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Why New York City is Two Dots’ secret design weapon

Jun25
by on June 25, 2015 at 1:52 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Design & Dev, Insider

Photo credit: Nicole Franzen
“You can’t build the next great games studio in New York,” Playdots Inc. CEO Paul Murphy recalls being told. Two hits and 50 million ‘Two Dots’ downloads later, Murphy hasn’t just proved his peers wrong – he’s redefined how location can inspire your product rather than restrain you. Since the company’s birth just a little over two years ago, Playdots has grown from two employees to 29. Its roster is full of designers and developers from around the world – something Murphy says sets it apart from other gaming startups. “Being in New York City is incredibly important to our identity,” Margaret Robertson, Playdots’ Game Director, tells…

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Amazon’s Alexa voice service is now open for third-parties to use in their products

Jun25
by on June 25, 2015 at 1:41 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Gadgets, Insider

amazon echo
Amazon is making Alexa – the voice assistant technology powering its Echo device – open to thirds party developers and manufacturers with a new set of software tools and $100 million in funding to support developers, manufacturers and startups. The Alexa Skills Kit is a collection of APIs and tools aimed at making it easy for developers to add features to Alexa. Amazon says that with a few lines of code, developers should be able to integrate existing web services into Alexa – or create completely new experiences within a few hours. Amazon says developers will need no experience with…

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Learn to design a better UX, with the Immersive User Experience Bundle

Jun25
by on June 25, 2015 at 1:15 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Design & Dev, Offers, TNWDeals

UX wp
A great interface can be the making of an app or website, so it pays to get it right. With this bundle of six courses, you learn how to make your designs immersive and responsive, using a variety of tools and techniques. The standard cycle used by top designers is to build prototypes at speed, get feedback from users, and then make adjustments according to the feedback. Each stage of this process is covered here. Three of the courses teach prototyping, focusing on the Foundation 5 responsive framework, the Framer.js framework for converting Sketch and PSD mockups into interactive prototypes,…

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What does the CRM of 2015 look like?

Jun25
by on June 25, 2015 at 1:02 pm
Posted In: Apps, Around the Web, Business Apps, crm

futurecomms

This post was brought to you by GetApp, your number one cloud business apps marketplace

What does the CRM of 2015 look like? Contact management with a mobile app, maybe some analytics, and integration with email? Throw in some pipeline visualizations and a couple of dashboards, and you’ve got yourself a modern day CRM app. Like with a lot of business software, however, CRMs tend to lag behind when it comes to innovation, preferring instead to stick to flash-free features that literally ‘get the job done’. But what if a CRM application were to embrace the technology of the near future to create something truly customer-focused? Believe it or not, the stuff of the ‘future’…

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Celect helps retailers increase sales by optimizing store layouts

Jun25
by on June 25, 2015 at 12:58 pm
Posted In: AI, Around the Web, Celect, Insider, machine learning

Celect
Ecommerce companies are spoiled for choice when it comes to analytics services that can help them track and optimize their product sales. What about physical stores? Boston-based company Celect has launched a data-driven customer choice modeling suite that helps retail planners create optimized product assortments. Celect’s retail optimization in action Celect says its platform helps stores figure out how to stock their shelves for increased inventory turnover and revenue. It uses machine learning to determine the best assortments by taking into account what was available or viewed when a customer purchased an item. The technology is designed to give brick-and-mortar stores…

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