[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.