WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

More important than ever to build the organizational resilience (ie. have the proper solutions/tools/processes in place) to be prepared for whatever this pandemic will bring next. 

ie. Stay focused, lean, efficient & effective to best serve your customers in whichever market condition

Live streaming platform comparison of the top 10 solutions in 2020. A complete guide including key features, pros, cons, and pricing for business.

The challenge of search and recommending products online is increasingly being solved with data science as e-tailers compete on personalisation. New e-commerce platform Psykhe makes recommendations based on personality traits by identifying both the user and the products; its models can assign products a “personality profile”, informed by traits such as openness or neuroticism, in addition to traditional details, without human input. Resale platform Rebag has developed a universal taxonomy for designer handbags to better appraise products. And Facebook recently unveiled GrokNet, a tool that automatically identifies and describes items in pictures to help people sell items on its marketplace.

This Constellation ShortList™ presents Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Best-of-Breed Platforms relevant to early adopters pursuing digital transformation. Offerings included in this document meet the threshold criteria for this category as determined by Constellation Research.

"It's like a Fitbit in your skull," the SpaceX and Tesla leader says of Neuralink's brain-computer link technology.

The mind-bending bigness of Neuralink’s mission, combined with the labyrinth of impossible complexity that is the human brain, made this the hardest set of concepts yet to fully wrap my head around—but it also made it the most exhilarating when, with enough time spent zoomed on both ends, it all finally clicked. I feel like I took a time machine to the future, and I’m here to tell you that it’s even weirder than we expect.

Through thoughtful design, agile and lean management can be the perfect match for companies in search of lasting performance improvement.

DELF is a new framework to help developers implement data deletion in modern applications. Traditional methods for implementing deletion require application developers to write repetitive, error-prone code. DELF’s main novelty lies in enabling developers to implement deletion in every product they build with minimal effort, which takes the form of annotations rather than code. DELF introduces multiple correctness validation techniques to help achieve semantic correctness and avoid mistakes that could potentially lead to retaining data that should have been deleted or accidentally deleting the wrong data.

Martech investments in digital tools and techniques are aimed at driving marketing efficiency and innovation, characteristics that might blind some digital marketing leaders to short- and midterm risks from COVID-19 and slowing economies.

Digital marketing leaders have an optimistic outlook but need to have a realistic perspective that places a premium on the resiliency of the martech stack, or many marketers may find themselves in trouble should economic or pandemic conditions worsen. Marketing technologies with a longer-term plateau will likely remain protected in marketing budgets given their long-term importance as well as the incremental value they deliver over the midterm.

we’re in a period of both forced experiment and forced experimentation. In January everyone was online and willing to try anytime online: now we have no choice. So, some of this is the future happening more quickly, with years of growth being pulled forward, but some of it also is an experiment that won’t stick. We’ll find out which in the next six months or so.

Girish Balakrishnan, Netflix's director of virtual production, says the workflow using Unreal offers "the ability to connect a DP in New York with VFX artists in London, a director in Los Angeles with an art department in Japan, and performance-capture talent with in-house animation supervisors." The goal is to streamline production across continents "while talent safely works from home."

GPT-3 is the most powerful language model ever. Its predecessor, GPT-2, released last year, was already able to spit out convincing streams of text in a range of different styles when prompted with an opening sentence. But GPT-3 is a big leap forward. The model has 175 billion parameters (the values that a neural network tries to optimize during training), compared with GPT-2’s already vast 1.5 billion. And with language models, size really does matter.

Where the Business Model Canvas tries to provide a complete model which encapsulates many types of business, the Lean Canvas focuses more on customer problems and solutions. Hence the Lean Canvas is more applicable for startups.

In this section, dive into one of the 55 Business Model Patterns, each providing a practical template to help you build new business models from scratch and supercharge your existing business models. A short description is provided, capturing the key concept and underlying mechanisms of the respective business model pattern, as well as exemplary firms applying the pattern.

Several stories here have highlighted the importance of creating accounts online tied to your various identity, financial and communications services before identity thieves do it for you. This post examines some of the key places where everyone should plant their virtual flags.

Visitors to Shenzhen's Burberry flagship store can use Tencent's WeChat app to interact with the window display and play their own music in fitting rooms.

Réalisé pour le compte du ministère de l’Économie, de la Science et de l’Innovation (MESI), le CEFRIO a regroupé dans le Portrait de la logistique en commerce électronique les conclusions de deux grandes enquêtes - d’abord auprès d’un échantillon représentatif d’entreprises actives en commerce électronique et oeuvrant dans les secteurs du commerce de détail, du commerce de gros ou en fabrication, puis auprès d’entreprises oeuvrant spécifiquement dans le secteur des services logistiques. Analyses et perspectives d'experts et de chercheurs universitaires complètent cette publication afin de dresser un état des lieux complet pour les PME québécoises.

The physical world will become machine-readable, clickable, & searchable. There will be new interfaces & new ways to navigate & create content. We will create new lexicons and even new architectures for our digital selves and the digital world around us. What could a day in the metaverse look like? What if interacting with our digital assistants and virtual life could be more streamlined, productive and even fun? For many tasks, smartphones are bulky. They don’t allow us to work with both hands. They’re awkward as mirrors to the augmented world. AR glasses offer a different solution, one where the digital and physical come together in a streamlined approach.

I’m typing this in my sweatpants, in my living room, because our offices have been closed since mid-March as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. My internet goes out approximately twice a day. I exercise in the same space in which I answer emails and Slack messages. I sort of mentally crumple up my day as I move from the living room to the kitchen for dinner. I am just a small part of an accidental grand experiment: Do knowledge workers really need the office?

There is great potential business value in a variety of retail use cases, many of which work in tandem to achieve a seamless, multi-channel multi-device customer experience, including:

• Personalized suggestions and recommendations
• Trend prediction
• Customer churn prevention
• Targeted discounts and advertising
• Stock optimization
• Consumer session tracking
• and more

The current reshaping of the customer engagement center (CEC) market is characteristic of the consolidation of the customer service technology market. Customer service and support organizations must deliver consistent, effortless, intelligent and personalized customer service to their customers. The ability to orchestrate customer requests with assisted service, as well as with self-service, is one of the four pillars of great customer service within a leading customer service and support operation.

D2C brands can scale tremendously fast by capitalizing on
technology, shifts in consumer buying patterns and behaviors,
social engagement, and the experience economy.
D2C industry trailblazers have mastered the art of storytelling,
experiential in-store testing and showrooming, consumer
engagement, and creative digital advertising.
Once you have established a sound D2C operation, you should
build a holistic Amazon strategy to generate incremental
product exposure, demand, sales, and profits.

Strategic and organizational factors are what separate successful big-company innovators from the rest of the field.

We mapped the retail pharmacy ecosystem in the US and identified opportunities new players are leveraging to challenge incumbents. We'll discuss three trends that already have an impact.

1. Direct to consumer models address convenience and frictionless customer experiences
2. Cash for care models address the need for cost reduction
3. End to end data integration addresses the need to measure health-based outcomes and offer more personalized services