Amazon’s Global Echo
Amazon is bringing Echo devices to India, the world’s second most populous country, at the end of October. India is saturated with many e-commerce companies, such as Flipkart and Snapdeal, so Amazon hopes to convert Echo users into Prime members. Echo is currently sold in the US, UK, Germany, and will be in Japan later this year. The Alexa-controlled speaker is fluent in 4 dialects (American English, British English, German, and English with an Indian accent) and can even understand sentences that include proper nouns such as places, songs, and movie titles in several Indian languages. Alexa is like that one #goals friend on Instagram who is chilling in a new country each week. (Source: CNET)
Instagram Gettin’ Fancy
Instagram Stories just got some game-changing features. You can now engage friends by adding a “poll” sticker, allowing you to ask questions and list any answer choices you want. Friends can vote on the topic of choice and you get to see who voted for what. Other features include an eyedropper tool to select colors from your pictures and an alignment tool to center text and stickers. In a nutshell, Instagram Stories are now part Snapchat, part SurveyMonkey, and part PhotoShop. Would you use these features? Tap “yes” or “no.” (Source: The Verge)
Big Data, Big Recruitment Opportunities
LinkedIn has over 500 million members and 11 million job listings at any given time. Recruitment is the company’s largest source of revenue, so LinkedIn is introducing Talent Insights in 2018. It is a paid, self-service, big data analytics product that lets recruiters make deep search queries. For example, a recruiter can ask “which companies have been recruiting the most computer vision specialists?” or “what schools are producing the most successful data scientists?” Companies can also compare their recruitment patterns to their competitors. (Source: TechCrunch)
