WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

About half of U.S. adults say they get news from social media “often” or “sometimes,” and this use is spread out across a number of different sites. Facebook stands out as a regular source of news for about a third of Americans.

Through UGC and AI, we’re inching closer to the Metaverse. But the most exciting part of that vision is its potential to reinvent our social interactions.

A recent meeting of Real Story Group’s MarTech Stack Leadership Council focused on personalization lessons learned. These sessions with large-enterprise stack owners are confidential, so I can’t share specific details and recommendations, but some high-level themes might interest you.

The Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2020 highlights technologies that will significantly affect business, society and people over the next 5 to 10 years. This year's highlights 5 unique trends - find out what they are here.

The Gartner Hype Cycle shows firms deemed "fast followers" should be working on an AI business. For early adopters, AI scalability is the next frontier.

Today we are launching a dedicated Year In Review page with interactive maps and charts where you can explore what changed on the Internet in 2020. Year In Review is part of Cloudflare Radar.

Don’t believe the hype: retail isn’t failing nor is success tied to innovation for innovation’s sake. What is the future of ecommerce for 2021 and beyond? 5 insights offer the answer.

Meanwhile, as more people in poorer countries gain internet access, Wikipedia is becoming a truly global resource. The encyclopedia’s sub-sites are organised by language, not by nationality. Using this method, the richest Wikipedias—as measured by the share of speakers of each language who are active editors—tend to cluster in rich Western countries.

Welcome to the 2020 edition of the marketing technology landscape. Yes, it grew once again, by 13.6%, up to a total of 8,000 martech solutions. That's after 615 from the 2019 landscape went away, either consolidated with another martech company or simply gone defunct. If you were predicting consolidation, an 8.7% churn rate from one year to the next is pretty significant attrition to support that narrative.

This is the 6th year that we have run The Stackies as an awards contest that invites marketers to send in a single slide illustrating their marketing stack — the collection of martech tools they use and the way they conceptualize them together as a whole. Although we award trophies for a few winning entries for the ideas they shared, any stack that works for the team who uses it is a winner where it really matters. But through this contest, the martech community at large wins, by learning from the many examples their peers so generously share. A big,

In March 2020, some of our McKinsey colleagues argued that the COVID-19 crisis could be the “imperative of our time.” A month later, we noted that it could bring a “dramatic restructuring of the economic and social order.” We stand by those assertions. The COVID-19 pandemic has been an economic and human catastrophe, and it’s far from over. But with vaccines beginning to roll out, it’s possible to be cautiously optimistic that the next normal will emerge this year or next.
And we believe that, in some ways, that normal could be better. With good leadership, from both business and governments, the changes we described—in productivity, green growth, medical innovation, and resiliency—could provide an enduring foundation for the long term.

There’s an old saying that the first fifty years of the car industry were about creating car companies and working out what cars should look like, and the second fifty years were about what happened once everyone had a car - they were about McDonalds and Walmart, suburbs and the remaking of the world around the car, for good and of course bad. The innovation in cars became everything around the car. One could suggest the same today about smartphones - now the innovation comes from everything else that happens around them.

Accenture notes that technology has reframed our relationships with work, working hours & workspaces for years, with this shift accelerating in 2020. 

We asked executives how long they expected it would have taken their companies prepandemic to digitize 12 different activities and how long it actually took them once the coronavirus hit.

The eCommerce Trends 2021 report ranks the most significant trends in the years to come based on the opinions of eCommerce experts.

Well. It is certainly safe to say that 2020 has been tumultuous.

Marketers have been thrown challenges from every angle. This report takes a reflection through the past year and looks at what marketers should do to improve their ability to compete in 2021.

In this guide you will learn:-

• The importance of embracing digital transformation
• How to be a helpful and genuine marketer
• What it means to be data driven in decision making
• And so much more.

On average, 30% of customers will return what they bought online from you during the holidays, and the vast majority will do so within the first month of the post-holiday season. We’ll show you how to reduce holiday returns, automate the returns process, and protect yourself from fraudulent returns.

As remote work increases access management tool adoption, and security controls shift to identity, the ability to secure access with AM strategies aligned with continuous adaptive risk and trust assessment is paramount. Cost optimization for IT spending (e.g., AM) will also increase during 2021.

This list is covering major Topics around the global economic and technical Digital Transformation, such as: Digital Marketing/SEO, Social Media Marketing, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Ethics, IoT (Internet of Things), IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things), Algorithms, Neural Networks, Autonomous Vehicles, Digital Health, Cloud, Smart Cities, Automation, Robotics, Robots/Bots/Chatbots, Future of Work, Data Science, Big Data, Analytics, Fintech, Insurtech, DevOps, Edtech, Cyber Security…

The ranking here is in fact not important, the important things are the ideas, knowledge, and insights shared by the experts and influencers there.

An analysis of more than 400 use cases across 19 industries and nine business functions highlights the broad use and significant economic potential of advanced AI techniques.

A new report reveals the scope of China's mass surveillance program as data privacy concerns mount.

We estimate that globally, there will be 86,000 authors pre-publishing fundamental and applied AI research papers on arXiv in all of 2020; and that there are approximately 478,000 people globally with the specialized AI technical skills needed for building an AI product. You can read the full report with further breakdowns of the data here. Below I share why understanding the talent pool can help explain the friction in getting AI to work.

despite the challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic and nearly five years of constant attacks on the news media by the president, the Times projects a 14 percent increase in total subscription revenue in the fourth quarter vs. 2019, as well as a 35 percent increase in digital-only subscription revenue. The Times is well on its way to meet its goal of 10 million subscribers by 2025 and well on its way to make its digital journalism its core revenue stream.

A deepfake was used to create the fake author of the dubious Hunter Biden report. Martin Aspen, allegedly a Swiss security analyst who authored a report about the business activities of Joe Biden's son in China, is a completely fictional persona, disinformation researchers have concluded, according to a report by NBC News. The researchers say the report was part of an elaborate attempt to smear Biden. Among many other indications that Aspen is a fiction, the experts concluded that photos of Aspen that appear on various social media pages were created using deepfake technology, the A.I.-based method that can create fictional faces or graph one person's head onto another's body.