Mary Meeker delivered her annual Internet Trend Report. Her 333-page slideshow is an overview of basically every important trend from last year and an outlook for the next year. Some interesting facts: 51% (=3.8 billion) of the world’s population are Internet users 2.4 billion are interactive gamers Smartphones are the primary internet access point Users...
Month: June 2019
Tesco Go comming?
British chain Tesco is apparently working on developing convenience stores that work similar like Amazon Go: people can just walk in, put items into their bags and leave. Akin to Amazon Go payment happens automatically after they left the store. This was reported by The Telegraph that furthermore claims that Tesco is working with Israeli...
The Geometry of Thought | Edge.org
Barabara Tversky discusses what she calls geometry of thought in this very intersting EDGE cast: Slowly, the significance of spatial thinking is being recognized, of reasoning with the body acting in space, of reasoning with the world as given, but even more with the things that we create in the world. Babies and other animals...
The Best Books on Marketing | Five Books Expert Recommendations
Seth Godin talks about marketing and the changes that happened to this field. It’s an interview absolutely worth reading. So are the five books he recommends: Syrup by Maxx Barry When Scat comes up with the idea for the hottest new soda ever, he’s sure he’ll retire the next rich, savvy marketing success story. But...
What do customers want from your business?
I’ll give you the answer right away: convenience. What is striking, it’s difficult for businesses to see their services with the eyes of their customers. There’s a huge gap in what businesses concieve as important and what customers think is important. It often starts at right the top: executives have no idea how their services...
Would you fire a cashier that turns 25% of your customers away?
The answer is probably a yes. And yet many companies don’t do this. Why? Because the cashier is not a person in a brick and mortar store, but the checkout process of an online store. According to a study, as many as 25% of the customers abandon their purchase on online stores because of a...
Lush connects online and offline
Lush’s new flagship store in Tokyo is a good example how online and offline commerce can be connected. For example, the Lush app offers services that give customers information about “naked products” when they are scanned. The app recognises objects from the store, looks up information and presents them to the customer in several languages....
A Few Thoughts about Deep Fakes—Stephen Wolfram Blog
Stephen Wolfram discusses deep fakes and suggests to use blockchain technology as a potential way to detect them: So, where does this leave us with deep fakes? Machine learning on its own won’t save us. There’s not going to be a pure “fake or not” detector that can run on any image or video. Yes,...
Mobile for Brick and Mortar Stores
Mobile was often regarded as enemy of brick and mortar businesses. People would come into a store use their mobile to sometimes scan items and order them elsewhere. That was the story told by many brick and mortar businesses. This has changed considerably. Instead of fighting mobile, leading players in the retail sector have actively...
What It’s Like to Work on a 30-Year-Old Macintosh – The Atlantic
Ian Bogost writes about his experience using a Macintosh SE from 1990. He attributes the attractiveness of this long past computing area to the simplicity of using devices like a Mac: But it wasn’t user-friendliness alone that made computers of this era great—it was simplicity. Mousing, dragging, and menuing does make the machine easier to...