Trends

The coronavirus impact on business already is substantial, but I am wondering if it's time to count our blessings even as we remain vigilant. At this point the number of active cases in the U.S. is still small, relative to the population, though the bug has an annoying ability to do math in the form...

Facebook has announced a $100M commitment to offer cash grants and ad credits to help as many as 30,000 eligible small businesses in 30 countries where the company operates. The program can help SMBs maintain their workforces, meet rent costs, connect with more customers, and cover operational costs...

Researchers into the COVID-19 virus have a new source of distributed computing power: crowdsourcing. Usually crowdsourcing involves information or opinion gathering, but in this case it involves computing power. By installing the Folding@home software program, anyone with a computer, gaming console,...

Shopping hysteria in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic is crippling Amazon's ability to fill online orders and meet timely delivery promises. The company said Tuesday that it would increase pay in the U.S., UK and Europe for employees engaged in fulfillment operations, as well as open 100,000 new fu...

Consumers were becoming increasingly comfortable with the idea of ordering food online, either for pick up or home delivery, even before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Now many more shoppers are turning to online grocery shopping.

As retailers evolve to stay relevant, it will become critical for brands to embrace omnichannel personalization -- or a one-to-one customer experience across all channels and devices.

Someday a future Monty Python comedy troupe will reprise the plague scene from the Holy Grail in which a character pushes a cart through a street shouting "Bring out your dead!" only to discover one who isn't dead yet. What will be funny about our era? Perhaps it will have something to do with overr...

A number of VPN and ad-blocking apps owned by Sensor Tower, a popular analytics platform, have been collecting data from millions of people using the programs on their Android and iOS devices, according to a report. The software involved includes Free and Unlimited VPN, Luna VPN, Mobile Data, Adblo...

Way back in 1995, Amazon made its first-ever customer sale. Within two short months, Amazon was selling $20,000 per week in the U.S. and countries around the world. Today, Amazon has become the go-to marketplace for more than 310 million customers, and more than 54 percent of all product searches oc...

Twitter applied its "manipulative media" label to a deceptively edited video showing presidential hopeful Joe Biden saying, "re-elect Donald Trump" -- the first time the service enforced rules adopted to control synthetic and manipulated media. The flagged video was posted to Twitter by Dan Scavino,...

Heavy trading on Wall Street once again was too much for the Robinhood app to handle. The company reported issues with equities, options and crypto trading just before 10 a.m. ET on Monday. The incident is a case of bad deja vu. Robinhood customers potentially lost millions of dollars when the compa...

The coronavirus scare is working its way through the economy -- even affecting CRM. At this point some vendors are canceling events rather than taking the risk of having thousands of customers, press and analysts descend on a city, swap microbes through the air for a few days, then go home and likel...

E-commerce business leaders are already thinking ahead to the holiday season, and they want to answer one big question: What can we improve over the next 10 months to generate the most value during the holidays?

Franchising is a tried-and-true business model with numerous permutations that benefit all participating parties. For the vendor it's a great model for expanding without all of the downside risk associated with building a business, like finding all the financing and hiring people. The franchisor gen...