Machine Learning

Atlanta – The program used to steal credit card data in the recent cyber attack on The Home Depot Inc. is reportedly not the same program used in the 2013 cyber attack on Target. According to Bloomberg, the malware used against Home Depot, FrameworkPOS, operates by impersonating a McAfee antivirus agent.

Nashville, Tenn. – Cognitive computing provider Digital Reasoning has released Synthesys 3.9, the latest release of its machine learning platform for analyzing human language data at scale. Synthesys 3.9 provides capabilities to detect key risk and performance indicators in human communication and automatically connect and aggregate information based on those indicators.

Menlo Park, Calif. – Women’s online shopping marketplace Poshmark is launching PoshMatch, a social merchandising engine that combines community curation and algorithmic technology to match shoppers to merchandise based on their social activity in the app. With PoshMatch, each shopper is greeted with their own real-time storefront built from their personal fashion shopping network and their style preferences.

By Nicole Chen, brand outreach associate and Michael Olmstead, director, Plug and Play Retail

In today’s day and age, technology pervades into every aspect of our lives. With an emphasis on the fast and easy, nearly all of our day-to-day transactions are now being condensed and expressed through technological gateways. With new trends appearing in the startup space and technology industry every day, it is often difficult to choose what is a good investment and what may turn out to be a dud.

I’m excited to announce a new partnership Chain Store Age is launching with Plug and Play Tech Center, an innovative Silicon Valley tech startup investor whose mission is to connect promising tech startups with retail corporations in an attempt to help retailers transition into the technological age. From time to time, you will be seeing Plug and Play-related content on our site and in our magazine.

Walmart held its second U.S. Manufacturing Summit in Denver on Thursday and used the occasion to dole out the first of $10 million in grants designed to stimulate innovation and the creation of U.S. jobs.
 
The initial grants presented this week were given to organizations focused on reducing the cost of textiles manufacturing, including home textiles and apparel, in the U.S. by addressing obstacles throughout production and improving common manufacturing processes with broad application to many types of consumer products.
 

San Mateo, Calif. - Feedzai, a data science company that uses real-time, machine-based learning to analyze Big Data to prevent fraud, has developed e-commerce apps for the Shopify and Big Commerce platforms. The Feedzai apps on Shopify and Big Commerce provide online retailers with real-time information to determine the legitimacy of an order.

Dodgeville, Wis. -- Lands’ End has brought on San Francisco-based Secret Sauce Partners to help improve the retailer’s online shopping experience.

Lands’ End has deployed Secret Sauce’s Fit Predictor service, which proactively finds a customer's best fit in seconds using existing data, without the need for physical measurements.  

San Francisco - SnapUp is launching a free iPhone app that lets users take a screenshot of the item they’re shopping for and then have the product tracked on any retailer’s mobile app or website and compiled in one place. With access to the iPhone’s camera roll, SnapUp recognizes and transforms the screenshots taken, then adds those items to the user’s SnapUp account.

Toronto -- Twitter released a full suite of targeting, creative and measurement tools designed to enable advertisers to promote their mobile apps through the new mobile app promotion (MAP) product.