Trends

Way back in the dark ages in May 2011 -- about 2,345 Internet years ago -- I wrote a column about Net neutrality, which was in court at the time. For those of you who are not sure, "Net neutrality" is short for "Internet neutrality" or "network neutrality." The concept addresses user access to the I...

Walmart's e-commerce sales were up 43 percent for Q4 FY 2019, the 13-week period ended Jan. 25. Sam's Club e-commerce sales grew 21 percent. Customers "continue to respond to our increasingly omnichannel offerings. We're executing against our strategy and it's working," said Walmart spokesperson Rob...

Google has unveiled its game plan for fighting disinformation on its search, news, YouTube and advertising platforms in a 30-page document. "Providing useful and trusted information at the scale that the Internet has reached is enormously complex and an important responsibility," noted Google Vice P...

Technology by its nature changes the market. The introduction of efficient solutions spurred by technology to meet consumer demand creates new positive effects across an economy. Plenty of industries -- entertainment, transportation, the press and retail, for example -- have experienced changes in b...

JPMorgan Chase on Thursday announced that it has created and successfully tested a digital coin. Each JPM Coin represents $1 in funds held in designated accounts at JPMorgan Chase N.A. The token was created using Quorum, a variant of Ethereum developed by JPMorgan Chase, to enable instantaneous paym...

Apple plans to launch a subscription news service at an event next month. The service has been described as "Netflix for news," because it would let customers access an unlimited amount of content from publishers for a single monthly fee. It will be based on a reworked version of Texture, the media ...

I've recently been writing a lot about platforms -- not about any one in particular, but about the importance of platform to the future of what we all do in CRM and beyond. Platform provides a level of abstraction between machines and humans, who must get useful work out of them. Inventing the pla...

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order aimed at boosting artificial intelligence R&D in the U.S. The order sets up the American AI Initiative, which instructs federal agencies to move projects involving artificial intelligence to the top of their priority lists. No funding is propo...

Over the last several quarters, I have heard opinions of the pending T-Mobile, Sprint merger from every corner. Those who are pro-merger focus on all the benefits it woud bring. Those who are anti-merger focus on what would be lost and how it would harm different segments. Amid the chaotic debate, w...

AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint have sold access to subscribers' real-time location data to aggregators, which in turn have sold it to about 250 bounty hunters and related businesses, according to a report. In some cases, the data allowed users to track individuals to their specific locations inside a...

Until recently, becoming a subscription provider was a big and expensive task. To get into the game, a vendor needed to build a subscription business model right next to its traditional businesses, so to speak, which typically involved building an e-commerce Web store and member site, organizing an ...

The social networking era brought about a sharing economy. We share not only our lives, but also everything from cars to clothes to chickens, yes chickens. Services like Uber and Airbnb have ushered in a new era, and industries rapidly have been embracing the change to determine how to benefit from ...

What's the state of the selling profession today? In brief, it fluctuates significantly based on economic circumstances and a company's position in a category lifecycle. At the start of a category lifecycle, when vendors really need people who can educate and explain what a disruptive innovation act...

Musing about Facebook's first 15 years, CEO Mark Zuckerberg positioned it as a David confronting a Goliath composed of hierarchical institutions. Facebook gives the masses a voice, he wrote. It brings communities together and provides businesses with low-cost outreach. Progress has been made in addr...