Here Are The 5 German Startups from 2 Use Cases of AI in Marketing You Need to Know

According to the German Economic Institute, there are to date 164 AI startups in Germany, most of which are based in Berlin, which is expected, considering it’s known as the Silicon Valley of Europe. I had the opportunity to learn about some of them in person at Asia-Pacific Week 2019 Berlin. AI startups cover a variety of industries, but of course, I am most interested in AI application in the marketing industry and the different uses and opportunities it presents. Even within the marketing industry, AI applications can cover a wide variety of purposes. For example, who recalls the Big Data buzz a few years ago? Well, having access to large sets of data is useless without the ability to accurately draw insights from it… That’s where machine learning, a subset application of AI, comes in. Without going into too many technical details, AI-based machine learning algorithms process Big Data, performing Data Labeling/Segmentation, Data Analytics, and Scenario Simulation, to create a big picture with insights and patterns that are sorted out, categorized, and packaged into a digestible form.

Apart from the wealth of knowledge and contacts that I got from attending APW2019, I got my hands on The Hundert Startups of Germany 2018, which, as the title implies, introduces a 100 of the most promising startups in Germany as of 2018. So without further ado, and in no particular order, here are 5 German startups from 2 use cases of AI in the marketing industry that I believe are worth checking out and learning about:

Customer Service

Perhaps one of the most mainstream and familiar use case of AI in Marketing are Chatbots. Chatbots aren’t new; they’ve existed since perhaps E.L.I.Z.A in 1966, or if you were like me, you’d recall from your teen years, messing around with A.L.I.C.E from 1995. But of course, the most modern depiction of intelligent chatbots would be Siri, followed by Google Now, Alexa and the army of FB Messenger Bots. The popularity of chatbos in modern business was catapaulted with the use of AI and machine learning, which made them not only an exciting way to engage with customers but an effective method to streamline some customer service processes, and ultimately increase sales. Capitalizing on the rising success of bots of customer service are these German startups:

1. Solvemate

   Solvemate is a quick to setup and easy to use SaaS platform that uses machine learning to automate 24/7 customer service. What makes Solvemate special? Their virtual agents use only multiple-choice questions to dynamically generate decision trees. With this unique approach, Solvemate clients can reach an average self-service rate of 83% in less than three months, and offer the right solutions in just 12 seconds and in multiple languages.

2. Twyla

   Twyla positions itself as the world's first professional conversation design software for chatbots. It doesn’t simply give businesses access to an AI-equipped chatbot, but the ability to train it by designing conversational patterns with their own terminology and vocabulary. This gives marketers the chance to personalize a brand’s chatbot to be an accurate extension of the brand’s voice and personality.

3. Mesaic

   Mesaic is a platform for high mobile engagement through messaging, that leverages the power of automation and AI to transform customer interactions into personalized experiences and continuous relationships across all touchpoints. Beyond chatbots, it specializes in omnichannel and e-commerce solutions that integrates all customer service needs such as browsing products, concluding transactions with payment, and rating.

   Market Research

   This may be a lesser mainstream use case of AI in marketing, but certainly a very important one. Unsurprisingly, advanced data analysis is the #1 AI-tech expected to make an impact on the industry, with 63% of market researchers saying AI will take over data analysis within 10 years, according to a report by Qualtrics. Although 75% of market researchers believe that data produced by AI will be more accurate than it is today, only 40% expect it to explain survey findings as well as humans within 10 years. This sentiment was shared by Dr. Feiyu Xu, Vice President of Lenovo Group and Head of AI lab of Lenovo Research, in her presentation in APW2019. That’s exactly what makes this a good niche market to invest in now, and why these German startups deserve a shout-out:

4. i2x

   This startup, while also revolving around customer service, focuses real-time conversation analytics and coaching. It aims to improve the communication skills of sales and customer support agents, rather than replace them with chatbots. It empowers them by recording customer calls for playbacks, and analyzing them with a clever combination of machine learning algorithms, big data and communication know-how to improve crucial KPIs (conversion rate and C-Sat score). It also gives feedback to the agents right after each call to level up their communication skills with features such as blacklisting keywords from annoying speech habits, and advising on talk-to-listen ratio, speech rate and volume.

5. Tawny

Tawny is a pioneer in the field of multimodal AI-powered emotion analytics as it specializes in Emotion AI to “make the world’s products, services and experiences more empathetic”. It enables the analysis of human data from different sensors (e.g. physiological, video, text) to detect emotions and affective states using recognition algorithms powered by affective computing. Among other applications such as the development of tailor-made algorithms for the Automotive industry and detection of athletes’ states to predict future performance, emotion detection allows the assessment of user behavior that can aid User Experience designers and market researchers.

