[Tools] Venngage.com | Create Great Infographics

Infographics are a simple, effective and creative way to capture, represent and share information about any topic. Great infographics surely require great skill to prepare, and we often wonder how these are done.

Well, while there are many tools and services out there, here's one - VENNGAGE.com that should appeal and make it easy to get started. Pick your template, and go for it!

AllDayDevOps.com | Largest, Free DevOps Conference

DevOps is rapidly becoming a way of doing things in many companies, driven by IT/software. If you are already on this ride - or are looking to join in, this is one place you want to be!

All Day DevOps is a FREE online community responsible for creating the world's largest DevOps conference.

All Day DevOps 2017 - coming your way on October 24, 2017 - will offer over 100, 30-minute sessions across six tracks in all time zones, simultaneously.  Tracks include CI/CD, Modern Infrastructure and Monitoring, DevSecOps, Cultural Transformations, DevOps in Government, and the newly created "Tech Crawl" where companies will invite you to a sneak peek of what it's like to work on DevOps in their organization.  

All sessions are practitioner-led with a "no vendor pitch" policy strictly enforced.

Free registration needed. Please check the website for full details. 

[Link] IBM developerWorks - BlockChaim Essentials Course

Blockchain is an emerging technology that can radically improve banking, supply chain, and other transaction networks and can create new opportunities for innovation. Businesses contain many examples of networks of individuals and organizations that collaborate to create value and wealth.

These networks work together in markets that exchange assets in the form of goods and services between the participants.

Blockchain technology provides the basis for a dynamic shared ledger that can be applied to save time when recording transactions between parties, remove costs associated with intermediaries, and reduce risks of fraud and tampering.

The video lectures and lab in this course help you learn about blockchain for business and explore key use cases that demonstrate how the technology adds value.
^Requires IBM developerWorks (free) Registration

[Event] DataHack Summit 2017 | November 2017

DataHack Summit 2017 -
A data science conference by Analytics Vidhya that brings together the finest data scientists from across the country & globe.

Scheduled to be held from 9 – 11 November at Bengaluru, India, be there and see live action in Advanced Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning & Deep Learning.

Visit the DataHack Summit 2017 website for more details and registration.

[Link] Beginner's Guide to Build Data Visualizations using D3.js

Source: http://d3js.org

D3.js is a popular and powerful library that enables the creation of rich data visualizations. Data Visualization - and rich ones in that - are the need of the hour, with a lot of large data becoming the norm in today's digital world.

Analytics and visualization often go hand-and-hand, and this article (in a series of more to come) helps to get started.

Beware the Bot (Platforms) Are Coming

Source: businessinsider.com

Bots, short for software robots, are making news more frequently than we could have imagined. Facebook Messenger, began as a messaging platform, but has now become a popular channel for developing "intelligent" services, that can enable things via chat-like means.

The more formal term for such bots is "conversational bots". And, in order to provide a near-human-like experience, that is, not being able to easily distinguish whether a real human was actually responding and not a software, these bots have to indeed have smarter and cognitive capabilities. Enter, the world of A.I - Artificial Intelligence.

With so many new possibilities, this is a rapidly evolving area today, and along with the bots, many bot platforms are showing up too. While the list is going to be long, we thought of including a few here, that might interest you. These aren't in any manner of preference or selection, just a snapshot of what's there as we jot this down:

• Facebook Messenger
• Flowxo.com
• gupshup.io
• Reply.ai
• MindIQ
• Rainbird.ai
• Cisco Spark
• And, a handy list of "Top 10 Best Chatbot Platform Tools"...

Hope this excites you enough, and get ready for the age of bots: no longer a sci-fi thing!

Study Blockchain - Books to read

Blockchain, Bitcoins and cryptocurrency are changing the world of finance, and are already touted as disruptive. Not just finance, but other industries are also exploring the potential for utilizing, what is claimed to be, amongst the most secure trading and transactional means, especially in the world of money.

However, Bitcoins - and blockchain - aren't necessarily limited to financial domain.

To learn more about this, find useful books at studyblockchain.org from Amit Bharadwaj, founder at Amaze Mining and Research Limited.

[Event] Gartner Data Summit 2017 (June @ Mumbai India)

Data, big data and analytics is on everyone's mind today. Gartner's Data & Analytics Summit 2017, is scheduled for June 6-7 in Mumbai, India, with a host of interesting speakers and sessions.

Visit the website for more details.

Source: www.gartner.com/events