AI’s not all bad — here are 4 good things it may do by 2030 Conversational commerce This refers tovoice-drivensales activity in which the natural voice is the customer’s, interacting with an AI-driven bot voice at the vendor’s end. It is different from today’s e-commerce pattern, where the customer goes through a sequence of steps: visiting the vendor’s website, reviewing a series of pictures, entering their choice, keying in delivery directions, providing credit card information, and then confirming the purchase....

In a recent push by Al Jazeera the Middle East’s largest news Network has released two new smartphone apps for the Android and BlackBerry in a shift from its standard Live Streaming model provided for iPhone users. The launch comes a couple of months after the firstAl Jazeera English LiveAndroid app quietly hit the market this year raising the Al Jazeera smartphone app stack to4 appsrunning on BlackBerry, Samsung Wave (Widget), Android, and Nokia....

Update: Al Jazeera’s Transparency Unit has been blocked by the Palestinian Telecommunication Group,read more here. In a second of its kind initiative (afterWikileaksthat is) the world’s leading Arabic news network Al Jazeera has launched a Wikileaks-like whistleblower platform for the world with a focus on the Middle East. The platform branded “Al Jazeera Transparency Unit” provides a secure (with Public Key Encryption) website for interested individuals to send in digital documents to “shine light on notable and newsworthy government and corporate activities which might otherwise go unreported....

It’s no surprise Al Jazeera has received praise on its phenomenal coverage of the uprising in Egypt. What makes it so special is the fact that none of the other global networks have even come close to doing the same. While the reason that Al Jazeera has been able to provide world class coverage, unmatched by rivals such as CNN and Fox News, is debated bymany, the Qatar-based news channel has released some interesting numbers for its portals online traffic influx....

Updated: The website appears to be back online Being one of the region’s leading news agencies, Al-Arabiya which is part of MBC Group, the largest broadcasting company in the Middle East has been hacked by an unknown group signed only with ‘Crack_Man’ stating it has been ‘powered morocco’. The hackedwebsitecomes in a long lasting tradition of security flaws in the website leading to the recurrent event of the portal being hacked during political instability hits the region usually as an expression of disagreeing with what many consider the news agency’s Western oriented liberal point of view....