Expected revenue in the emotion detection and recognition (EDR) market to grow from USD 6.72 Billion in 2016 to USD 36.07 Billion by 2021 (Emotion Detection and Recognition Market by Technology (Bio-Sensor, NLP, Machine Learning), Software Tool (Facial Expression, Voice Recognition), Service, Application Area, End User, And Region - Global Forecast to 2021", published by MarketsandMarkets). Image Credit: HYVE/TAWNY.

Beyond the marketing industry, AI has a major impact on the business models of German startups, especially considering 31.6% of them are in the information and communication technology. While 83% of startups sales are made in Germany, 95.4% of these startups plan to target the European market in the future, with other markets being a much lower priority., according to the Deutscher Startup Monitor 2018. So while AI German Startups may not be up to compete on a global scale, they can still serve as interesting case studies for the application of AI in marketing.

What startups from your country do you find most inspiring? Tag them in the comments!

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How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Edtech Trends

“Technology will never replace great teachers, but technology in the hands of great teachers is transformational"… a quote that quite supports the use of technology in education. Thus, there is no question as to whether technology belongs in education. The question is what and how!

Year on year, educational technology (edtech) crosses decades in the world of innovation, with more technologies springing that find their way into the classroom and driving some of the latest trends in edtech, such as:

• Learning Management Systems which have become the embodiment of convenient learning and teaching.
• High quality contents that are accessed with technical devices and should be intelligible enough to bring change in the world of education.
• Immersive learning through various technologies such as virtual reality, mixed reality and augmented reality that can bring learning to life.
• Online social networking and social media tools such as discussions, comments, communication and feedback that can foster group studying and bonding.

Even with their increasing popularity in education, such technologies still face several challenges such as:

• A hesitation to change and adopt new tech, as it often requires a change in the teaching methods and standards.
• A cost crunch as these new educational technologies often cost money that institutions don’t have adequate funds for.
• Too many choices to handle with high competition driven by new startups and companies making it difficult to be noticeable.

These challenges, and many more, are addressed in the STIMEY project head on, to capitalize on edtech in STEM learning. Being developed based on a well-researched pedagogical framework geared towards STEM education, STIMEY ensures that the technologies adopted in its learning environment are designed for educational purposes and in support of teaching and learning, rather than merely being adapted in education for being trendy. Moreover, the learning environment is being built based on co-participatory design principles, with teachers, students, parents, organizations coming together with our experts and researchers, ensuring the best fit of technologies based on their needs, thus they’re less likely to resist the change.

The integration of several technologies such as robots, radio, and social media in a web-based learning platform with different capabilities also come at no cost to the users, giving institutions the ability to exploit their full potential. Additionally, the platform is open-access, giving institutions as well as individuals also the opportunity to add their own content, link their resources, and promote their edtech products and services in support of the users’ learning and teaching needs.

Thus, we’ve made it our mission in STIMEY to stay on top of trends while addressing their challenges, but we’d still like to hear from you in the comments of what other trends and challenges you think we should keep our eye on!

For collaborations and active participation in the project, reach out to us.

References:

https://edtechtimes.com/2017/09/22/xr-education-immersive-technology-in-education-today/

https://elearningindustry.com/6-edtech-trends-watch-2017

https://elearningindustry.com/edtech-trends-and-challenges-in-2017

http://www.thinkmind.org/index.php?view=article&articleid=aict_2017_4_30_10061 

My Top 5 Productivity Tools

As an independent social media consultant, I have the flexibility of working from home (or mostly hotel rooms and wherever I am while traveling)... And while I very much enjoy that I can work in my PJs, wake up and sleep whenever I want to, work at my own pace while watching TV, and take a break or travel when I feel like it... I have to confess that it tends to get out of hand, and I easily lose focus and track of work. Try to separate work life from personal life when you work from your personal space, and your job is all about spending time online on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the tons of other distracting social networks! So while my work life might look awesome on the outside, on the inside it is quite hectic, unorganized, confusing, and can get overwhelming... Up until I decided to restructure and organize it! And given how I'm all about tech, I of course turned to tech for help and began my search for tools and applications to manage and increase my productivity. Whether you work independently, or just want to make your job easier, here are the tools I recommend:

1. RescueTime

This is the first app that I found, used and was mind-blown by it... It is so simple yet very crucial! It basically tracks how you spend your time on the devices where you have it installed (I have it installed on my laptop and mobile phones) and gives a visual report of what the time was spent on with different categories, ranging from very distracting to very productive. You can set a goal of how long you want to spend on Business/Productive tasks vs Distracting tasks, and know exactly how to work towards that goal as you see where your time goes... The app has so many awesome features that you must check out, but I specifically like that it syncs across all my devices, and sends me a weekly summary, seen below, of how my time was spent, showing the most productive days, times, activities, and applications, and the most distracting apps that I need to learn to avoid (Whatsapp much?!).

