two-thirds of companies surveyed said that they expected the technology to be integrated into their systems by the end of 2018.

“It is clear that companies across the board have a significantly greater understanding of blockchain technology than was the case 12 months ago,” the report said.

“This stems in part from a surge in R&D (research and development) both internally and in partnership with third parties, with a recognition that blockchain has the potential to be deployed in a variety of use cases.”

The report added: “As the number of research projects has increased, so too has awareness, both amongst the participants and elsewhere in their industries, with competitor companies in turn beginning to consider whether they too should seek to gain competitive advantage from deployment.”

But here is another opportunity to interact with and learn from the best in the industry, you can’t afford to miss the CB – Blockchain Conference in Silicon Valley. Here are some of the benefits you stand to gain:

1. As an Entrepreneur, you will be able to:

• On-board anchor investors and top-notch advisers.
• Give interviews to the top bloggers and journalists.
• Find partners and high-quality contractors.

2. As an Investor, you will be able to:

• Meet founders and get in depth insights for investments.
• Find LPs and grow the funds under management.
• Exchange market view and investment ideas with peers.

3. As a Journalist or Blogger, you will be able to:

• Get first-hand access to decision makers and trendsetters.
• Be the first to learn resonating insights.
• Find partners to grow your audience.

Headline speakers include:

1. Nadia Brannon, Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations at U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
2. Anant Kadiyala, Director – Blockchain & IoT Industry Solutions, ORACLE.
3. Edith Yeung, One of the top Silicon Valley investors (Inc Magazine), partner at 500 Start-ups. Investor in over 40 start-ups (Hooked, DayDayCook, Fleksy (acquired by Pinterest), Human (acquired by Mapbox), AlSense, Penrose, Cryworks, Sllk Labs, Piper, Apptopia, Mobile Action, Andy OS, Quickly, Powercore, Pack, Ingrain, Switch, Bento, Palantir, etc.). Advisor to Dolphin Browser, Partner at RightVentures.
4. Grant Fondo, former federal prosecutor, N.D. of California, a partner in Goodwin’s Securities Litigation + White Collar, Privacy + Cybersecurity.
5. Konstantin Gladych, CEO, Changelly.
6. Alex Kurashenko, Small Cap Nation, Investment Relations.
7. Patrick Baron, CEO, Ambisafe Financial.
8. Amir Rafizadeh, Managing Director of Client Relations and Member of Advisory Board; Kruse Asset management, LLC.
9. Rafael Soultanov on ICO pre marketing and post ICO token growth
10. VP at Crypterium

The CB – Blockchain Conference will feature the following headline talks:

1. CRYPTO BIG PICTURE- This will feature the following topics:

• Transforming the economy & society
• Supercharging peer-to-peer commerce
• New governance & decentralized autonomous orgs (DAOs)
• Virtual globalization
• Enhancing social impact
• Expanding freedom in vice industries
• Outlook for 2018 and the Future

2. INVESTOR’S TRACK- This will feature the following topics:

• Crypto macroeconomics
• ICOs & Disruption of Venture Capital
• Tokenomics & Utility
• Bitcoin – Digital Gold
• App tokens vs Protocol tokens
• Crypto investments

3. FOUNDER’S TRACK- This will feature the following:

• 50+ companies: Token Pitch Competition
• Token Sale – How-to
• Building a Blockchain Community
• Token Sale Legal Panel
• Exchange panel – How to get listed
• Crypto media influencers
• Token economy

4. APPLICATIONS COVERED- This will feature the following:

• Cross-border payments
• Tokenization & Securitization of assets
• Non-Financial Applications
• Payments, Ecommerce & Loyalty
• Enterprise Blockchain
• Social Media & Micropayments
• Democratizing AI
• Blockchain + AR

5. DEVELOPERS TRACK- This will feature the following:

• Smart Contract Development
• Privacy and Identity
• Consensus in Blockchain Systems
• Ethereum dApp Development
• Security and Scalability
• Blockchain Development Tools
• Blockchain architecture lightning talks

The conference will also include a special event and this will feature the following:

• Napa Valley Wine Tour
• Award ceremony for ICO Start-ups Pitch Competition
• San Francisco Bay Tours – boat cruises around the bay
• Power networking with blockchain experts and investors
• After-Party
• VIP Lounge

Registration for the CB – Blockchain Conference is still open, though the tickets are selling out faster than the organisers had earlier anticipated. You can find more information here.

Press contact:

Rafael Soultanov, rafaels@cbconference.io

The post Blockchain Conference in San Francisco Set for March 22-23, 2018 appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post from Jeremy Fain, CEO and founder of Cognitiv.

