Written By: An IntelliGenesis AI Specialist It seemed only appropriate for this newsletter to talk about resorts! I’ll even start with Velas Resorts. In 2011, Velas Resorts ran a promotion in which they gave away a free wedding package valued at about $13,000. To enter the contest, all you had to do was Like their Facebook page. The contest ran for about 6 weeks, and in that time they received nearly 7000 Likes, 700 Twitter followers, and thousands of page views. For reference, Doritos aired a 30 second commercial at Super Bowl 50 at a cost of $5 million, and is estimated to have gained 7000 Twitter followers. So Velas Resorts got 10% of the impact for less than 1% of the money. It’s clear that social media is a phenomenal way for smaller companies to make big leaps in building their brand. We all know that businesses are gathering and using more data than ever about their customers to provide better products and services. Hotels and resorts are no exception. What’s unique about hospitality organizations is that they can leverage this data to provide better service on an individual level.

Written By: An IntelliGenesis Senior All-Source Intelligence Analyst This is what most of our days consist of– large unruly sets of non-sense that we must make sense. Or that used to be the case, more than likely nowadays we are looking at multiple haystacks of data. Some of those will be kind to us and have some form of structure, most will not. It is said that by the year 2020, the amount of digital data will breach 40 zettabytes. We all know some form of structured data–from banking records and medical records to inventory stock lists. The data within each cell for instance will be formatted in a single fashion (think a UPC code or serial number) and it can only ever be that format. Unstructured data on the other hand is structured data’s unruly cousin Eddy. It will contain some bit of information that you need, but it will not be in a well-defined field nor will it be consistently formatted throughout. Now imagine taking the structured data and trying to link it via one of its edges to the table of cousin Eddy data. You would end up just as crazy as Clark.

Written By: An IntelliGenesis AI Specialist 2017 flew by! Happy New Year from the Tech Leads! We have seen many things take off this past year and talked about some pretty cool tech topics, IoT (Internet of Things), Data Visualization, Scaling Cloud Platforms and the Evolution of Cyber just to name a few. This year we hope to bring you even more insight into tech trends and happenings. To kick off this year, let’s touch on something you are probably already a little familiar with, but that we believe will take off even more so over the next 1-2 years. That is embedded voice services, such as Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana and Apple’s SIRI. We all have some experience with each of these, but the topic here is not the use of, but rather the expansion of their use across new platforms.

Written By: An IntelliGenesis Senior Software Engineer

Back in the early days of programming, programmers had few choices when it came to programming languages. Times have certainly changed. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Spectrum regularly ranks the top languages, and in 2017, they ranked the top 48 languages based on popularity. The languages ranged from Python in the number one spot, to ActionScript (a version of Flash) taking the number forty-eight spot.