Trends

These could be the worst of times for high-end flagship smartphones. Google CEO Sundar Pichai told Alphabet shareholders that his company's flagship phones, the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL, released last fall, had encountered some "year over year headwinds." Samsung maintained that its flagship phone lin...

Influencer marketing continues to build steam, and more companies, large and small are getting involved. As powerful and as helpful as influencers can be, it's important to realize that not every influencer is right for every company. Selection of the right influencers to work with your company and ...

For B2B sellers, keeping pace with customer expectations is anything but easy. Accustomed to the simplicity and convenience that has become common across B2C transactions, buyers expect more from B2B sellers than ever before. Make the most of a growing B2B e-commerce market by considering the unique...

With jam-packed delivery schedules, driver shortages, and impatient millennials who refuse to wait three days for their goods, it's clear that running an e-commerce company is not an easy walk in the park. It seems the "Amazon effect" is only growing stronger and stronger. Retail e-commerce sales ar...

The social media community seems tied up in knots over what to do about all the abuse happening within their communities, but if you look elsewhere you might see signs of solutions that could solve some fundamental problems. A solution that works well has arisen almost by accident in CRM, and it off...

Merchants have a vested interest in streamlining the customer experience and minimizing friction wherever possible in the purchasing process. There are downsides to this premise, though.

Apriva has announced partnerships with AveriGo and Vagabond to offer innovative mobile shopping and payment solutions. Apriva offers an adaptive platform for secure mobile communications and omnichannel payments. Both its new partners are in the vending and F&B service industries. AveriGo offers...

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...

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...

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...

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...