A lot of people have asked me about my thoughts for 2018, and what I think the overarching trends in advertising technology and deep learning will be in the coming year. Far be it from me to disappoint my fans – so here’s my take on next year’s biggest topics:

1. Marketers will have to start thinking seriously about deep learning.

AI has been a buzzword for the past several years, as clearly evidenced by the vast numbers of products claiming to be AI currently on the market. While most of these applications don’t really live up to the picture of AI that most people have in their heads of a Jetsons-like robot, there have lately been a series of discoveries, most notably in the field of deep learning, that are sure to have a serious impact on the way that most businesses operate.

Deep learning and neural networks are at the heart of some of the most astonishing machine learning developments, from image recognition to the natural language processing that enables gadgets like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home to operate. But access to the technology and insights of deep learning is no longer limited to the big players, as new tools have arrived to bring the computing power and analytical insight of deep learning to marketers.

In some ways, the current wave of AI products is good, because it means that more people, including marketers, have become aware of what AI has the potential to do as well as its possible limitations. As more advanced forms of AI become market-ready, deep learning will be at the forefront of any of those conversations, and marketers will begin to understand the value of using deep learning to buy media and create audiences to advertise against, becoming better equipped to lead their businesses to success in 2018 and beyond.

2. Mobile ad networks will be forced to become more transparent.

Before programmatic became a mainstay of digital advertising, ad networks performed an important function as an intermediary between digital advertisers and publishers. They could help publishers find buyers for their inventory, and they could put inventory from multiple publishers together to make it easier for advertisers to buy. Because most inventory came from smaller publishers, it cost less, and was a cost-effective value proposition for most advertisers.

The rise of programmatic, however, created a way for advertisers to directly buy from any publisher with added transparency into pricing and websites.  Suddenly, ad networks had to deliver more value than just inventory aggregation.  This transition took place in the traditional digital display world years ago but has yet to take place in mobile advertising.  2018 will be the year where mobile ad networks will have to prove their added costs or face the reality that mobile advertisers have begun to use programmatic for user acquisition and retention campaigns.

3. Header bidding will become a problem on the agency side, so its use will diminish.

This relates in some ways to the general theme of greater transparency in the digital advertising markets. Header bidding code allows a publisher to offer the same impression in multiple exchanges at the same time, ultimately leading to the impression being sold for a higher price than if a single exchange was used. This means advertisers are bidding multiple times on the same inventory and, because of the nature of programmatic, they are likely paying more.  Originally, header bidding was meant to allow advertisers to compete programmatically for all of a publisher’s inventory, instead of just the unsold “dregs” that were left over after directly sold insertion orders had been fulfilled.  The technology, however, is now being used to offer the same impression through multiple exchanges to the same DSP.  This has driven DSP costs up because of the skyrocketing number of “duplicate” bid requests being received from multiple exchanges and has given rise to an entirely new ad tech industry of trying to sift through these duplicate impression requests.

A much more elegant, and likely solution in 2018, will be that advertisers through their agencies will require the use of the ads.txt standard.  This file is meant to be made available by every publisher wishing to sell their inventory programmatically.  It lists the exchanges their inventory is available in.  Ads.txt was created to stop a flagrant type of fraud where websites list themselves inaccurately as more valuable websites, but Ads.txt can also be a great tool to cut down on duplicate impressions.  A publisher has the right to sell its inventory any way it chooses, and different exchanges may have different strengths for different types of inventory,  so I do not predict (or advise) that advertisers will require pubs use only one exchange.  In the end though, I predict that header bidding as it is used today is on its way out.  The costs are too high for DSPs and advertisers will realize they are bidding on the same exact impression and ultimately paying a higher price.  I’ve never met an advertiser that liked that.

If there’s any overarching theme here, it’s the idea that marketers and advertisers are constantly getting more savvy about the tools they’re using, whether it’s AI, ad networks, or ad exchanges.  They will begin asking tough questions and demanding accountability in 2018 in new ways that will, as always, lead to big changes in the advertising ecosystem.

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CB is a series of premium Blockchain events that connect ICO companies with the brightest industry minds and the latest in technological innovation. CB is the place where the future of Blockchain Industry is unboxed and brought to life. And when you consider this study by U.K. research firm Juniper Research, more than half of the world’s large corporations are looking into blockchain (distributed ledger technology), then it’s a high time you consider the blockchain technology. The research highlights that 57 percent of large corporations- defined as any company with more than 20,000 employees- were either actively considering or in the process of deploying blockchain. And two-thirds of companies surveyed said that they expected the technology to be integrated into their systems by the end of 2018.

