Trends

That time of year is upon us once again, and stress levels for Amazon vendors are starting to build. The arrival of spring means renegotiating your vendor terms with Amazon, which seem to grow stricter year-after-year. However, with more than 50 percent of all Amazon sales coming from third-party se...

The Drones Are Coming

Spurred by everything from environmental concerns to the desire to avoid congested roads, companies are developing, testing, and beginning to implement a wide array of drone delivery systems. A number of practicalities need to be worked out before drone delivery becomes an everyday occurrence -- inc...

The Internet has made convenience a top consideration for consumers when it comes to browsing and making purchases. This trend has led to more consumers opting to shop online. As a result, retailers are racing to make their products readily available. With U.S. e-commerce sales increasing by 17 perc...

The American Civil Liberties Union has leveled criticisms against facial recognition tool developer Clearview for making misleading claims about the accuracy of its product. Clearview apparently has been telling law enforcement agencies that its technology underwent accuracy testing modeled on the A...

A U.S. District judge has ruled that Sprint and T-Mobile, the nation's third- and fourth-largest mobile carriers, can go forward with a $25 billion merger. The deal will not close until the California Public Utilities Commission approves the transaction, but clearing this latest hurdle moves the two...

INSIGHTS

Customer Retention Blooms Again

Brightback recently published a report on customer churn and what more than 400 subscription companies say they're doing about it. Its findings are in line with many other sources, and the data deserves an examination.

Ransomware hit at least 966 U.S. government agencies, educational establishments and healthcare providers in 2019, at a cost possibly exceeding $7.5 billion. The victims included 113 state and municipal governments and agencies; 764 healthcare providers; and 89 universities, colleges and school dist...

There were 4,521,480,071 Internet users as of Dec. 1, 2019. A month later it was closer to 5 billion users. A decade ago there were fewer than a billion social network users. That's worldwide. That user growth has been a leading indicator of the rise of alternative social networking platforms. Marke...

Motorola's new foldable Razr phone has been garnering mediocre notices from early reviewers, who tended to find its performance underwhelming for a phone priced at $1,500. Still, it does have personality, which can go a long way in the smartphone market, noted Bob O'Donnell, chief analyst at Technal...

EXPERT ADVICE

3 Amazon Trends to Watch in 2020

Over the last quarter-century, Amazon has transformed itself from an online bookseller into an e-commerce behemoth that's reshaping retail economics. In 2018 alone, Amazon reported more than $232 billion in revenue -- a number that's sure to jump once 2019's final revenue figures are released. Those...

The open source software movement has evolved dramatically over the past two decades. Many businesses that once considered open source a threat now recognize its value. In spite of increased enthusiasm among enterprises, consumer interest by and large has not materialized. With large companies incre...

INSIGHTS

The New App Dev CRM Model

CRM is an industry that's been full of turning points, and I think it is at another. There have been many smaller turns, like the additions of analytics, social media and process flows. However, to get a sense of this point in time, I think you have to go all the way back to the turn of the century ...

A coding error in an app used to count vote totals in the Democratic caucuses in Iowa has delayed the release of final tallies, the state's Democratic Party announced. Although the data collected by the app was sound, it was reporting only a portion of that data to party headquarters due a coding is...

Google misdirected a number of private videos that users of its Google Photos app intended to back up to Google Takeout, sending them instead to strangers' archives. The company emailed affected users to inform them that a technical issue caused the error. Google recommended that affected users back...

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