August 2018 Summaries

In the competitive landscape of eCommerce, traditional retail giants like Sears have struggled to maintain market dominance, as exemplified by their decline alongside Amazon's meteoric rise. Despite Sears's attempt to embrace online retail, the key differentiator for successful eCommerce businesses lies in their ability to innovate and implement emerging technologies such as cognitive services, which include machine learning and artificial intelligence. These technologies enable companies to stand out by offering personalized experiences, utilizing data for targeted marketing, and enhancing customer interactions through tools like chatbots and email automation. The evolution of eCommerce necessitates that businesses continually adapt by leveraging personalization, localization, and second-screen technology to bridge the gap between online and in-store experiences, while exploring future-forward options like AI assistants and delivery drones to cater to the evolving needs of digital consumers.

Cognitive services, encompassing machine learning, artificial intelligence, and distributed algorithms, are revolutionizing the integration of advanced capabilities such as vision, speech, language, and problem-solving into applications and businesses, significantly enhancing efficiency and sustainability. These services are becoming increasingly accessible through APIs from major players like Watson, AWS, and Microsoft, as well as emerging startups, enabling developers to easily incorporate them into new applications. In the realm of eCommerce, cognitive services are transformative, impacting areas like natural language processing for chatbots and shopping assistants, knowledge and discovery for trend analysis and recommendations, and language translation for global reach. They facilitate the creation of intelligent systems that can handle complex interactions, make predictions, and offer personalized recommendations, ultimately enhancing customer engagement and business insights. As cognitive services continue to evolve, they promise to further streamline buying processes and enable data-driven decision-making, with API-driven services allowing businesses of any size to quickly implement next-generation intelligence in their applications.

This blog tutorial provides a step-by-step guide on building a simple two-player racing game using Go and the PubNub Go SDK, which facilitates real-time communication essential for multiplayer games. The tutorial addresses the setup of a basic game lobby where the first player becomes the host and the second becomes the guest, with PubNub managing the exchange of player information and game data. The game involves a progress bar race, with players alternating between pressing the SPACE and RIGHT ARROW keys, and the first to reach 100% wins. The tutorial highlights the need for a robust game lobby, touches on the challenges of ensuring fair play, and provides solutions for managing player presence and game state using PubNub's channel presence feature. It also notes limitations related to terminal size and font settings and suggests restarting the game if there are issues with lobby management.

A/B testing is a crucial tool for game designers and product managers, offering a structured approach to experimenting with various game design elements and making informed decisions. The text highlights the integration of Optimizely A/B testing into a Multiplayer Ninja Platformer game using PubNub's real-time APIs to determine which game levels yield the highest engagement and completion rates. The integration process involves setting up variation variables and tracking metrics in the Optimizely portal, initializing the Optimizely SDK by including the necessary script in the HTML document, and fetching the Optimizely data file to configure A/B testing variables. Once implemented, user interactions can be adjusted through the Optimizely portal, demonstrating its effective integration and utility in game development.

PubNub is a crucial tool for developers in the real-time data space, providing an efficient publish/subscribe design pattern that is often overlooked but essential for modern app development, particularly in applications like chat services. Utilizing PubNub reduces infrastructure management burdens and costs by leveraging a global network of APIs and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), allowing developers to focus on application logic rather than server maintenance. It is recognized as a valuable skill, with over 120 engineers listing it on UpWork, and offers extensive educational resources, including tutorials and webinars, to help both new and experienced developers quickly integrate PubNub into their projects. By using PubNub, developers can take advantage of features like Access Manager for user permissions and Mobile Push Gateway for notifications, facilitating scalable and efficient real-time messaging without the need for extensive engineering resources.

Advancements in technology have made Virtual Reality (VR) more immersive and affordable, enabling the development of interactive experiences that can replicate or transcend reality. This tutorial demonstrates how to create a real-time, multiplayer VR bowling game using A-Frame, PubNub, Glitch, and WebVR, leveraging the capabilities of various smartphone-compatible VR headsets like Google Cardboard, Samsung Gear VR, Oculus Rift, and HTC Vive. WebVR provides a cross-platform JavaScript API that allows users to experience VR through their browsers, while A-Frame is a framework built on the WebVR API to facilitate VR content creation using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Three.js. The game incorporates elements like dynamic bodies through the aframe-physics-system, animations for ball movement, and PubNub for real-time communication between players, allowing them to replicate each other's screens during gameplay. Players can interact with the environment by manipulating objects like pins and balls, and the setup enables switching between static and dynamic bodies to control gameplay physics. The game's structure supports seamless integration of multiplayer features, making it possible to expand from a single-player to a multiplayer VR experience.

As the integration of IoT and cloud computing technologies advances, they are increasingly being utilized to address global challenges in agriculture, such as feeding a rapidly growing population. The text outlines how smart farming, enhanced by Agri-Tech companies like Illuminum Greenhouses, leverages IoT to precisely monitor and manage agricultural resources, thereby promoting sustainable food production. It provides a comprehensive guide on building an IoT-enabled self-sustaining plant system using a Raspberry Pi, sensors, and PubNub’s real-time data infrastructure. The system includes components like a submersible water pump, temperature/humidity sensor, and soil moisture sensor, all of which are integrated with PubNub’s platform to facilitate real-time monitoring and control. The project highlights the potential of IoT in creating efficient and sustainable agricultural practices, offering instructions for setting up and coding the system to automatically manage plant care through a combination of automated and manual modes. This innovative approach not only emphasizes the importance of technological adoption in agriculture but also serves as a model for developing scalable and sustainable farming solutions.

To enhance user experience and engagement in iOS applications, integrating mobile push notifications is essential, particularly using Apple Push Notifications Service (APNs) in conjunction with PubNub. This process involves setting up PubNub by acquiring a token and configuring it with the necessary Apple credentials, followed by creating a new project in Xcode and incorporating the PubNub iOS SDK via CocoaPods. The AppDelegate.swift file is then configured to handle push notifications by importing necessary libraries, initializing the PubNub object, and defining functions to register for and receive push notifications. On the front end, a simple button setup in ViewController.swift allows users to send push notifications, demonstrating the integration's functionality. The guide emphasizes ensuring that the environment is properly configured with the correct credentials and provides code snippets to facilitate the setup, ultimately enabling push notifications to work seamlessly on iOS devices.