“It is clear that companies across the board have a significantly greater understanding of blockchain technology than was the case 12 months ago,” the report said.

“This stems in part from a surge in R&D (research and development) both internally and in partnership with third parties, with a recognition that blockchain has the potential to be deployed in a variety of use cases.”

The report added: “As the number of research projects has increased, so too has awareness, both amongst the participants and elsewhere in their industries, with competitor companies in turn beginning to consider whether they too should seek to gain competitive advantage from deployment.”

But here is another opportunity to interact with and learn from the best in the industry, you can’t afford to miss the CB – Blockchain Conference in Silicon Valley. Here are some of the benefits you stand to gain:

1. As an Entrepreneur, you will be able to:

• On-board anchor investors and top-notch advisers.
• Give interviews to the top bloggers and journalists.
• Find partners and high-quality contractors.

2. As an Investor, you will be able to:

• Meet founders and get in depth insights for investments.
• Find LPs and grow the funds under management.
• Exchange market view and investment ideas with peers.

3. As a Journalist or Blogger, you will be able to:

• Get first-hand access to decision makers and trendsetters.
• Be the first to learn resonating insights.
• Find partners to grow your audience.

Headline speakers include:

1. Nadia Brannon, Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations at U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
2. Anant Kadiyala, Director – Blockchain & IoT Industry Solutions, ORACLE.
3. Edith Yeung, One of the top Silicon Valley investors (Inc Magazine), partner at 500 Start-ups. Investor in over 40 start-ups (Hooked, DayDayCook, Fleksy (acquired by Pinterest), Human (acquired by Mapbox), AlSense, Penrose, Cryworks, Sllk Labs, Piper, Apptopia, Mobile Action, Andy OS, Quickly, Powercore, Pack, Ingrain, Switch, Bento, Palantir, etc.). Advisor to Dolphin Browser, Partner at RightVentures.
4. Grant Fondo, former federal prosecutor, N.D. of California, a partner in Goodwin’s Securities Litigation + White Collar, Privacy + Cybersecurity.
5. Konstantin Gladych, CEO, Changelly.
6. Alex Kurashenko, Small Cap Nation, Investment Relations.
7. Patrick Baron, CEO, Ambisafe Financial.
8. Amir Rafizadeh, Managing Director of Client Relations and Member of Advisory Board; Kruse Asset management, LLC.
9. Rafael Soultanov on ICO pre marketing and post ICO token growth
10. VP at Crypterium

The CB – Blockchain Conference will feature the following headline talks:

1. CRYPTO BIG PICTURE- This will feature the following topics:

• Transforming the economy & society
• Supercharging peer-to-peer commerce
• New governance & decentralized autonomous orgs (DAOs)
• Virtual globalization
• Enhancing social impact
• Expanding freedom in vice industries
• Outlook for 2018 and the Future

2. INVESTOR’S TRACK- This will feature the following topics:

• Crypto macroeconomics
• ICOs & Disruption of Venture Capital
• Tokenomics & Utility
• Bitcoin – Digital Gold
• App tokens vs Protocol tokens
• Crypto investments

3. FOUNDER’S TRACK- This will feature the following:

• 50+ companies: Token Pitch Competition
• Token Sale – How-to
• Building a Blockchain Community
• Token Sale Legal Panel
• Exchange panel – How to get listed
• Crypto media influencers
• Token economy

4. APPLICATIONS COVERED- This will feature the following:

• Cross-border payments
• Tokenization & Securitization of assets
• Non-Financial Applications
• Payments, Ecommerce & Loyalty
• Enterprise Blockchain
• Social Media & Micropayments
• Democratizing AI
• Blockchain + AR

5. DEVELOPERS TRACK- This will feature the following:

• Smart Contract Development
• Privacy and Identity
• Consensus in Blockchain Systems
• Ethereum dApp Development
• Security and Scalability
• Blockchain Development Tools
• Blockchain architecture lightning talks

The conference will also include a special event and this will feature the following:

• Napa Valley Wine Tour
• Award ceremony for ICO Start-ups Pitch Competition
• San Francisco Bay Tours – boat cruises around the bay
• Power networking with blockchain experts and investors
• After-Party
• VIP Lounge

Registration for the CB – Blockchain Conference is still open, though the tickets are selling out faster than the organisers had earlier anticipated. You can find more information here.

Press contact:

Rafael Soultanov, rafaels@cbconference.io

The post Blockchain Conference in San Francisco Set for March 22-23, 2018 appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.