What I love is that by knowing which time and day I am most productive, I can plan to have the most daunting tasks performed then where I am less likely to prone for distraction. The only issue however is that social networking sites are categorized as Very Distracting, which is realistic, but given that my work involves social media, I can not separate between the productive/business use of social networking sites and the distracting/personal use. Still, that's a problem you only have to worry about if you're in my line of work; otherwise, you're going to love it! 

2. KanbanFlow

This is a web-based tool where you have a work board with tabs to manage tasks and to-do lists. It's quite easy to set up and use, and leave open in your browser for a quick glance to stay on top of your work responsibilities. The tool has so many useful features such as adding description, tags, color-coding tasks, adding due dates, subtasks, team members, sending you email reminders when you're approaching due dates or tasks are overdue, etc... Ok you get it, it has everything and it's awesome and I love it :P It's usually the first thing I check out every day and regularly update! FYI (for your information/inspiration), below you can see a snapshot of my own workboard... 

I just love clearing out that "Do today" and "In progress" columns, and look at all the tasks I've "Done" to feel like I've accomplished something! As That itself increases motivation and productivity. The downside of Kanbanflow is that it is only web-based; it would be great to have a mobile version of it. 

3. Handle

This beautifully designed app is an integration between email, to-do lists, and calendar; so it is the perfect app if most of your work happens on or comes from your inbox! I personally didn't use it much, as I was already using KanbanFlow to organize my projects' to-do list, but I recently felt that Handle can be better suited to "handle" those small tasks that are coected to an email message, and can save me the time to manually add it to KanbanFlow with a link. So you may want to save the large recurring project tasks to Kanbanflow, and use Handle for small/communication tasks. But even on Handle, you can organize to-do tasks by project, and add reminders and due dates that would sync with your Google calendar...

Unfortunately, I seem to be having trouble adding due dates, not sure why; the other downside is that it does not have a mobile app, but rather a browser extension/desktop app ... Don't these developers know we spend most of our time on mobile rather than desktop! But we can't complain, the app is practical and free, and would sure come in handy. 

4. Toggl

This is more of a project time management tool that basically works as an automatic timer, with an option to add time manually, to track how much time you spend on each specific project, as opposed to RescueTime which tracks the time you spend on a specific application/website instead of project. It can be useful especially when different projects have different time priorities, and are costed differently based on hourly rate, to make sure that your time is spent on the most profitable/top priority projects, and you're being productive where it actually counts!

The upside of it is that there is a mobile version of this app, but the downside is that I personally often forgot to click "Start" for every task I started working on, and sometimes I forgot that I had the timer ruing for a task while I was not really working on it but was actually distracted or even away. Still, it can be useful if you can actually remember to use it, and it can especially come in handy where the other apps may fall short, like in tracking the time you spend on doing online research for work by visiting many different websites. You can then log in that time as "productive", when RescueTime would not recognize the significance of those sites separately and may even consider them distracting (unless you manually go change each site's categorization in the app).

5. gTasks

It's a little embarrassing perhaps to include this in the list with the others, but it is the first app I started using long before the rest. gTasks, or Google Tasks, is a simple task list app by Google that integrates with your Gmail tasks. The advantage of it is that because of how simple and easy it is to use, it saves you time and effort in adding tasks and due dates. gTasks is my go-to app when I'm out in a meeting, or moving around, and need to quickly make a note/list of things to do, before I move onto the other tools for more elaborate task management. You can also easily send the list by email, or share it in many other means; you can check tasks as done in one tap, and see everything in one place. The same developers also developed another similar app called TickTick that you can also check out if you need something like gTasks but more advanced. TickTick lets you add attachments, comments and location to your lists, as well as active links.

So this is it! That's all I need and use so far to manage my productivity and I hope you give them a try and find them as useful as I did... If you do try them, let me know what you think, and if you are using other productivity tools that work well for you, give me your recommendations below.