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E-commerce has exploded since Amazon and eBay were founded in 1995. Today, e-commerce is part of everyday life. By 2023, retail e-commerce sales in the U.S. are projected to surpass US$735 billion. Even industries like food, healthcare, and banking, which previously were dominated by offline transactions, are now embracing e-commerce for increased efficiency and cost reductions...

I have been warning about online companies invading our privacy for years. Some very large companies now are under scrutiny by the U.S. government. As the pressure increases, Amazon seems to have come up with a creative solution. It has been offering to pay users US$10 for permission to track them. Interesting While $10 is practically nothing, thi...

Researchers led by speech neuroscientist Edward Chang at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) on Tuesday reported their success at decoding speech attempts in real time by reading the activity in the speech centers of test subjects' brains Three persons capable of normal speech, who were being treated for epilepsy at the UCSF Medical C...

Oracle just published some commissioned research that gives us insights into both CRM generally and the times we live in. A study of more than 1,100 people across several generations found the following: Almost half (43 percent) of consumers have blacklisted a brand as the result of a bad experience; more than one-third (34 percent) of consumers sa...

Google Cloud has expanded its strategic partnership with VMware to push further into hybrid clouds The two companies on Tuesday announced Google Cloud VMware Solution by CloudSimple, a service that lets organizations run VMware workloads in Google Cloud Platform on premises, in a hybrid architecture, or in the cloud.

Capital One Financial Corporation on Monday announced a data breach affecting some 100 million people in the United States and another 6 million in Canada. The FBI arrested the alleged perpetrator of the breach in Seattle Capital One on July 19 discovered someone had accessed its data stored online and obtained personal information of credit card c...

Recent studies have shown that over the last 19 years the average human attention span has fallen from 12 seconds to eight seconds. Sure, four seconds less doesn't sound like much, but for marketers, this means even less time to capture attention and communicate with your audience Quality marketing is not about cramming as much information into one...

Congratulations! You've succeeded in driving online traffic to your product page. So why aren't customers actually clicking 'Add to Cart'? Making successful e-commerce conversions, or transforming your website's visitors into actual paying customers, isn't an easy feat. Expertise in doing it well and accurately is key to your long-term growth. This...

GitHub is blocking users in Crimea, Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Syria from accessing its services to comply with U.S. trade control laws. The Microsoft-owned company disclosed the action on a support page as a courtesy, noting that GitHub users ultimately are responsible for ensuring that their use of GitHub's products and services complies with a...

Apple's 2019 crop of iPhones haven't been released yet but there's already talk about its 2020 plans, largely because that will be the first year the company's mobile lineup will support 5G Ming-Chi Kuo, an Apple analyst known for his accurate predictions, wrote in a note to investors that he believes all three iPhones introduced in 2020 will suppo...

The contact center uses familiar benchmarks to determine if a call, chat or email is successful or not. Call metrics such as net promoter score (NPS), handle time, and amount of silence are correlated with positive or negative outcomes. However, insights from speech analytics technology prove that these metrics only tell part of the story. What's ...

Launching a new car company and getting it to global scale isn't something that happens often, and it has been a long time since there has been a successful launch of one in the United States. Tesla really stands alone as the only new U.S. car company of scale since American Motors and Studebaker failed decades ago, when three auto companies then dominated the U.S. industry. One of those car companies, Chrysler, first was owned by Mercedes and then Fiat. ...

Finance and accounting technology became the No. 1 software budgeting priority for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), according to a survey conducted last year by Capterra. Almost 54 percent of respondents were budgeting to invest in accounting tools in the next 12 to 24 months, with those in the retail industry specifically forecasting to spend between US$30,000 and $40,000. Given the ultra-competitive market in which SMBs operate, and the remarkably intricate compliance landscape they have to navigate, these findings are not surprising.

It's about time -- or better said, it's timely. The Justice Department earlier this week announced it was opening antitrust investigations into some of the biggest tech companies around, including Facebook, Google, Amazon and others. This is nothing that either the public or the companies involved should fret about For a long time, I've been writin...

CBS earlier this week went dark across AT&T's U-verse and DirecTV services days after the seven-year contract between the two companies expired. As the two couldn't come to new terms, CBS and its related channels -- including CBSN, CBS Sports, and The Smithsonian Channel -- were blacked out This latest disruption in service affected viewers in majo...

It was bound to happen. Salesforce was going to China at some point, and it announced that action this week saying it was partnering with Alibaba. There are so many ways to read this, but I don't have the filters to resist comparing the announcement to what Robin Williams once said about cocaine: "Cocaine is God's way of telling you you are making...

Amazon is keenly interested in protecting the intellectual property rights of its third-party sellers because the company depends upon them for their long-term success. In a recent newsletter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos explained that third-party sellers currently make up a majority of the site's gross merchandise sales, with the share of revenue from third-party sellers having grown from just 3 percent in 1999 to 58 percent today.

The United States Department of Justice on Tuesday announced an antitrust probe into big tech, following several months of rumors that it was about to do so The DoJ plans to review how the leading online platforms achieved market power and whether they have engaged in practices that reduced competition, stifled innovation, or otherwise harmed consu...

A flaw in a Facebook app designed for children under 13 years old allows kids to chat online with people unapproved by their parents The messaging app is designed to give parents control over who their kids text and video chat with online, but a bug in the software lets a contact approved to chat with one child talk to another without the approval ...

CRM systems are the lifeblood of many businesses, and the volume of customer data within them keeps growing as companies digitize more processes. That data often is not being used to its full potential, beyond basic reporting on sales metrics and marketing campaigns. With the advent of mainstream machine learning and artificial intelligence techno...