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I recently made two major additions to my life -- a second dog and a lake house. On weekends, I need to transport all my stuff and my two dogs to the lake, so I decided to upgrade my SUV to a larger model with an additional row of seats and more cargo space. When I began looking around at available models, I was stunned. The amount of competition ...

Foldable phones faced a setback on Monday when Samsung announced it was postponing indefinitely the release of its Galaxy Fold, which had been scheduled to reach retail shelves in the United States this Friday Samsung pumped the brakes on release of the US$1,980 phone after several reviewers reported problems with their units....

Marrying technical rigidity with unrestrained creativity? Due to its ability to transform brand engagement with creators on social media, programmatic influencer marketing is here to stay Millennial consumers have been abandoning traditional media channels and instead becoming increasingly invested in social media. However, with an overwhelming amo...

The big news last week was that Apple finally agreed to settle its fight with Qualcomm. Kudos to Tim Cook, because I've known a lot of CEOs who rather would have fought to the death than admitted they were wrong -- and not only wrong but acting disingenuously the entire time. (Fighting this to the death would have been far worse.) What spurred the...

NICE inContact this week released the Spring 2019 version of its CXone cloud-based contact center software. It features multiple artificial intelligence-powered updates for smarter customer and agent engagement, plus enhanced customer relationship management integrations NICE inContact CXone "is the most complete, unified, and intelligent cloud co...

The Walt Disney Corporation officially announced Disney+, its direct-to-consumer streaming service, during its Investor Day webcast last week. The new over-the-top (OTT) service will become available on Nov. 12 for a US$6.99-month subscription. Disney+ will arrive with more than 25 new TV programs, as well as more than 10 new movies The service wil...

E-commerce continues to grow at an unprecedented pace. Total retail sales, excluding the sale of items not normally bought online -- like fuel, automobiles, and food at restaurants -- hit US$3.628 trillion last year, up 3.9 percent year over year from $3.490 trillion, according to Internet Retailer data. E-commerce accounted for a 14.3 percent sha...

Apple and Qualcomm on Tuesday unexpectedly announced a settlement as their case entered the second day of a hearing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Diego In related news, Intel on Tuesday announced it was getting out of the 5G smartphone chip business....

There's a chicken-and-egg issue with digital disruption. Making decisions based on numbers instead of gut instinct is recognized to be a superior approach in many situations, but before you can get to decision making, people have to be able to use things like artificial intelligence and machine learning. Humans are not naturals when it comes to nu...

The ramp-up to Apple's Worldwide Developers' Conference this June has begun, with reports circulating about the goodies the company will include in the next generation of its desktop and mobile operating systems. The latest revelations include macOS support for the iPad as an auxiliary display, and iOS support for multiple windows within apps. The...

As the world has become increasingly digital, the retail industry has gone through tremendous transformation. To survive in the competitive landscape and keep up with evolving customer preferences, merchants have had to adapt and learn how to deliver the seamless omnichannel experience that shoppers expect. Delivering that efficiency and convenience comes with operational intricacies that no longer can be managed manually...

The other day Salesforce announced that it was integrating its philanthropic arm, the nonprofit Salesforce.org, into the larger organization, Salesforce.com. This makes a round trip for "the org" as it's sometimes called. At its founding, Salesforce built its 1-1-1 model of philanthropy -- donating 1 percent of its equity, product and employee time to communities around the world -- into its core business...

Hackers piggybacked onto a Microsoft customer support portal between Jan. 1 and March 28 to gain access to the emails of noncorporate account holders on webmail services Microsoft manages, including MSN.com, Hotmail.com and Outlook.com Microsoft has confirmed that a "limited" number of customers who use its Web service had their accounts compromise...

A copyright directive that some fear could break the Internet cleared the final hurdle in the European Union on Monday The Council of the European Union approved the directive, which makes platforms for user-uploaded content -- like Google and Facebook -- legally liable for violating the rights of copyright holders. It requires them to obtain the p...

"Headless commerce" has become an e-commerce buzzword lately, but how can brands use it to their advantage? "In its most basic terms, 'headless commerce' refers to the decoupling of a website's presentation layer -- the front end -- from its commerce and business logic/function layer -- the back end," said Meghan Stabler, vice president of product ...

Last week I attended a coming-out event for some of Qualcomm's latest processors, a massive update on its artificial intelligence effort (which included an innovative Quantum element), and a connection to 5G most likely didn't see coming. I think this is a game-changer. The nature of the San Francisco event was to highlight a counterintuitive im...

Customer relationship management keeps expanding, and some people might wonder why we never seem to get all the way to some mythical goal of perfection. One of the chief reasons is that the goal posts are moving away from us and always will be. This isn't some plot by the software companies to drive demand. From what I've seen, most companies simply try to keep up with demand with increasingly diverse products that meet real market needs...

Q4OS and the little-known Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) form an unbeatable combination that provides a powerful, flexible computing platform I periodically revisit releases of interesting Linux distros and develop new desktops in my weekly quest for exciting and innovative choices. I am always looking to tweak my Linux OS productivity. Some of ...

In an E-Commerce Times poll conducted from March 25 to April 1 of this year, only 4.32 percent of respondents said there was always enough information on the first page of search results to meet their needs. By comparison, 14.05 percent said they found the first-page search results were rigged and limited by algorithmic highlights More than one qua...

With 5G knocking on our door, a growing number of wireless competitors have been getting on their high-horses and trying to knock down the current leaders. All I have to say is, cut it out! No customer or investor is interested in all this meaningless industry-wide jibber-jabber. If you keep this up, you may pay a price when you do begin to offer 5G...