Articles by Jack M. Germain

Marketing trends have reached the point where SMBs need digital tools just as much as their enterprise-sized competitors to establish a dependable customer experience (CX) Cultivating repeat customers is a critical necessity in the continuing customer shift to mobile-first interactions for a potential product or service purchase....

When 21-year-old Linus Torvalds, a then computer science student from Helsinki, released a new type of computing system built on a kernel he created on Aug. 25, 1991, he laid the foundation for what became the Linux operating system Today the Linux community is estimated to be 86 million users strong. It has become the backbone of large enterprises...

August 25 marks the 30th anniversary of the release of a free computer operating system that revolutionized nearly every industry and helped spread the open-source movement globally First came the software kernel that made it possible for the creation of the initial Linux distributions. Then came more new computing platforms by other software devel...

Online consumers have voted with their fingers what they think of e-commerce websites that provide a poor experience. In exchange for a less than satisfactory buying experience, shoppers are abandoning their digital shopping carts to show their displeasure Fast -- a shopping and checkout platform for e-commerce sites -- released survey results in J...

Happy Birthday, Linux. At 30 years old, you have made quite a reputation for yourself. Having spirited the rise of open-source software, you have turned the world of proprietary computing upside down Of course, you had a bit of a premature start. You entered the world of technology with little more than a kernel to call your own. That was the inten...

In September 2020 Jacque Montague Raymer, developer and creator of the MakuluLinux family of distributions, released a new distro inspired by a project he shelved several years ago. On Aug. 10 of this year, he released an upgrade that puts an expanded "Shift Distro" into revolutionizing the Linux distribution's user interface MakuluLinux Shift is a...

You are young -- as in under 30 -- are smart and have financial support. That makes you a great candidate to start your own business and most likely to meet with astounding success. Right? Do not yet quit your day job! The numbers borne out by ample research say you could be wrong....

Brands are seeking new and eye-catching ways to stay relevant with their ads amid the continuing surge of online shopping. As marketers look for every possible scenario to feed the consumer frenzy for digital deals, social media -- TikTok included -- could offer them one of their best options Social media outlet TikTok may be the key to advertisers...

E-commerce and m-commerce are transforming the economic landscape. Both markets were steadily growing before the pandemic. But since then, consumers have been fueling both types of commerce with a frenzy For instance, global e-commerce is expected to yield $6.5 trillion by 2023, growing at a 17.5 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR). That rep...

Tapping into natural language understanding (NLU) technology as part of an overall approach to managing customer relations improves the experience that businesses provide to their customers In a 2020 study conducted by Cisco, 93 percent of participants agreed that technology is very important in creating a better customer experience. Brands already...

Bitdefender security researchers have uncovered a Romanian-based threat group active since at least last year targeting Linux-based machines with weak Secure Shell Protocol (SSH) credentials The researchers discovered the group was deploying Monero mining malware used to steal cryptocurrency. That malware also allows other kinds of attacks, accordi...

As if online vendors did not have enough changes to handle in this post-Covid marketing environment, the impending loss of third-party digital cookies will soon force the e-commerce advertising industry to shift its strategies fast Third-party cookies will soon be a thing of the past. Within the next two years, Google will completely stop selling w...

Lifetime Value, or LTV, is key to growing your business. Without it, you might as well turn off the lights and go home LTV is the total amount of money that a merchant receives from a customer's entire lifetime of association with a seller. Thus, if you have an e-commerce store and your average customer spends $200 per year for an average of three ...

Anyone with a stake in keeping ahead of cybersecurity assaults and enterprise network intrusions through an application programming interface (API) vulnerabilities can now tap into expert advisories and security reports Salt Security, on July 14, announced the launch of Salt Labs, a now-public forum for publishing research on API vulnerabilities. T...

A new e-commerce trend catching on as the pandemic stranglehold on consumer access to brick-and-mortar stores loosens is converging shopping with playing games as a source of entertainment One good example is startup Tophatter. This retail discovery marketplace where shoppers go to spend time, rather than to save time, is what its CEO Ashvin Kumar,...

Shouldn't you get paid when businesses use your personal information gleaned from the internet? How much is your personal data posted online worth to you? Would you register your personal data so that you get paid when companies track you and use your own data to target you for ads? That is precisely what Invisibly lets you do....

A better customer journey is the roadmap businesses need to meaningfully improve their customer experience Bloomfire in May published a report that shows 88 percent of companies are ill-equipped to handle customer expectations, which have continued to rise during the pandemic. Companies also face the operational obstacles of integrating customer kn...

This summer brings hefty changes to Google's search algorithm. Software developers and website operators need to think about how to keep their sites ranking on top. Failing to do so can have a devastating impact on finger traffic that ads and page clicks have on business results. Google went live earlier this summer with its new Core Web Vitals al...

One of the little-known marketing secrets on Amazon is how seller aggregate organizations drive product and seller buyouts These companies can greatly impact the broader market. On the surface, aggregate companies become what amounts to sub-stores within the marketplace....

The magnitude to which retail stores recover when consumers fully adjust to post-pandemic routines may well hinge on the shopping experiences they offer, whether online or in-person Despite U.S. storefronts reopening, e-commerce is still seeing a surge in sales. To maintain retail success in 2021, retailers will need to continue optimizing their di...