PSFK

PSFK is an American media company located in New York, New York. The company follows and reports on trends.

History

PSFK examines trends in major corporations. The company does research for corporate clients to determine trends and consumer behaviors. PSFK has tracked consumer data through smartphones and other mobile devices for clients. They were founded by Piers Fawkes in 2004. Fawkes ran his own website with a blog. He relocated from London to New York and started covering technology and other trends on his blog, which formed the basis for PSFK. He worked as a dog walker and other odd-jobs until he started his startup. His first client was Anheuser-Busch. They had seven employees as of 2011. Clients include Coca-Cola, Target Corporation, BMW and Procter & Gamble.

In 2009, PSFK created a list of the top 10 most "inspirational brands," which included Google, Apple, Zipcar, and other major consumer companies. They gathered the list by reviewing the blogs that PSFK had written over a period of time and then had a panel of specialists review the subjects to create the list. They publish The Future of Retail annually, which covers trends and documentation about retail sales. Trends they have reported on include cyborgs, which they believe will become a commonality in technology by 2017.

San Francisco

San Francisco (/sæn frənˈsɪskoʊ/), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the cultural, commercial, and financial center of Northern California and the only consolidated city-county in California. San Francisco encompasses a land area of about 46.9 square miles (121 km²) on the northern end of the San Francisco Peninsula, which makes it the smallest county in the state. It has a density of about 18,187 people per square mile (7,022 people per km²), making it the most densely settled large city (population greater than 200,000) in the state of California and the second-most densely populated major city in the United States after New York City. San Francisco is the fourth-most populous city in California, after Los Angeles, San Diego and San Jose, and the 13th-most populous city in the United States—with a Census-estimated 2014 population of 852,469. The city and its surrounding areas are known as the San Francisco Bay Area, and are a part of the larger OMB designated San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland combined statistical area, the fifth most populous in the nation with an estimated population of 8.6 million.

Watson (computer)

Watson is a question answering computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's first CEO and industrialist Thomas J. Watson. The computer system was specifically developed to answer questions on the quiz show Jeopardy!. In 2011, Watson competed on Jeopardy! against former winners Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. Watson received the first place prize of $1 million.

Watson had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabytes of disk storage including the full text of Wikipedia, but was not connected to the Internet during the game. For each clue, Watson's three most probable responses were displayed on the television screen. Watson consistently outperformed its human opponents on the game's signaling device, but had trouble in a few categories, notably those having short clues containing only a few words.