WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

Amazon has 147 million Prime members in the United States, according to estimates from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.

Toronto-based Ghost Kitchen began more than five years ago. The concept it designed includes a footprint of about 2,500 to 3,000 square feet where it runs anywhere between 20 and 30 international brands out of one kitchen. Sales are either through walk-in with its own technology and QR codes, with no customer interaction in front of the house, or through third-party delivery. Customers can buy from any of the food brands at the same time.

McDonald’s Drive-Thrus are a baseline for the entire industry and seeing them install LCDs that basically blow up and fail totally is something everyone wants to understand.

When it comes to assessing risk, humans often fail to make rational decisions because our brains take mental shortcuts that prevent us making the correct choice. Here are some that can cause havoc.

In addition to checking student work for matches across billions of web pages and books, originality reports can now check for matches against a repository of student work within your domain. 

Shortsighted solutions to recurring problems--antipatterns--often sabotage technology transformations.

Instacart: The firm will be working with JPMorgan Chase to issue a credit card that will reportedly let customers earn 5% cash back on Instacart purchases. The card is said to launch next year.
DoorDash: The company is rumored to have several bidders lined up for its rewards credit card, including JPMorgan Chase, but is reviewing its options before making a decision in the next few weeks. DoorDash is also in the process of recruiting restaurant partners and stores to offer cardholders rewards and discounts on a rotating or permanent basis.

How to build a modern, scalable data platform to power your analytics and data science projects.

It makes sense that home improvement retailers leaned the heaviest on click and collect, given the size and weight of many of their products, and the fact that buyers—including small businesses, contractors, and repair service providers—often need these products immediately.
The big-box retailers came in just behind the home improvement retailers, followed by department stores like Macy’s and Nordstrom, which saw the least dramatic transitions to click and collect.
The lower figures for department stores can partially be attributed to the complete closure of certain locations during the height of the pandemic, thus precluding click and collect and forcing customers into traditional ecommerce delivery. Additionally, demand for apparel was low last year when compared with other product categories. But the lower click-and-collect share figures for department stores probably comes down to consumers still preferring home delivery for lower-priority, less time-sensitive items like clothing and accessories.

Enterprise marketplaces provide many tangible benefits to both B2C and B2B companies. Application leaders can use this Market Guide to understand the complexities of operating a marketplace, which vendors can help them develop a marketplace and what features they should consider.

Lightmatter says the computing and power demands of complex neural networks need new technologies like these to keep up.

Companies should explore seven specific drivers to assess where the value lies in cloud. As companies assess the opportunities enabled by cloud, a detailed review of the sources of value can pinpoint where they need to focus their attention, people, and resources. Across the three dimensions, seven drivers of value can collectively generate more than $1 trillion in value.

Google Shopping has gone through quite the metamorphosis over the years. Back in 2002, it was called Froogle upon launching - a pun on the term frugal - and was later renamed to Google Product Search in 2007. Then, it was renamed yet again to Google Shopping in 2012 and went through several iterations even within itself relating to how information was presented to users. 

Is this what our world is going to be like post the Covid-19 pandemic?

A comprehensive survey designed to surface consumer comfort levels with new and emerging technologies.

The DIACC is pleased to publish the first iteration of the Directory of Products That Assess Identification Documents & Verify Identity. This Directory is designed to provide an overview of providers’ solutions which use government issued photo identification cards, combined with biometric facial scans, to establish Digital Identity.

As organizations launch more and more digital initiatives, CEOs must monitor whether they are delivering business results. These metrics are ones to watch.

Enquête NETendances 2020 - Le commerce électronique au Québec. Les achats en ligne au Québec ont connu une croissance de 15 % en un an.

The pandemic has boosted adoption of livestreaming technologies among brands and retailers looking to engage more directly with customers. The addition of commerce features is now transforming livestreaming into a growth engine for e-commerce globally.

1. Niche assortment: Niche assortment companies focus on a narrow product assortment and gain a following among fanatics.  
2. Distinctive convenience: Distinctive convenience companies strive to deliver ease and speed as a service. 
3. Social connection: Social connection companies home in on the community and social aspects to promote product discovery, connection, and sales. 
4. Personalization: Personalization companies focus on merchandising (product recommendations and search) and product customization (tailor a product specifically to a customer).
5. Sustainability: Sustainability companies strive to reduce material waste, add more efficient products and services, and incorporate more transparent messaging. 
6. Amazon market jockeys: Amazon market jockeys are companies that buy and scale up third-party marketplace brands on Amazon. Rather than Amazon-proofing, these companies are riding the wave of Amazon’s success.

We developed the Random Employee Chats application internally, with the goal of recreating the pre-pandemic informal interactions. Here's how we moved from a shared spreadsheet to Cloudflare Workers to automate the entire process.

A ranking of the largest and fastest-growing consumer-facing marketplace startups and private companies. From food delivery to outdoor travel, the Marketplace 100 reflects the imprint of a year like no other. The Marketplace 100 is based on data from Bloomberg Second Measure, a consumer data analytics company that analyzes billions of purchases to track real-time consumer behavior and relative sales across over 5,200 merchants. The startups and private companies on the Marketplace 100 are then ranked using a common industry metric, Gross Merchandise Value (GMV), which is extrapolated from the total dollars consumers are spending against each company.

Today, around $4.3T worth of global commerce happens online. Stripe is intent on growing that number.

We created a DevSecOps assessment to help your company level up its DevSecOps capabilities.

1. Automate security scans and tests (such as static analysis, dynamic analysis, and penetration testing) within your pipeline so that they can be reused across all projects and environments.
2. Build a continuous feedback loop by presenting results to developers, allowing them to remediate issues while coding and learn best practices during the coding process.
3. Evaluate and monitor automated security policies by building checks into the process. Verify that sensitive data and secrets are not inadvertently shared or published.
4. Automate complex or time-consuming manual tests via custom scripts, with human sign-off on results if necessary. Validate the accuracy and efficiency of test scripts so that they can be replicated across different projects.
5. Test new code within a staging environment to allow for thorough security and low-impact failure, and test on every code commit.
6. Scheduled or continuous monitoring should automatically create logs (or red flags) within a review dashboard (such as GitLab’s Security Dashboard feature).

We looked into how traffic trends and user behavior on mobile stack up against desktop, and also analyzed mobile vs. desktop SERP discrepancies.