Artificial Intelligence

Twitter is giving over every message ever tweeted to the data scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s famed Media Lab. The social media giant is also giving $10 million (throughout a five-year period) to fund the new Laboratory for Social Machines (LSM), which will be based at the Media Lab.

The new initiative aims to build new tools that will analyze and enable communication on social platforms. Twitter will provide full access to its real-time, public stream of tweets, as well as the archive of every tweet dating back to the first.  

Greensboro, N.C. - Convenience store operator Mapco recently partnered with Gilbarco Veeder-Root to install the Impulse upselling platform across 220 sites by the end of 2014. Mapco, which operates 375 stores in the Southeast, is using the Impulse platform to drive dynamic digital content at both the point-of-sale and through their mobile application.

First Data Corporation has bolstered its senior leadership team as part of its ongoing transformation from a payments processor to a collaborative technology company and solutions provider for merchants and financial institutions around the world.

The company promoted two executives to new roles: Barry McCarthy to lead four strategic businesses including the STAR Network and Sanjiv Das to lead First Data’s international business. The company has also brought in two new hires: Andrew Gelb to lead the financial services business and Adam Rosman as general counsel.

By R.J. Carver, Corporate Development Associate, Plug and Play Tech Center

American Express has promoted Neal Sample, currently Enterprise Growth’s chief information officer and chief marketing technologist, to president. He will report to American Express CEO Kenneth I. Chenault and will serve as a member of the company's operating committee.

Sample replaces Dan Schulman, formerly group president of Enterprise Growth, who has resigned his position to become CEO of eBay’s spun-off PayPal business.

San Jose, Calif. – eBay Inc. is reversing course on its previous decision to keep its fast-growing online payments business PayPal as part of the company, and is instead spinning the unit off as a separate publicly traded company. The decision will generate $180 million for activist investor Carl Icahn, who attempted to force eBay to spin off PayPal in a public dispute earlier this year. It comes as the payments sector is heating up and generating increased interest as Apple gets set to launch its Apple Pay mobile payments service.

Ottawa, Canada – Price intelligence technology provider 360pi, is collaborating and integrating with IBM to facilitate more automated and dynamic pricing for joint customers. The resulting solution leverages 360pi’s real-time price intelligence for exact and “like” products within IBM’s cloud-based omnichannel pricing platform.

New York -- SmartFocus announced that U.K. department store retailer House of Frasier has selected SmartFocus' Insights technology to gain a holistic view of their customers and continually deliver personalized interactions that increase engagement.