The recent Cyber Weekend was a boon for online mining of consumer data, with major social media players using cookies to track users’ activity across the internet, including of course ecommerce websites, often without permission, then sell the data to advertisers.
TikTok, the hugely popular short-form video site owned by Chinese firm ByteDance, had quite a year in 2022, surpassing 1 billion users globally and making itself a force to be reckoned with in advertising, ecommerce and fulfillment, becoming the latest competitor to Amazon’s dominance. But government bans are applying heat.
A week after a name change to Meta, reflecting its aspirations for the so-called metaverse virtual world, the company formerly known as Facebook is looking to open physical stores to sell gadgets associated with its new vision, according to a report in the New York Times.
The future of brand-building is more than storytelling and design – it’s more about creating a brand world. As our attention moves beyond the screen, stories will become even less linear and more choose-your-own-adventure. Design systems will continue to grow beyond visual elements and into the domains of sound, space and motion.
Fast delivery, once a way to really stand out, has become standard and the effort to add on new features and faster speeds is starting to look like a race to the bottom. Shipping is important, but brands need to redefinine customer interactions and reimagine the impact on operations in order to really differentiate themselves.
Global Privacy Control focuses on letting consumers opt out of the sale of their personal data to third parties. The early-stage coalition includes the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Mozilla. Rob Shavell, CEO of Abine, who was involved in Do Not Track and now GPC, discusses what’s ahead and why merchants should get on board.
The U.S. Department of Justice, joined by attorneys general from 11 states, has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google alleging it used its market power to thwart competition in search and advertising, setting up a battle on the level of the 1990s federal action against Microsoft.
Now that it’s detached itself from Amazon, FedEx has entered into a multiyear agreement with Amazon’s cloud computing rival Microsoft, with the first offering using the latter’s real-time intelligence capabilities to provide FedEx shippers with greater visibility into transit time issues. Other solutions will be announced later this year.
Innovation around the Internet of Things (IoT) is advancing rapidly, enabling data sharing among millions of devices and tagged items and providing new levels of visibility and traceability. Experts from FedEx and Microsoft will discuss the latest advances in IoT and results within their organizations at Ecommerce Operations Summit.
Walmart is shutting down its Manhattan-based concierge delivery service Jetblack two years after its experimental launch, as it continued to lose money while not gaining customers or finding a buyer, the Wall Street Journal reported. Walmart had been in talks with potential buyers last year but the talks ended without bearing any fruit.