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EXPERT ADVICE

Is Your Business Ready for a 2019 Recession?

For those of you who have an ear to the ground on American economic trends, you've probably heard the whispers of a recession heading our way, starting as early as this year. Everyone remembers how hard their finances were hit back in '08 -- no one better than small business owners, some of whom los...

The EU Parliament overwhelmingly approved two measures that would integrate the region's fragmented law enforcement and home affairs databases into a centralized one that would include biometric information on some 350 million EU and non-EU citizens. It approved creation of the new system on two vot...

EXPERT ADVICE

E-Commerce Branding in the Time of Amazon

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. When I began looking around at available models, I was stunned. The amount of competition in the SUV marketplace...

Foldable phones have been dealt a setback by Samsung's announcement that it has postponed indefinitely the release of its Galaxy Fold. Samsung pumped the brakes on the $1,980 phone's release after several reviewers reported problems. Samsung acknowledged that their experiences indicated the device n...

EXPERT ADVICE

How to Get Smarter About Influencer Marketing

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...

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 $3.628 trillion last year, up 3.9 percent year over year from $3.490 trillion. E-commerce accounted for a 14.3 p...

Apple and Qualcomm unexpectedly announced a settlement as their case entered the second day of a hearing in the U.S. District Court in San Diego. In related news, Intel announced it was getting out of the 5G smartphone chip business. The Apple-Qualcomm settlement provides an unspecified one-time pay...

INSIGHTS

Disruption Plus

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 lear...

The ramp-up to Apple's WWDC 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 win...

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...

INSIGHTS

Philanthropy Is Good for Business

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 ...

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 wh...

A copyright directive that some fear could break the Internet has cleared the final hurdle in the European Union. The directive makes platforms for user-uploaded content legally liable for violations of the rights of copyright holders. It requires them to obtain the permission of the holders before ...

"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...

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